Dangerously exposed: the life & death of the resilient subject


“What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political question being asked by ideologues and policy makers who want us to abandon the dream of ever achieving security and embrace danger as a condition of possibility for life in the future. As this article demonstrates, this belief in the necessity and positivity of human exposure to danger is fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’. Resilience demands our disavowal of any belief in the possibility to secure ourselves and accept that life is a permanent process of continual adaptation to dangers said to be outside our control. The resilient subject is a subject which must permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world, and not a subject which can conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility. However, it is a subject which accepts the dangerousness of the world it lives in as a condition for partaking of that world and which accepts the necessity of the injunction to change itself in correspondence with threats now presupposed as endemic. This is less than acceptable. Not only is it politically catastrophic, it is fundamentally nihilistic. Identifying resilience as a nihilism that forces the subject to wilfully abandon the political, we argue for a wholesale rethinking of the question of what a politics of life is and can be.”
see the rest @ http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21693293.2013.770703?src=recsys

One response to “Dangerously exposed: the life & death of the resilient subject

  1. i think you’ve got the gist of it (it’s open-access there for now, i emailed you the link but it’s on that site too)
    i guess i could have made it explicit but i thought that the fact that they saw nihilism as a negative was enough of a red-flag, even the most noxious neolibbers who are selling resilience to corporations and governments have made the surprisingly reality-reflecting shift away from the mad scramble/surveillance-lock-down to avoid all harm/vulnerability to a sense of shit’s going down at scales/intensities beyond your powers so how will you cope in the aftermath?
    i actually used some of this logic/rhetoric recently in a meeting with the state better business bureau (not the most progressive crowd) around cyber-security and they could see the light, even got them to think positively about moving to rewarding their employees for reporting errors/invasions rather than punishing them, now can they put that to practice i don’t know but this is not a group usually given to admitting limits/weakness so i was momentarily encouraged, now if only we could get them to generalize this to formal politics and policing…

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