A Tool for Decomposing the „World as We Know it“? Resilience beyond Critique and Affirmation

In writing my book about the car (that will be titled "Autodestruktion - das moderne Selbst in der ökologischen Katastrophe" and will be released next September in'shallah), I have written some preparatory papers in English to work out the theoretical implications of my philosophy of the car as one of the main prostheses to attach our selves to modern lifestyles. They are also the best sources in English as of now to get to know more about my main project these last years (maybe next to this video of a talk of mine).

The first one has already been released a couple of months ago:

• Politicizing New Materialism against the Toxic Entanglements of the Now - Towards a New Materialist Philosophy of the Car 

 A third one will be released beginning of next year with the title

• The Car as a Machine producing Nature 
  

Now the middle one has been released with the title:

 

A Tool for Decomposing the „World as We Know it“?

Resilience beyond Critique and Affirmation

 

It is a condensation of my year-long critical occupation with the term "resilience" that I have started with my book "Backlash - Essays zur Resilienz der Moderne" and will still play an important role in "Autodestruktion". 

 

The abstract of the now released paper is:

The critique of „Resilience“ as a predominately neoliberal concept that individualizes responsibility and depoliticizes the causes of crises of late-modern statehood is certainly en vogue in the more critical branches of the Humanities. However, in spite of a significant proliferation of these critiques the concept continues to spread almost unhalted. To understand this, I want to investigate the shortcomings – and even complacency – of modern critique with what it criticizes. By reading Isabelle Stengers, Tom Boland and Denise Ferreira da Silva, I want to propose a different approach towards resilience that is not only critical, but also affirms it as a critical tool to dismantle our toxic entanglements with the neoliberal state of the “world as we know it”, as Ferreira da Silva puts it. By learning from some fringe discourses within economic theory, I want to propose a methodology of examining the resilience of political problems with the aim of slowly decomposing them. By proposing an angle of a critical examination of the “resilience of Modernity” in order to overcome this world, I want to illustrate how resilience can be translated affirmatively as a critical tool to the Humanities.

 

Read it here.