Clausewitzian Gestures
Howard Caygill, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance
Bloomsbury, 256pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781472526564
reviewed by Alex Fletcher
‘Saints, hermits, but also intellectuals. The few who have made history are those who have said no.’ Pier Paolo Pasolini
Our present has been marked by the enduring iteration and persistence of resistances; from the Arab insurgencies, to the resistance of the indignados and aganaktismenoi, to the global eruption of the Occupy movement, to the ‘Taskim Republic’. Whether experienced as images on a screen, or on the street (through a blurred vision provoked by tear-gas) the last several years have witnessed the recurring appearance of sights and sites of resistance, along with the almost certain accompanying scenes of violent repression. As Howard Caygill’s On Resistance argues: ‘[r]esistance was one of the most important and enduring expressions of the twentieth-century political imagination and action and one ever more important in the struggles of the present century.’
Despite the proliferation of texts dedicated to ‘provoking, sustaining or repressing it’, resistance, Caygill contends, remains extremely resistant to philosophical analysis. If it were indeed a simple task to unify the plurality of concepts and historical instances of resistance it would surely risk emptying the grammar of resistance of its very capacity to resist. For Caygill, it is precisely the constant reinvention and metamorphosis of practices and theories of resistance that is the condition of possibility for its slippery persistence. If it were a static concept or practice, any change or development in the forms of power and domination would be bound to succeed; rendering bankrupt Foucault’s notorious claim that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’.
Caygill’s analysis of resistance masterfully traces the refractions of this concept through various discourses, framed in terms of ‘force’, ‘consciousness’, ‘violence’ and ‘subjectivity’. Discourses are often paired or clash with complimentary or contradictory texts (Marx and Nietzsche, Gandhi and Mao, Benjamin and Gramsci), historical examples of resistances that have been informed by or have informed such discourses (from the French Resistance, to anti-colonial struggles theorised by Fanon and the Zapatistas), and artistic and aesthetic instances of resistance - what Caygill terms his ‘marginal readings’ of Jean Genet, Pasolini and Kafka – that help to illuminate, problematise, and open up the philosophy and history of resistance.
However, it is the theorist of ‘the war of resistance’, Carl von Clausewitz, whose book On War (1832) is the inspiration of Caygill’s own title, that unifies the reflections on 20th-century thinkers of resistance. For Caygill, Clausewitz’s insight that modern politics and war pivot on the ‘capacity to resist’ is crucial to a philosophy of resistance. As he observes, Clausewitz’s famous proposition, repeated in various forms throughout On War – that ‘war is the mere continuation of politics by other means’ – was embraced by Lenin, Mao and Che Guevara. Caygill’s Clausewitzian considerations are not limited to identifying resistance simply with violence. In fact, Gandhi’s position on non-violent resistance in anti-colonial struggles in South Africa and India, which possessed a clear concept of enmity and a strategic sense of the importance of preserving and enhancing the capacity to resist (while compromising the enemy’s capacity), through moral rather than physical force, are Clausewitzian gestures par excellence, according to Caygill.
Central to Caygill’s analysis is an assiduous focus on the idea of ‘a resistant subjectivity possessing the capacity to stage a protracted non-violent resistance’, providing an archive of precedents that help to counter the ‘romantic’ image of resistance as a momentary or ephemeral flash. A key example of a sustained resistance is exemplified in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, who endured almost 20 years of non-violent resistance against a repressive state and military adversary; and were also significant for the refinement of the tactic of occupation, providing important lessons that seem unheeded by the recent Occupy movement. The conception of resistant subjectivity for Greenham characteristically affirms life directly against death. Caygill interestingly complements and echoes but also contrasts this with the more ‘thanatopolitical’ versions of resistant subjectivity that affirm life through what Huey P. Newton of the Black Panthers called ‘revolutionary suicide’.
The question of life is analysed via a reading of Arendt and the biopolitical current of thought, which Caygill argues remains above all a theory of domination; ‘it is not, and in many cases does not have, a defined theory of resistance.’ Instead of giving life and resistance the theoretical initiative, establishing a political philosophy and strategy of resistance, he argues that biopolitical theories of total domination often put it on the defensive. This is not to ignore the force (physical or intangible) of domination, but as the Black Panthers demonstrated, one can remain painfully aware that they are being hunted, and still refuse to adopt the posture of prey. Caygill interprets Pasolini’s film Salò (1975) as an attempt to imagine the capacity to resist reduced to near-zero (Pasolini is the first to use the term homo sacer in a modern context, a reference subsequently extended in the work of Agamben). As Caygill puts it, ‘lights of resistance … flicker through Pasolini’s work’. The depiction of resistance in The Gospel According to St Matthew, for instance, casts Christ as Ghandian figure of resistance.
The final part of On Resistance concerns the state of the contemporary capacity to resist neo-liberalism and other forms of domination, charting contemporary resistance movements, as well as the question of the role played by digital technologies. The internet and its capacity for the movement of information, as Caygill recognises, has become a crucial site for contemporary resistance. As he points out, however, the actual origins of the internet may be traced directly to neo-Clausewitzian (and Janus-faced) concerns with preserving the capacity to resist, that is, enhancing the capacity to control and dominate.
The style of argumentation becomes more open towards the end of On Resistance, as if the reader now equipped with a long history of resistances can gauge for themselves the quality and consistency of the diverse expressions of the contemporary capacity to resist, as well as their internal limitations and susceptibility to counter-resistance. It is, I think, the susceptibility to counter-resistance that will strike contemporary struggles as a pressing concern. As Caygill remarks, while reflecting on Mao’s commentary on Clausewitz and Sun Tzu:
Apollo’s oracle ‘know thyself’ adopted by Socrates must be complemented in the Chinese tradition by knowing ones enemy – perhaps Socrates went to his death precisely because he knew only himself and did not sufficiently know his enemy?
It is Caygill’s astonishingly attentive enquiry into the ‘actuality’ of resistance, rather than its diversion into the realm of ‘the possible’, that makes On Resistance such a crucial source for contemporary actors and thinkers seeking to both perform and preserve our capacity to resist.
Our present has been marked by the enduring iteration and persistence of resistances; from the Arab insurgencies, to the resistance of the indignados and aganaktismenoi, to the global eruption of the Occupy movement, to the ‘Taskim Republic’. Whether experienced as images on a screen, or on the street (through a blurred vision provoked by tear-gas) the last several years have witnessed the recurring appearance of sights and sites of resistance, along with the almost certain accompanying scenes of violent repression. As Howard Caygill’s On Resistance argues: ‘[r]esistance was one of the most important and enduring expressions of the twentieth-century political imagination and action and one ever more important in the struggles of the present century.’
Despite the proliferation of texts dedicated to ‘provoking, sustaining or repressing it’, resistance, Caygill contends, remains extremely resistant to philosophical analysis. If it were indeed a simple task to unify the plurality of concepts and historical instances of resistance it would surely risk emptying the grammar of resistance of its very capacity to resist. For Caygill, it is precisely the constant reinvention and metamorphosis of practices and theories of resistance that is the condition of possibility for its slippery persistence. If it were a static concept or practice, any change or development in the forms of power and domination would be bound to succeed; rendering bankrupt Foucault’s notorious claim that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’.
Caygill’s analysis of resistance masterfully traces the refractions of this concept through various discourses, framed in terms of ‘force’, ‘consciousness’, ‘violence’ and ‘subjectivity’. Discourses are often paired or clash with complimentary or contradictory texts (Marx and Nietzsche, Gandhi and Mao, Benjamin and Gramsci), historical examples of resistances that have been informed by or have informed such discourses (from the French Resistance, to anti-colonial struggles theorised by Fanon and the Zapatistas), and artistic and aesthetic instances of resistance - what Caygill terms his ‘marginal readings’ of Jean Genet, Pasolini and Kafka – that help to illuminate, problematise, and open up the philosophy and history of resistance.
However, it is the theorist of ‘the war of resistance’, Carl von Clausewitz, whose book On War (1832) is the inspiration of Caygill’s own title, that unifies the reflections on 20th-century thinkers of resistance. For Caygill, Clausewitz’s insight that modern politics and war pivot on the ‘capacity to resist’ is crucial to a philosophy of resistance. As he observes, Clausewitz’s famous proposition, repeated in various forms throughout On War – that ‘war is the mere continuation of politics by other means’ – was embraced by Lenin, Mao and Che Guevara. Caygill’s Clausewitzian considerations are not limited to identifying resistance simply with violence. In fact, Gandhi’s position on non-violent resistance in anti-colonial struggles in South Africa and India, which possessed a clear concept of enmity and a strategic sense of the importance of preserving and enhancing the capacity to resist (while compromising the enemy’s capacity), through moral rather than physical force, are Clausewitzian gestures par excellence, according to Caygill.
Central to Caygill’s analysis is an assiduous focus on the idea of ‘a resistant subjectivity possessing the capacity to stage a protracted non-violent resistance’, providing an archive of precedents that help to counter the ‘romantic’ image of resistance as a momentary or ephemeral flash. A key example of a sustained resistance is exemplified in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, who endured almost 20 years of non-violent resistance against a repressive state and military adversary; and were also significant for the refinement of the tactic of occupation, providing important lessons that seem unheeded by the recent Occupy movement. The conception of resistant subjectivity for Greenham characteristically affirms life directly against death. Caygill interestingly complements and echoes but also contrasts this with the more ‘thanatopolitical’ versions of resistant subjectivity that affirm life through what Huey P. Newton of the Black Panthers called ‘revolutionary suicide’.
The question of life is analysed via a reading of Arendt and the biopolitical current of thought, which Caygill argues remains above all a theory of domination; ‘it is not, and in many cases does not have, a defined theory of resistance.’ Instead of giving life and resistance the theoretical initiative, establishing a political philosophy and strategy of resistance, he argues that biopolitical theories of total domination often put it on the defensive. This is not to ignore the force (physical or intangible) of domination, but as the Black Panthers demonstrated, one can remain painfully aware that they are being hunted, and still refuse to adopt the posture of prey. Caygill interprets Pasolini’s film Salò (1975) as an attempt to imagine the capacity to resist reduced to near-zero (Pasolini is the first to use the term homo sacer in a modern context, a reference subsequently extended in the work of Agamben). As Caygill puts it, ‘lights of resistance … flicker through Pasolini’s work’. The depiction of resistance in The Gospel According to St Matthew, for instance, casts Christ as Ghandian figure of resistance.
The final part of On Resistance concerns the state of the contemporary capacity to resist neo-liberalism and other forms of domination, charting contemporary resistance movements, as well as the question of the role played by digital technologies. The internet and its capacity for the movement of information, as Caygill recognises, has become a crucial site for contemporary resistance. As he points out, however, the actual origins of the internet may be traced directly to neo-Clausewitzian (and Janus-faced) concerns with preserving the capacity to resist, that is, enhancing the capacity to control and dominate.
The style of argumentation becomes more open towards the end of On Resistance, as if the reader now equipped with a long history of resistances can gauge for themselves the quality and consistency of the diverse expressions of the contemporary capacity to resist, as well as their internal limitations and susceptibility to counter-resistance. It is, I think, the susceptibility to counter-resistance that will strike contemporary struggles as a pressing concern. As Caygill remarks, while reflecting on Mao’s commentary on Clausewitz and Sun Tzu:
Apollo’s oracle ‘know thyself’ adopted by Socrates must be complemented in the Chinese tradition by knowing ones enemy – perhaps Socrates went to his death precisely because he knew only himself and did not sufficiently know his enemy?
It is Caygill’s astonishingly attentive enquiry into the ‘actuality’ of resistance, rather than its diversion into the realm of ‘the possible’, that makes On Resistance such a crucial source for contemporary actors and thinkers seeking to both perform and preserve our capacity to resist.