“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
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synthetic zerØ 
I’m sure we’ve discussed this before, and Felix and I were talking about it last night, but it strikes me that there is something noxious in the rejection of resilience as a mirror or rhetorical-discursive tool that is totally saturated by the carcinogenic radiation of neoliberal and capitalist ideology. Resilience is in fact just another gloss on the central post-nihilistic idea of coping-with, the thin or survivalist account of some deflationary eudaimonic enterprise. If resilience can be defined in the terms deployed by the American Psychiatric Association then it has something to do with
“the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace and financial stressors. It means “bouncing back” from difficult experiences”.
Holy shit! What ideological crimes the idea of resilience perpetuates that it expects us to be able to maintain some minimal degree of functionality in the face of extreme destructive interventions into our systems of expectancy, our anchoring systems and socio-economic navigational capacities.
And what the hell is the author on about when they speak of a new ideology regarding the irreducibility of human exposure to danger? It’s as if the immunological was short-circuited to become an inborn invulnerability, as if a brief survey of human history or a glance at the day in the life of any human existence wouldn’t reveal a world rife with the demands to navigate danger, as if risk-assessment weren’t in fact an integral purpose of our predictive neurological infrastructure.
The problem is that without any ecological plasticity, without the ability to map the ecologistical distribution of bodies and their affects, their atmospheres and climates, how in the hell would we ever be able to “secure” ourselves? I suppose we’re to achieve this security by first of all remaining within a normative autism defined by withdrawal from the real coupled with an extreme cognitive rigidity?
Maybe that’s unfair- things being behind paywalls (nice and snug and securely out of reach from proletarian contaminants)- but all the denials of resilience seem profoundly wrong-headed to me. Rather, we ought to be capable of a repurposing of the discursive technologies. Why should neoliberals be the only ones to talk about resilience? Or do we cede all that to the neoliberals and the neoreactionaries who promise much more in the way of security and stability?
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…
And without wishing to be facetious- can we have a moratorium on “the life and death of x subject”. Or any subject. A subject neither lives nor dies. It may have a biological base but it is hardly reducible to that. Grrr…