The politics of time and temporality in Foucault’s theorisation of resistance: ruptures, time-lags and decelerations

ABSTRACT

This paper revolves around the politics of time and temporality within Michel Foucault’s theorisation of resistance. In focus is Foucault’s outline of resistance as discursive resistance, reversed discourses, techniques of the self and counter-conducts, and other anti-authority struggles. These forms of resistance are played out across a range of temporal scales. When is resistance, in Foucault’s view, spectacular and instantaneous rather than incremental and ‘slow’? Overall, this paper reveals how the resistance practices, that are described within Foucault’s texts, appear as repetitions of signs across time, major ruptures, breaks or as rhizomatic movements between now, then and the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Resistance
• Foucault
• time
• temporality
• power

Disclosure statement

There are no potential conflict of interest in regard to this paper.

Notes

1. Adam describes time control in similar terms: ‘The control of time […] includes the slowing down of processes, the re-arrangement of past, present and culture, the re-ordering of sequence, and the transformation of rhythmicity into a rationalized beat’ (Adam 2003, p. 69).

Additional information

Funding

This paper is written within a research program funded by the Swedish Research Council. Project title: Resistance and its impact on Processes of Democracy. Project Number: 2018-2021 Participants: Mikael Baaz, Mona Lilja (main applicant), Michael Schulz och Stellan Vinthagen.

Notes on contributors

Mona Lilja

Mona Lilja currently serves as a professor in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Lilja’s area of interest is the linkages between resistance and social change as well as the particularities—the character and emergence—of various forms of resistance. Some of the Lilja’s papers have appeared in Signs, Global Public Health, Nora and Journal of Political Power.