The Right to Resist

Mario Wenning is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Macau, China.Thomas Byrne is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Husserl Archives at KU Leuven, Belgium.

While the idea of total revolution seems anachronistic today, there is increasing consensus about the importance of new forms of political, ethical, and aesthetic resistance. In the past, resistance was often motivated as a form of protest against specific institutions. Increasingly, dissent has become integrated into the fabric of modern life. This volume addresses new forms of resistance at a level that combines a rootedness in the philosophical tradition and a sensitivity to rethinking the possibility of emancipation in today's age. The work focuses on contemporary social and political philosophy from a perspective informed by critical theory.The text specifically addresses three challenges. (1) Critical theorists need to investigate in which ways resistance, conformism, and oppression oppose and constitute each other. (2) The relationship between the theory and the practice of resistance needs to be posed anew, given recent protest movements and media of protest. (3) It needs to be shown in which ways different areas of society such as the arts, religion and social media establish divergent practices of resistance.The chapters are written by scholars from Asia, Europe and North America. These experts in resistance discourse focus on practices of dissent ranging from traditional forms of civil disobedience, to more recent practices such as guerrilla protest, art, and resistance in digital networks, including social media. What unites them is a shared concern for the dimensions of political acts of resistance in an age that is characterized by a tendency to integrate and thereby neutralize those very acts.

AcknowledgementsIntroduction, Thomas Byrne (KU Leuven, Belgium) and Mario Wenning (University of Macau, China)Part 1. Justifications for resistance1. Kantian Conditions for the Possibility of Justified Resistance to Authority (Stephen R. Palmquist, Hong kong Baptist Church, China)2. Justifying Resistance (Christian Schmidt, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)3. Beyond Morality: On the Relation of Indifference and Resistance (Philip Hogh, Florida Atlantic University, USA)Part 2. Resistance, Revolution and Social Change4. On the Temporal Structure of Resistant Practices: A Hermeneutical Proposal (Stefan Deines, Frankfurt University, Germany)5. Resistance and Social Transformation in Walter Benjamin's "On the Critique of Violence" (Alexei Procyshyn, Sun Yat-sen University Zhuha, China)6. Passive Resistance: A Daoist Approach (Mario Wenning, University of Macau, China)7. Resistance through Transformation: Spiritual Practices as a Pedagogy of Unlearning and Becoming (Jinting Wu, State University of New York, USA)Part 3. Resistance in the Media, the Arts and Religion8. Network Resistance in China (Shih-Diing Liu and Lin Song, University of Macau, China)9. "Probability and Reality Do Not Always Coincide": Uncanny Modernity in Kleist'sMichael Kohlhaas (Louis Lo, National Tapei University, Taiwan)10. Resistance in the Mysticism of Kabir and Jaspers (Amita Valmiki, University of Mumbai, India)11. On Dissent Against Lockdowns: Phenomenology and Public Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic (Thomas Byrne and Tarun Kattumana, KU Leuven, Belgium)Notes on ContributorsIndex