Veranstaltungsart: In Debate

Building on the distinction (highlighted by Derrida) between constative and performative speech acts, on the one hand, and the event, on the other, we shall attempt to specify a resistance to knowledge and to power. Is it the resistance of an irreducible otherness which, nonetheless, addresses me, speaks to me (Levinas); is it the resistance to symbolisation of the real (Lacan)? How may one respond to, how may one take responsibility for this resistance, which insistently imposes itself, breaks in, interrupts? How may we leave a place for such resistance within our lives, and in our institutions? We shall attempt to characterise an ethical response to, and responsibility towards the event’s resistance – which may provide an ethical resistance to (the reduction of the social field to) politics.

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Departing from the presentation of the points of convergences between the disruptive Ethics of Luis Villoro and the moral thought of T.W. Adorno regarding the critique of a positive account of the idea of justice, the presentation explores on the experience of vulnerability and injustice in order to present a phenomenological interpretation of Villoro’s account of justice “via negativa” based in the historical experience of exclusion. I conclude with some points to discuss whether a phenomenological approach to the reconstruction of the normative sphere is possible starting from negative experiences related to the condition of vulnerability rather to the habitual understanding of experiencing of values from acts of intuitive enjoyment or positive fulfillments that take into account the historical dimension of injustice and exclusion as a contribution to the idea of resistance against oppression, and the development of a notion of justice departing from an experience-oriented account rather than the rational accounts from the liberal theories like the ones we may find in Rawls or Habermas.

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One of the most common ways in which the distinction – and corresponding incommensurability – between the “early” and the “late” Heidegger has been developed is in terms of “activism” vs. “quietism”. By adopting the former, agency is won at the expense of an account of the broader social-historical forces that shape it and, therefore, remains naïvely voluntaristic. Endorsing the latter, by contrast, secures a compelling diagnosis of the historical epoch of technics at the expense of possibilities for emancipation. This picture not only misses the fact that the “late” belongs to and is the fulfillment of the “early” (emancipatory) project, but that it only appears to endorse “passivity” or “quietism” on the presupposition of a causal account of agency and a form of dialectical negativity that is its corollary. But the “early” project of fundamental ontology was crucially animated by the dismantling of the causal model of agency and the passive/active distinction that is a holdover from the metaphysical tradition, an endeavor further developed and radicalized in Heidegger’s later work. Hence, I argue that in order to better understand the relationship between the “early” and “late” projects and, more importantly, to elaborate an account of resistance in the age of Ge-stell that does not participate in its reproduction, it is necessary to attend to the guiding thread of Heidegger’s critique of agency as causality and negativity as dialectics.

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This talk explores the question of resistance through the lens of a phenomenology of fatigue. It argues that the term “fatigue” covers a plurality of distinct experiential structures unfolding on different levels: individual, relational, and social-political. Each form of fatigue transforms our presence to ourselves, our capacity to act, our relation to others, and our way of inhabiting the world. Accordingly, different fatigues call for different forms of resistance. Yet, the notion of resistance itself proves to be fundamentally ambivalent, since it designates both the resistance encountered in the world, from which fatigue arises, and the resistance by which the subject responds to fatigue. The talk argues that these two senses are intrinsically connected and illuminate one another, thereby disclosing the phenomenological structure of both fatigue and resistance.

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Drawing on Frantz Fanon and Abdelmalek Sayad, the lecture examines forms of racial oppression that evade subjective interpretation and verbal articulation. It considers how theoretical narrative can reconstruct such experiences and develops a gradual account of resistance attentive to pre-reflective conflictuality, beyond the conventional model of resistance beginning with conscious awareness.

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The lecture reconsiders interiority beyond the Cartesian division between an inner realm and a material exterior. Bringing critical phenomenology into dialogue with contemporary critiques of inwardness, it asks how the multiple forms of resistance within subjectivity can illuminate changes in the lifeworld and clarify their anthropological, historical and political significance.

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