Resistance - Conservative Roots, Anti-colonial Resistance, Totality, Cultural Resistance, Resistance Refuted And Reimagined
english body opposition political
The path of resistance has been neither straight nor narrow. First adopted by the political right, and then crossing the aisle to the left, resistance is sometimes considered a means and other times an end. Its modern history traces the evolution of an idea and a transformation in politics.
The English word resistance is a derivation of "resist," stemming from the Latin—via the French—meaning "to stand." Resistance has a technical scientific meaning, the opposition offered by one body to the pressure or movement of another, as well as a later psychoanalytic one, the unconscious opposition to repressed memories or desires. But the Oxford English Dictionary's primary definition: "To stop or hinder (a moving body); to succeed in standing against; to prevent (a weapon, etc.) from piercing or penetrating," has a distinct political bent.
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Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the great conservative thinker of the modern era, makes the case for resistance in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Fondly remembering Marie Antoinette as a "morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy" (p. 75), Burke criticizes the revolutionary overthrow of birthright authority. Horrified by the thought of the hair-dresser who …
Halfway around the world Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) was developing his own ideas of resistance. Arriving at conclusions similar to Burke and Arnold, he stood these conservative
notions on their head in opposing British colonial rule. Central to Gandhi's political philosophy was the idea of satyagraha. In Sanskrit this means "insistence on the truth"; Gandhi, however, a…
La Résistance was the name adopted by the French citizens who fought against the Nazi occupation of France. But the specter of oppression didn't disappear with the defeat of Fascism in the postwar West. Instead, totalizing power was identified everywhere and resistance was redefined as an everyday battle with no end in sight. This total resistance against totality finds its roots in ex…
While apathy may reign supreme in the voting booth, some scholars and activists have been looking for resistance elsewhere: on the street corner, in the living room, or at the club, that is, in cultural expression. Matthew Arnold first articulated cultural resistance, but the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) framed the contemporary discussion. Gramsci, writing from a Fascist jail…
Is cultural resistance, resistance at all? Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) raised this question in Exile's Return (1934), his memoir of Bohemian days in Greenwich Village. He pointed out that while the cultural conservatism of the Victorians may have served an era of capitalism predicated on hard work and savings, by the 1920s a new ethic was needed for what was becoming a mass consumer e…
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy, 1869. Reprint, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ——. "Dover Beach." In Poetical Works, edited by C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950. First published in 1867. Baudrillard, Jean. "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media." New Literary History 3 (1985): pp 577…
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