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I plead guilty to the indictment of avowed optimism. We have entered an age of resistance for which we must build an analytics. New forms, strategies and subjects of resistance and insurrection appear regularly without knowledge of or guidance from Badiou, Zizek or Negri.
On 17 June 2011, I was invited to address the Syntagma Square occupation in Athens. After the talks, following the usual procedure, members of the occupation who had their number drawn came to the front to speak to the 10,000 people present. One man in particular was shaking and trembling with evident symptoms of stagefright before his address. He then proceeded to give a beautiful talk in perfectly formed sentences and paragraphs, presenting a complete and persuasive plan for the future of the movement. How did you do it? I asked him later, I thought you were going to collapse. When I started speaking, he replied nonchalantly, I was mouthing the words but someone else was speaking. A stranger inside me was dictating what to say. Many participants in the recent insurrections and revolts make similar statements. My recent work addresses this stranger in me (a usual description of the unconscious), this miraculous transubstantiation shared by people in different parts of the world.[1] The new world order announced in 1989 was the shortest in history, coming to an abrupt end in 2008. Protests, riots and uprisings have erupted all over the world. Neither the mainstream nor the radicals had predicted the wave and this led to a frantic search for historical precedents. A former director of Britains Secret Intelligence Service thought it, a revolutionary wave, like 1848. Paul Mason agrees: There are strong parallels above all with 1848, and with the wave of discontent that preceded 1914. [2] Alain Badiou suspects a possible rebirth of history in a new age of riots and uprisings after a long revolutionary interval.[3] Eventually however history is miscarried or stillborn and Badiou strongly disagrees with my statement that we have entered an age or resistance.
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[16] At a conference in Paris in January 2013, I was on the same panel with Badiou. After my presentation, Alain started: I certainly admire the eloquence of my friend and comrade Costas Douzinas, who has buttressed his avowed optimist with precise references to what he takes to be the political novelties of the peoples resistance in Greece, where he has even discerned the emergence of a new political subject. When I heard the next point I thought I had misunderstood: While the courage and inventiveness of the resistance is a cause of enthusiasm, it is neither novel nor effective. The same things happened in May 68, in Tahrir Square and even in the times of Spartacus or Thomas Munzer. [4] I plead guilty to the indictment of avowed optimism. We have entered an age of resistance. New forms, strategies and subjects of resistance and insurrection appear regularly without knowledge of or guidance from Badiou [17], Zizek [18] or Negri [19]. Their timing is unpredictable but their occurrence certain. As resistances spread around the world from the austerity-hit countries to Turkey [20] and Brazil [21], the former poster boys of neo-liberalism, to Bosnia-Herzegovina [22] and Ukraine [23], philosophy has the responsibility to explore the contemporary return of resistance and to develop an analytics of resistance. In a more strategic sense, it is importance to follow Kants advice in his late political essays, something of a vote of confidence for philosophical public relations avant la lettre. In Kants philosophy of history, nature guarantees the eventual civil union of humanity in a cosmopolitan future. But given the chance of a public hearing, the philosopher must keep preaching the inevitability of cosmopolitanism, offering a helping hand to providence. In a similar fashion and after the repeated claims about the end of history, the end of ideology and the new world order, it is important for the left to proclaim that radical change has become possible again. In the twentieth century, the left collected a long list of prophets and groupuscules promising the re-foundation of the one and only or the correct communist organisation. In earlier interventions, Badiou explained that the resistance (in ironic quotation marks) of the anti-globalisation movement was a creation of power. The movement is a wild operator of globalisation and seeks to sketch out, for the imminent future, the forms of comfort to be enjoyed by our planets idle petite bourgeoisie. [5] Warming to the theme, Badiou proceeded to attack Negri (a backward romantic) who is fascinated by capitals flexibility and violence. He called the multitude a dreamy hallucination, which claims the right for our planets idle... to enjoy without doing anything, while taking special
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[24] Repeated defeats do not help the millions whose lives have been devastated by neoliberal capitalism and post-democratic governance. What the left needs is not a new model party or an all-encompassing brilliant theory. It needs to learn from the popular resistances that broke out without leaders, parties or common ideology and to build on the energy, imagination and novel institutions created. The left needs a few successes after a long interval of failures. Greece is perhaps the best chance for the European left. The persistent and militant resistances sank two austerity governments and currently the Radical Left party Syriza is likely to be the first elected radical government in Europe. The historical chance has been created not by party or theory but by ordinary people who are well ahead of both and adopted this small protest party as the vehicle that would complement in Parliament the fights in the streets. The political and intellectual responsibility of radical intellectuals everywhere is to stand in solidarity of the Greek left. For an older generation of militants, theory is a weapon in politics. From this perspective, I have argued in my recent book that forms, subjects and strategies of resistance emerge within and against the circuits of power, reacting and rearranging its operations. To explain their multiplication and intensification, we must start with an exploration of the state of affairs they stand up to, the disastrous combination of neoliberal capitalism and the almost terminal decay of parliamentary democracy. All recent resistances from Tahrir, to Syntagma, Taksim and Sarajevo seem to respond to one or the other and usually both. It is therefore important to start the analysis of the age of resistance with an examination of certain common trends. Let me summarise them.
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[25] See more articles and videos from the Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism [25] partnership with the Open University. Country or region: Greece EU Topics: Civil society Conflict Culture Democracy and government Economics Equality Ideas International politics
$(document).ready(function(){ $("div#contentgrid").removeClass('grid-8'); $("div#contentgrid").addClass('grid-6'); }); About the author Costas Douzinas is Professor of Law and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a regular contributor for the Guardian and his latest book Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis [26] (Polity) was released in 2013. Read On
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[25] See more articles and videos from the Oecumene: Citizenship after Orientalism [25] partnership with the Open University.
[27] This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence. If you have any queries about republishing please contact us [28]. Please check individual images for licensing details.
Source URL: http://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/costas-douzinas/welcome-to-age-of-resistance Links: [1] http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/costas-douzinas [2] http://www.opendemocracy.net/freeform-tags/teatro-valle [3] http://www.opendemocracy.net/oecumene-citizenship-after-orientalism [4] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/international-politics [5] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/ideas [6] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/equality [7] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/economics [8] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/democracy-and-government [9] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/culture [10] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/conflict [11] http://www.opendemocracy.net/topics/civil-society [12] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/eu [13] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/greece [14] http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.opendemocracy.net/printpdf/79626&t=Welcome to the age of resistance [15] http://twitter.com/share?text=Welcome to the age of resistance [16] http://dy1m18dp41gup.cloudfront.net/cdn/farfuture/O2aoXgie1caevsq9h-9ONJrxPnWMkfF3YfzxYI haUds/mtime:1393671263/files/imagecache/wysiwyg_imageupload_lightbox_preset/wysiwyg_imageu pload/537772/1.%20courtesy%20of%20Tiziana%20Tomasulo_1.jpg [17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou [18] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek [19] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Negri [20] http://www.opendemocracy.net/freeform-tags/turkish-dawn [21] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/brazil [22] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries/bosnia-and-herzegovina [23] http://www.opendemocracy.net/countries-regions/ukraine [24] http://dy1m18dp41gup.cloudfront.net/cdn/farfuture/HqSiLdyArTZIf62xYzqrMR-J08J0mqhGZxJs8o SoXnM/mtime:1393671264/files/imagecache/wysiwyg_imageupload_lightbox_preset/wysiwyg_image upload/537772/2.%20courtesy%20of%20Tiziana%20Tomasulo_1.jpg [25] http://www.opendemocracy.net/freeform-tags/oecumene-citizenship-after-orientalism [26] http://www.politybooks.com/book.asp?ref=9780745665436 [27] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ [28] http://www.opendemocracy.net/contact
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