Over the recent decades, the concept of resilience has spread from environmental science to a number of disciplines dealing with crisis and disaster management. From psychology, public health, and human resource management to development and security studies, resilience is replacing an earlier focus on resistance and adaptability within these fields. There exist several studies dealing with resilience discourse as a key to a diagnostic of the present. While some hail resilience as a new register of ecological resistance for social movements, (...) other decries resilience as a discourse legitimating the neoliberal state’s abandonment of the poor to catastrophe. This article proposes a framework for reading together these highly diverging interpretations of resilience through a historicising of the concept of resilience, tracing its rise genealogically in relation to the concepts of resistance and adaptability. Through readings of authors such as Thomas Hobbes, Carl von Clausewitz, Herbert Spencer, and C.J. Holling, the article shows how these concepts were imported from scientific materialism into pragmatic and normative discourses of defence of life against shifting threats to individual and social life. The article shows how the shifting importance of the concepts of resistance, adaptability and resilience must be related to changing social-ecological problems and the forms of contestation and governance that respond to them. (shrink)

This essay provides an account of humiliation as a manifestation of the relationship one has to oneself. This account elucidates two important insights: first, that all sexual violence and not only public gang rape humiliates and, second, that appeals to the neoliberal notion of resilience undermine feminist efforts to counter sexual violence. The first part of the essay provides an overview of the idea of a relation of self to self and its significance, presents humiliation specifically as a manifestation of (...) the self‐relation, and then turns to feminist analyses of sexual violence and its effects in order to illustrate how sexual violence against women humiliates. The second part of the essay illustrates that, given the nature and function of humiliation, neoliberal discourse generally and that of resilience more specifically reproduce the individuation and exclusion that characterize humiliation and are thus detrimental to feminist efforts toward countering sexual violence against women. I conclude by encouraging feminist anti‐sexual violence efforts that at least counter individuation and at best promote collective and inclusive solidarity. (shrink)

V tem članku avtor poskusi predstaviti psihoanalitično branje razvoja duha kapitalizma. Opirajoč se na branje Lacana, članek pokaže, da je to mogoče doseči, če ločujemo med dvema ravnema užitka in sreče. Če je v kapitalizmu prvi ostal nespremenjen, je druga doživela velike zgodovinske spremembe. Opirajoč se na genealogijo neolibaralizma, kot jo srečamo pri Foucaultu poznih sedemdesetih let, in analizirajoč aktualno širjenje novih diskurzov o sreči, članek izpostavi tri momente duha kapitalizma: prvič, moment, ko obljubo sreče zamenja obljuba užitka; drugič, moment, (...) ko sam podjetnik odkrije srečo kot obljubo; tretjič, moment, ko sreča ni več obljuba, temveč kapital, ki ga mora neoliberalni subjekt krepiti. (shrink)

This paper will explore both the ways in which the practices of self-care, specifically related to mental health, have emerged as responses to the increasingly precarious status of life after the economic shocks of the Global Financial Crisis, whilst also looking to the work of Silvia Federici and Kathi Weeks to propose models for immanent critique of these practices. Although it cannot be taken as a pure origin, post-GFC mental health discourse has increasingly seen mental health discussed as a form (...) of resilience to precarity. Furthermore, practices of self-care, and psychological forms of treatment such as cognitive behavioural therapy have become vehicles for the intensification of personal resilience in the face of systemic crisis. If self-care involves an inward looking and depoliticised subject, surely political emancipation lies elsewhere. The possibility of some alternative to our present state of affairs, where self-care increasingly appears as a form of ‘voluntary servitude,’ that is to say, a form of self-subjugation with serious political risks, must surely be taken as a continual project for those engaged in critical inquiry. Then again, to suggest that those engaging in self-care are simply reproducing neoliberal subjectivity would surely miss the ways in which such forms of self-preservation might appear as unavoidable for the individuals in question. Through an engagement with their work—and one that draws parallels between their strategic critiques of reproductive labour broadly speaking, and the more specific area of mental illness and neoliberal governmentality—the question of the “necessity” of self-care will be brought into alignment with the possibilities of its practicality. (shrink)

Since a number of years, popular and scientific interest in resilience is rapidly increasing. More recently, also neuroscientific research in resilience and the associated neurobiological findings is gaining more attention. Some of these neuroscientific findings might open up new measures to foster personal resilience, ranging from magnetic stimulation to pharmaceutical interventions and awareness-based techniques. Therefore, bioethics should also take a closer look at resilience and resilience research, which are today philosophically under-theorized. In this paper, we analyze different conceptualizations of resilience (...) and argue that especially one-sided understandings of resilience which dismiss social and cultural contexts of personal resilience do pose social and ethical problems. On a social level such unbalanced views on resilience could hide and thereby stabilize structural social injustices, and on an individual level it might even lead to an aggravation of stress-related mental health problems by overexerting the individual. Furthermore, some forms of fostering resilience could be a latent form of human enhancement and trigger similar criticisms. (shrink)