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Abstract
Does the critical discourse about resilience reiterate the problematic dichotomy between suffering and agency that the concept of resilience inscribes? In this discussion piece, I engage with Brad Evans' and Julian Reid's reflections on resilience in a recent issue of this journal. Although I share with Evans and Reid a normative critique of the concept of resilience, I am cautious about their ontological critique of vulnerability and am critical of their identification of finitude with learning how to die – a position which overlooks the significance of natality. Rather than arguing that vulnerability precludes political transformation as Evans and Reid do or that vulnerability enables political coalition as in Judith Butler's account of precarity, one should ask: how is vulnerability framed? I argue for framing vulnerability through a critical theory of the victim which explores the interconnections between injurability and agency, rather than treating them as oppositional terms.
Notes
This paper was originally presented at the COST workshop ‘Resilience, Security and Law after Liberalism’, King's College, London, 4–5 July 2013 and revised here on the request of the journal editor as a comment on Brad Evans and Julian Reid's article, “Dangerously Exposed: The Life and Death of the Resilient Subject,” Resilience: International Policies, Practices, Discourses 1, no. 2 (2013): 83–98.
1 Robin May Schott, “‘Not Just Victims … But’: Towards a Critical Theory of the Victim,” in Women and Violence: The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators, eds. Heather Widdows and Herjeet Marway (Hampshire: Palgrave, forthcoming 2014).
2 See Schott, “Introduction: Birth, Death, and Femininity,” in Birth, Death, and Femininity; Philosophies of Embodiment, ed. Schott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.
3 Limitations of space preclude a discussion of these complex and competing debates here. But it is important to note that this identification only began to emerge decades after the end of WWII and that identifying with the victim often involves abstracting from concrete events, which jeopardises the victim perspectives it purportedly embraces.
4 J. C. Alexander, Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 35. This universalisation of victim status should be contrasted with the arguments put forth by Jean Améry, who maintains a victim perspective in order to retain the ‘moral truth’: that the only way to make history moral is through the ‘desire that time be turned back’ so that Hitler would be disowned and the ignominy of this history would be eradicated; Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits (London: Granta Books, 1999), 70, 78.
5 David Chandler, “Resilience and Human Security: The Post-Intervention Paradigm,” Security Dialogue 43, no. 3 (2012): 213–29; 213, 222–3.
6 Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation,” Security Dialogue 42, no. 2 (2011): 143–60; 146.
7 Ibid., 150.
8 Ibid., 154.
9 Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, no. 1 (2001): 41–66; 44.
10 Chandler, “Resilience and Human Security,” 217.
11 Pat O'Malley, “Resilient Subjects: Uncertainty, Warfare and Liberalism,” Economy and Society 39, no. 4 (2010): 488–509; 501.
12 Ibid., 488, 492.
13 I adapt this phrase from my colleague Dorte Marie Søndergaard's notion of ‘thinking technology’. See Robin May Schott and Dorte Marie Søndergaard, eds. School Bullying: New Theories in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2014).
14 However, as Peter Ramsay pointed out during the discussion of my paper, vulnerability for Hobbes belongs to the state of nature. Hence, for Hobbes it is not a policy of sovereignty as it is in the contemporary discourse of resilience.
15 Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, working within phenomenology and psychoanalysis, describes herself as committed to radical philosophy. She raises this objection to the insistence on using the language of ’survivors’ rather than ‘victims’: What of the victims who do not survive? Nissim-Sabat, Neither Victim Nor Survivor; Thinking Toward a New Humanity (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009), 164. Giorgio Agamben also reflects on those who have not survived in his discussion of the lacunae of witnessing. He cites Primo Levi: ‘we, the surivivors, are not the true witnesses … those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the Muslims, the submerged, the complete witnesses ….’ Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1999), 33.
16 This question is raised by Art Spiegelman's, Maus (London: Penguin, 1987).
17 Chandler, “Resilience and Human Security,” 217.
18 O'Malley, “Resilient Subjects: Uncertainty, Warfare and Liberalism,” 500.
19 Evans and Reid, “Dangerously Exposed,” 83. I have fleshed out the criticism of the content of the norm of resistance in the preceding section.
20 Michael Dillon, “Sovereignty and Governmentality: From the Problematics of the ‘New World Order’ to the Ethical Problematic of the World Order,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 20, (1995): 323–68; 349.
21 Michael Dillon and Julian Reid cite Joseph Stiglitz, ‘transformation to what kind of society and for what ends?’ And they add that the values, practices and investments that propel modernisation also prevent the pursuance of this key question both locally and globally. Dillon and Reid, “Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 25, (2000): 117–43; 119.
22 Evans and Reid, “Dangerously Exposed,” 84.
23 Evans and Reid, “Dangerously Exposed,” 98.
24 Ibid., 83.
25 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 2–3.
26 Ibid., 23.
27 Ibid., 14.
28 Ibid., 25.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 28.
31 Ann V. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 56.
32 Evans and Reid, “Dangerously Exposed,” 96.
33 Ibid., 98.
34 Butler, Frames of War, 14.
35 Ibid., 15.
36 Schott, “Introduction: Birth, Death, and Femininity,” 13.
37 This notion of empowerment can be misleading, and we would do well to recall Iris Marion Young's comment: ‘Empowerment is like democracy: everyone is for it, but rarely do people mean the same thing by it.’ Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 89. In the context of this security paradigm, empowerment implies that power can be diffused to individuals or groups, without a consideration of the way in which power operates through institutions, norms and the very techniques of the self in which the discourse of empowerment is inscribed. And this use of empowerment overlooks the dis-empowerment that takes place when subjects who have suffered harm can no longer articulate perspectives that contribute to the recognition of injustice and the striving for greater justice in the future.
38 See discussion in Schott, “Not Just Victims … But.”
39 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1986), 277–300; 300.
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Robin May Schott
Robin May Schott is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in the section for Peace, Risk, and Violence. She is a feminist philosopher working with issues of violence, conflict, war, and gender. She is editor and co-author of Birth, Death, and Femininity; Philosophies of Embodiment (2010) and editor of Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil (2007). She is also co-editor with Dorte Marie Søndergaard of School Bullying; New Theories in Context (forthcoming 2014).