REVIEW EXCHANGE
resistance today
margarita palacios
Department of Psychosocial Studies Birkbeck, University of London 30 Russell Square,
London, WC1B 5DT, UK
doi: 10.1057/eps.2015.29; published online 17 July 2015
On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance
Howard Caygill (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 264, ISBN: 978-1472522580
H
istorical resistances to colonial-
ism, capitalism and fascism, and
contemporary local and indigen-
ous resistances to global neo-liberalism
inspire Howard Caygills search for the
conditions of possibility and critique of
resistance. Moving back and forth from
the historical to the current, from the poli-
tical to the philosophical, and from the
local to the global, Caygill offers a sophis-
ticated account of a vast archive of prac-
tices and discourses on resistances which
include among others figures like Marx,
Lenin, Ghandi, Freud, Luxemburg, Mao
and Fanon. Acknowledging the centrality
of resistance as a philosophical concept
and its elusive character, Caygill positions
himself in certain traditions and philoso-
phical-political debates where resistance is
understood dynamically. He argues:
From the dynamic point of view, resis-
tance understood in terms of the pre-
servation or enhancement of the
capacity to resist cannot be reduced to
the binary opposition of run or resist,
but must be situated instead within a
complex and dynamic spatio-temporal
field that manifests itself in postures of
domination and defiance. (4)
130 european political science: 15 2016
(130 137) & 2016 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680-4333/16 www.palgrave-journals.com/eps
Although, Foucault and Derrida are
initial allies in this conceptual framework,
it is the figure of Claus von Clausewitz who
stands at the very centre of it. In his On
War (1976 [1832]), Clausewitz argued
that modern politics and war rest upon the
capacity to resist, where relations of
enmity a duel or a pair of wrestlers
consists not only in the mutual application
of force, but in the capacity to render the
other incapable of further resistance. How-
ever, if, on the one hand, Caygill endorses
what he calls this Newtonian conception
of forces applied to theories of conscious-
ness (as opposed to a more meaning
leaning approach), he does not reduce
resistance to either consciousness or
pure reaction. In this latter case, resis-
tance would become an end in itself and
therefore would lack purpose. Instead, the
resistant subject who is unfree and
located in a dynamic field structured by
force is mobilized by the virtues of jus-
tice, courage, fortitude and prudence, all
features that contribute to the enhance-
ment and preservation of the capacity to
resist. Furthermore, Caygill suggests how
resistance is also a type of creative affir-
mation, bringing in Raoul Vaneigems
The Revolution of Everyday Life (1983
[1967]) as an illustration:
Vaneigem sees love and generosity as
the bases for a new resistance, but one
which does not engage power on its
terrain of enmity and opposed force but
instead constructs its own new terrain.
This terrain is not that of Hegelian dia-
lectic but rather a Clausewitzian duel
between the death of power and the life
of love, identifying the conflict in the
Freudian opposition between the death
drive and the pleasure principle
power/stasis and love/creativity. (180)
In this same vein, the study of Pier Paolo
Pasolinis Sal allows Caygill to reflect
upon the possibilities of aesthetic resis-
tance (or resistance in style), arguing that
art offers a place to think resistance and
freedom. It is this phenomenological twist
that allows Caygill to argue against Agam-
bens bio-political approach which accord-
ing to him was inaugurated by Arendts
theory of total domination as presented
in her The Origins of Totalitarianism (2004
[1951]).
The suggested framework definitely
succeeds in exposing a vast number of
historical experiences of resistance in
their specificity, diversity and complexity.
It also succeeds in acknowledging the
structural character of the power/resis-
tance relation. More strikingly, resistance
is situated closer to the desire and
impetus for justice an energy or affirma-
tive capacity to resist than to the out-
come of a revolutionary, emancipatory or
reformist movement.
Now, is it not the case that this undecid-
able aspect of resistance (in its perpetual
logic of resistance/counter-resistance and
new constellations of domination) per-
vades also the movement itself and not
only its outcome? Caygill does recognize
this ambiguity and indeed he spends a
good amount of time sympathising with
Jean Genets vagabonds philosophy but
in his conceptual framework and in his
margarita palacios and howard caygill
analysis of specific resisting experiences,
he seems to cancel that ambiguity. Prob-
ably this cancelation relates to two things:
first, to the fact that Caygills analysis
starts from the assumption of identities
already constituted and placed within an
antagonistic field (without looking at the
process of identity formation nor explain-
ing why antagonism is constitutive); sec-
ond, because attempting to escape a
conceptual foreclosure of a resisting resis-
tance, Caygill offered what, to me, resem-
bles too closely a dualistic model of
exteriority and interiority: an outside (an
external and dynamic physical world char-
acterized by relations of force and antag-
onism) and an inside (a source of life,
energy, creativity, passion and virtue).
Let me also mention here that this arc is
strongly inclined towards the first side of
the pole: there is a very careful and
detailed treatment of Clausewitzs On
War throughout the book, whereas the
phenomenological side appears to
receive much less conceptual attention.
In this sense I would be curious to hear
how Caygill thinks of the relation between
the Newtonian and phenomenological
worlds, what connects them, and how each
of them always seem to pierce the other in
ways in which it becomes difficult, or even
impossible, to separate them. I also won-
der if bringing into this framework that
movement and moment of physical and
symbolic piercing the performative
movement that resists the establishment
of any system of domination could con-
tribute to further exploring the ambiva-
lences and challenges that experiences of
resistance confront us with. The accom-
plishment of this task would foster the
analytical and conceptual productivity of
one of the main premises of the book:
There is never a moment of pure resis-
tance, but always a reciprocal play of resis-
tances that form clusters or sequences
of resistance and counter-resistance
responding to each other in surrendering
or seizing initiative. (5)
european political science: 15 2016 131
 REPLY TO PALACIOS
What is the meaning of resistance?
Margarita Palacios addresses this ques-
tion to a tension in On Resistance
between a Newtonian account of the
strategic application of oppositional force
and a phenomenological reflection upon
the constitution of resistant subjectiv-
ities. The first account examines the stra-
tegic application of violence within a field
traversed by political and military force,
while the second considers the processes
of making sense of an unjust world and
constituting resistant identities and prac-
tices to oppose it. The tension is most
clear in the view of strategy as both an
applied physics of violence and the study
of civilian and military morale developed
by Clausewitz in On War, among other
things making it one of the first sustained
contributions to the theory of resistance.
The tension between force and meaning
is integral to the wider theory and prac-
tice of resistance, and perhaps even con-
stitutes it.
The book negotiates this tension by sup-
plementing the field of opposed forces with
an account of the meaning of resistance
indebted primarily to Nietzsche. From the
standpoint of opposed forces, resistance is
negative and its meaning consists over-
whelmingly in saying no!. Yet even in New-
tonian physics, opposed force is not purely
reactive and contributes, however mini-
mally, to shaping the scenario of opposed
forces. On Resistance tries to do justice
both to the overwhelming, mechanical
force of domination and the affirmative
resistance and resistant subjectivities that
oppose it. It tries to capture the apparently
paradoxical affirmative resistance or con-
structive defiance implied even in the most
reactive no-saying. It separates resistance
from any politics of melancholy and mourn-
ing and sees an affirmation of life in the
historically repeated and resolutely thana-
tological expressions of a resistant sub-
jects claim to be already among the dead.
132 european political science: 15 2016 resistance today
It does so by attempting to shift
the object of resistance studies away
from acts and the subjects of acts of
resistance towards the capacity to
resist. The latter concept, fugitive yet
central to Clausewitz On War, radically
alters the strategic posture of resistance
as well as redefining the parameters
of its meaning. In the case of strategy,
resistant strategy and tactics are lent
coherence by the categorical imperative
of acting so as to enhance the capacity to
resist or to compromise that of the oppo-
nent. In the second case, resistant acts
and subjects find meaning by reference
to a capacity to resist that exceeds any
specific subject of or occasion for resis-
tance. This understanding of resistant
meaning entails a politics of time in
which a resistant subject assumes a
legacy of opposition while acting so as
to ensure that it is passed on to future
generations. The meaning of resistance
is not constituted in a void or by a con-
text defined primarily by domination,
but by reference to the capacity to
resist, or what Walter Benjamin called
the tradition of the oppressed. This
gives a strategic gravity to resistance
movements such as Greenham Common
or the Zapatistas that exceeds the tacti-
cal successes or failures of their immedi-
ate actions and contexts.
The question of the meaning of resis-
tance can in this way be directed away
from the realm of melancholy gestures or
heroic being for death in the face of
intractable opposition and given an affir-
mative dimension. The book sought to
capture the affirmation and even joy that
are to be found paradoxically throughout
the testimonies left by the historical resis-
tances to even the most horrific oppres-
sion. Placing the capacity to resist at the
centre of the analysis allows us to under-
stand better the tension between avail-
able strategic options and the meaning of
defiance that informs the history and the-
ory of resistance.
References

Arendt, H. (2004 [1951]) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Schocken Books.
Clausewitz, C. von (1976 [1832]) On War, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Vaneigem, R. (1983 [1967]) The Revolution of Everyday Life, London: Rebel Press.

howard caygill
Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road
Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE, UK

Radical Sociality: On Disobedience, Violence and Belonging

Margarita Palacios (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 200 pp.,
ISBN: 978-1137003683

A
ny attempt to theorise expressions
of dissent, disobedience and resis-
tance must confront not only the
normative bias towards order and obedi-
ence embedded in most theoretical fra-
meworks but also the apparently reactive
character of oppositional politics. We dis-
sent from an established opinion, we dis-
obey a given law and we resist a constituted
authority. The oppositional stance seems
inescapably reactive, capable of saying only
no to an opinion, law or authority that
seems successfully and constructively to
have already affirmed itself. By opposing
an established state of affairs, an opposi-
tional stance by definition finds itself
already shaped and limited by whatever it
opposes; it finds itself in the violent and sad
subject position described by Nietzsche
(2007) as ressentiment. One of the many
merits of Margarita Palacioss Radical Soci-
ality is its unflinching response to these
obstacles and its argument not only for the
priority of disobedience but also for a new
kind of social theory without any normative
bias towards obedience and order.
Radical Sociality opens with an evoca-
tion of Max Weber torn between the
values of the Enlightenment and
Romanticism (1). It inaugurates a com-
plex and ambivalent sequence of proposi-
tions through which Palacios at once takes
distance from the oppositions of Weberian
social analysis at the same time as desir-
ing to extend and radicalise Webers
insight (1). Situating Weber in the space
between the values of enlightenment and
romanticism, science and substantive
values, science/bureaucracy and meaning
making, Palacios insists that this space is
paradoxical and informed by practices of
violence and exclusion. The radicalisation
of Weber and the heritage of social theory
at stake in the book are accomplished
through a number of audacious and fasci-
nating argumentative steps, beginning
with a shift from a scenario of conflicting
values to one emphasising the tension
between structural and historical features
of meaning generation. Instead of lament-
ing the retreat of meaning before logics of
domination, Palacios proposes that their
encounter opens a void (or space of unde-
cidability) which precisely guarantees the
permanent generation of meaning (2).
The tension between logics of domination
and meaning generation is productive of
meaning, and characterised by the

margarita palacios and howard caygill european political science: 15 2016 133
 simultaneous experience of belonging and
violence (2). Palacios then turns to one of
the most radical investigations of the gen-
eration of historical meaning Heideggers
(1962) Being and Time and its analytic of
thrown projection introducing it as the
guiding thread for her investigation of a
rich corpus of texts drawn from twentieth
century philosophy, social theory and
psychoanalysis.
The encounter between Weber and Hei-
degger staged in the early pages of the
book has consequences for the direction
of Palacios analysis, which relegates the
opening focus on the phenomenon of dis-
obedience in favour of the analysis of
anxiety. In a sense the decision to follow
the thread of anxiety may be understood
as a step back from the project of radica-
lising Weber proposed at the outset. The
art of disobedience described in the first
chapter as the expression for the negotia-
tion of undecidability and the void began
to overturn the priority Weber gave to
legitimate domination defined in terms
of the probability of securing obedience
and to emphasise the priority of dis-
obedience and defiance. Palacios carefully
distinguishes this ontological disobe-
dience from ontic disobediences of
emancipation, resistance and transgres-
sion, and sees it at the centre of pro-
cesses of meaning generation (as
opposed to obedient meaning reproduc-
tion) if not of the logics of domination
themselves that are contrived to antici-
pate and pre-empt an originary disobe-
dience. However, the implications of this
inversion of Weber and the critique of the
normative priority of order and obedience
that informs his social theory remains
largely unstated through much of the
book, which explores the implications of
the predicament of the void and undecid-
ability not through disobedience but
through the theme of anxiety.
The focus on anxiety emerges from
Heideggers analytic of Dasein and its
modulations with the psychoanalytic
134 european political science: 15 2016 resistance today
understanding of the affect accomplished
by Lacan and later underwritten by
Richardsons (1982, 2003) work on Hei-
degger and Jacques Lacan. Palacios is
especially fascinated by Lacans (2014)
Seminar X On Anxiety and his descriptions
of the affect in terms of contact with the
real and its peculiar property that it does
not lie. She convincingly and with great
subtlety shows how Lacan bequeathed an
account of anxiety that helps us to under-
stand identity formation, violence and the
death drive. She is also able to put this
account to use in understanding historical
events of violence notably representa-
tions of youth violence and repressive
political violence but the phenomenolo-
gical inflection of psychoanalysis unfolded
throughout seems a different project from
the moves towards an ontological account
of disobedience promised in the opening
pages of the book and their promise
of a theoretical understanding of an oppo-
sitional politics without ressentiment.
Clearly the two projects are related, but it
remains unclear how it is possible to move
from a Heideggerian and psychoanalytic
account of anxiety towards an understand-
ing of an originary disobedience.
Palacios returns to the notion of disobe-
dience at the end of her book in the closing
account of infinite criticality. Here the
theme returns in all its power as a poten-
tial for disruption of any established
semantic horizon, and as the key to keep
the gap of meaning and being open, a gap
which. I would like to argue, inaugurates
and secures infinite criticality (153). This
return to the opening gesture of the book
seems to point towards a radical enlight-
enment one in which Kants argue
as much as you like as long as you obey
is restated as argue as much as you like
as long as you disobey. The creativity
of disobedience far from any ressenti-
ment is theorised as an aesthetic ges-
ture, one which does not foreclose the
void, is infused with a joyful affect and
whose distantiation opens the possibility
for a type of resistance that immediately
counteracts the effects of language and
power (154). This resistance counters
the resistance of the symbolic world we
live in evoked in the closing lines of the
book, but not by adopting an oppositional
stance to it.
One of the most stimulating features of
Radical Sociality is the sense it leaves of
an adventure of thought being worked
through. Some of its decisions and
choices can be questioned, notably its
methodological emphasis on anxiety in
place of a direct confrontation with dis-
obedience and its closing intimations of a
resisting Romantic object-thing that
joins the body and its passions (168) in
materiality and resistance. Perhaps direct
and sustained attention to disobedience in
its own right and not just ultimately as a
failure of power may have inclined the
argument to the other pole of the Weber-
ian opposition between enlightenment
and romanticism cited at the books incep-
tion, pointing to a radical enlightenment
and a phenomenology of joyful rather
than sad affects that themselves resist
the vicissitudes of anxiety?
REPLY TO CAYGILL
Often political violence is reduced to stra-
tegic action and group interests, power and
opportunities. Without dismissing these
categories, in Radical Sociality: On Disobe-
dience, Violence and Belonging, I argue
that the emergence of political violence
entails a more complex set of phenomena.
Those phenomena are characterised not
only by the existential threat the other
poses to the self, but also the relation of
aggressive jealousy and enjoyment of
exclusion of the other which often accom-
panies political antagonism. On the other
hand, youth violence is often perceived as
resulting from the weakening of social ties
and the culture of narcissism that accom-
panies it. I argue instead that this type of
margarita palacios and howard caygill
social violence resembles a type of inclu-
sion without recognition predominant in
melancholic cultures.
In Radical Sociality, and inspired by the
above mentioned experiences of violence,
I offer a theoretical engagement to
explore, from different angles, the vicissi-
tudes that characterize the relation with
otherness. I do so by analysing pro-
cesses of meaning making and the physi-
cality which transverses any type of
sociality. Broadly speaking, the book
attempts to theorise both the indetermi-
nacy, openness and impossibility that
I think characterises social life, and also,
the always already existing uneven power
relations and colonizing logics of racializa-
tion and feminisation that accompany it.
In my view, only in the crisscrossing of
theoretical traditions which do not at first
sight appear to be compatible with one
another, we can find conceptual tools to
be able to link what social theory has often
kept apart: meaning making (i.e., phe-
nomenology and psychoanalytic theory)
and the study of power and hegemonic
formations.
Now, one of the main worries Howard
Caygill expresses about my book is the
strong emphasis on or perhaps even
the need for theorizing disobedience
through the lens of anxiety. According to
him, this theoretical move produces a
stepping back from my suggested pro-
ject of radicalising Max Webers under-
standing of the contradictions and
paradoxes which informed meaning for-
mation and domination in early capitalist
societies. Indeed I started the introduc-
tion of my book by quoting Weber, as he
was capable of addressing the existence
of something both paradoxical and ines-
capable about our societies: what he
theorized as the contradiction between
substantive and formal types of rational-
ity. Although, valuing his sensibility to
perceive a paradoxical core in the social,
I distanced myself from this Weberian
interpretation quickly. I argued instead,
european political science: 15 2016 135
 that it is not about opposing value
systems, but about the encounter
between the structural features of
meaning making and the historicity of
meaning that are at the base of the
paradox identity, action and violence.
Identity formation and action, I argued
in the book, are inevitably linked to forms
of exclusion and violence. In this context
I understood my theoretical gesture as a
radicalization of Webers insight, to the
extent that this argument brings my
book outside the confines of cultural
sociology, and to a place where a dialo-
gue with deconstruction (in particular
the work of Jacques Derrida), phenom-
enology (in particular Martin Heidegger)
and psychoanalysis (in particular Sig-
mund Freud and Jacques Lacan) become
pertinent and necessary.
The aim of Radical Sociality was to
reflect upon a variety of social formations
and political processes that show us the
logics of exclusion that characterize poli-
tical fantasy and the logics of inclusion
without recognition that accompany mel-
ancholic cultures. In this theoretical con-
text, disobedience is the starting point of a
larger conceptual journey, and it is theo-
rized as the void or out-of placeness
that triggers the paradoxical or undecid-
able becoming of the social. My argument
is that, as long as meaning is interrupted,
there is disobedience, and consequently,
that any form of consolidated meaning
involves power and hegemonic forma-
tions. Now, if in the first chapter of Radical
Sociality this void is theorized only
semantically that is, only referring to
the life of signifiers I move in the follow-
ing chapter to the very physicality of it.
That is, I argue we are not only confronted
with the indeterminancy of language, the
limits and opening of subjectivity, the dis-
juncture between temporality and time,
but also with the real of the death drive
136 european political science: 15 2016 resistance today
and jouissance. Here the notion of anxiety
(questioned by Caygill in his review), as
presented in philosophical discourse by
Heidegger and in psychoanalytic theory
by Lacan, becomes central for my project
as it helps to build a bridge between the
abstract notion of language and the phy-
sical character of meaning formation and
desire. That is, in my view, linking disobe-
dience and anxiety allows me to look at
the paradoxical logics and vicissitudes of
contemporary forms of belonging and vio-
lence which I analyse throughout the book
(such as those experienced in political
violence informed by experiences of
fantasy and exclusion and forms of
social violence informed by melancholia
and inclusion without recognition). With-
out this conceptual bridge between mean-
ing and desire (a bridge I build precisely
through the notion of anxiety), I would be
unable to address the deeply imbricated
character of otherwise disparate and see-
mingly incommensurate dimensions of
social life, such as the Nation-State, our
bodies and sexuality.
Let me just add here that what Radical
Sociality cannot offer is an emancipatory
discourse about a particular type of dis-
obedience, nor can it offer remedies to
think of violence-free societies. What my
book attempts to do is to explore a range
of insights that expose the ethical and
political challenges that our becoming
subjects and communities present to our
post-metaphysical and democratic and
post-colonial social imaginaries, as well
as it offers a notion of disobedience
which attempts to avoid normative uto-
pian or nihilistic conceptual closures. I do
so by theorizing the existential void
within a language which does not break
apart the dimensions of meaning from
desire, but one that acknowledges the
openness of meaning and the vicissi-
tudes of the body.
References

Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell.
Lacan, J. (2014) Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, edited and translated by J.-A. Miller,
Cambridge: Polity.
Nietzsche, F. (2007) One the Genealogy of Morality, edited by K. Ansell-Pearson, translated by C. Diethe,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, W. (1982) Lacan and Language: A Readers Guide to Ecrits, New York: International
Universities Press.
Richardson, W. (2003) Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought, New York: Fordham University
Press.

About the Authors

Margarita Palacios is Senior Lecturer in Social Theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies,
Birkbeck College, University of London, and Research Associate in the Institute of the
Humanities, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. She is the author of Fantasy and
Political Violence (2009) and Radical Sociality: On Disobedience, Violence and Belonging
(2013).

Howard Caygill is Professor of Modern European Philosophy in the Centre of Modern European
Philosophy, Kingston University. He is the author of Art of Judgement (Basil Blackwell, 1989,
2nd edition forthcoming), A Kant Dictionary (Basil Blackwell, 1995) and Lvinas and the
Political (Routledge, 2002).

margarita palacios and howard caygill european political science: 15 2016 137