Una vida en resilencia. El arte de vivir en peligro

by Brad Evans, Julian Reid

Brand New. Ship worldwide

Genres: Philosophy

269 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.