Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously

by Brad Evans, Julian Reid

What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’ that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence.

In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.

Genres: Philosophy

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Lukáš · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who would have thought the 'fashionable nonsense' of resilience, a concept that is all of a sudden everywhere from childcare through business planning to military thinking and the catastrophic/catastrophobic regime of anxiety it imposes on the neoliberal subject might be read as a complete draining out of liberal imagination and the frantic attempt to seize control over human lives ever since Kant and before? (Well, I did, but it sounds like a good way to start a review.) Pointing at the connections the concept of resilience establishes between liberal governing, the assault waged on imagination, genderedness, disempowerment and the accceptance of a wholly normalized catastrophic topography that forces life to 'bounce back' after dramatic events to the same faulty logic that terrorizes the liberal subject with preaching the inevitability of a 'misery yet to come', resilience allows the authors to open up spaces of this defferral. Different layers of being-with (anxiety / trauma, exposure, sustainable development, climate change as an end-of-the-world narrative) are taken up as the locus where all possibility is closed once the imagination is given away in the name of empiristic realism. Thus also spake Nietzsche: "Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it only prolongs the torment of men." Doomed to the catastrophic closure and the endangerment that is now said to be wholly a property of life and its inevitable finitude takes away all but the reactionary call to 'adapt' to the conditions and power structures that perturbate the very same misery and allows the authors to equate resilience with nihilist deferral of the worst kind - to be worthless, because we're extinct in the end anyways. Instead, we're given wonderful pathways to go through cinema, tragedy (and a bit of Beckett) and continental thought as a means to help us reflect on (and against) the truth-teling and prophetizing practices (as nonetheless analogous with much of religious eschatological imagery) and yet diagnose the affective-atmospheric-aesthetic mobilization that took a hold of them in the present. This book certainly does a great job at stepping out from the self-consuming poverty of academic thought and in its poetic call to affirm life as desiring, instead of 'exposed to' surely is a rare occurence of a book not worth burning after reading.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have now read and re-read this book at least three times and find something new and thought-provoking each time. My copy is now thoroughly dog-eared and post-it noted, signs that this book will stay in my personal library for quite some time.

[Luis Octavio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una crítica a los regímenes neoliberales que degradan al sujeto político a mero sobreviviente. Muy optimista y genuino al mostrar de qué manera el sujeto poético podría ayudar a imaginar futuros menos catastróficos. Lloré 4 veces.