A Matter of Resistance

Abstract

In this essay the author takes issue with postmodernist and/or poststructuralist theory of resistance. In the course of discussing what the author calls “the impasses of the way out”, she devides her analysis into two parts: one devoted to an exposition of the collapse of the emancipationist paradigm and to the impasses of the “way out” generally, and one devoted to the conception of the subject attuned to resistance. As a consequence of this discussion, the author argues that the pre-eminence of resistance, advocated by the postmodernists and/or poststructuralists, has serious implications for our understanding of the way out in the present constellation, but also for contemporary thought itself. In the course of tracing the experience of post-emancipationsit thought in its attempt to deal with the impasses of the “way out”, the author shows how postmodernist thought, by declaring that “the intractable” has fallen silent in the present social and political struggles, has largely contributed to the depoliticisation that has come increasingly to characterise our daily lives. Second, it has been shown how postmodernist and/or poststructuralist thought, in its desire to yield hole of a “way out”, turned out to be one of the most insidious ways of surrendering to the “growing impasses of capitalism”.