Beyond Power and Resistance

Peter Bloom cleverly draws on key thinkers using discourse and ideology from the past and present to illustrate a mutually constitutive relationship between power and resistance. He explores how social change agents might reinvent rather than challenge, and so paradoxically support, power. This book is an important read for scholars and activists interested in realizing the potential of radical politics. -- Clare Saunders, Associate Professor in Politics, University of Exeter
Bloom offers a postmodern attempt to revise the power and resistance paradigm fundamental to Western political thought. The first chapter summarizes the focus of his effort. The author follows with a history of power and resistance, basically as concepts, or accepted motifs. Chapter 3 reviews in standard fashion the development of modern Western political ideas, emphasizing the emergence of resistance as a recurring form of political action. Bloom next moves beyond modernism with his contention that Enlightenment rationalism has often devolved into myth and fantasy. Chapter 5 depicts capitalism as a hindrance to the potential for a broader concept of resistance. But the author then argues that modern forms of organization and technology enable new types of resistance that may weaken traditional structures of power. Chapter 7 features the use of Derrida and Foucault as harbingers of possibilities beyond traditional views of power and resistance. The concluding chapter urges a rethinking of the “notion of freedom” that moves this idea from simply a basis for resistance toward a positive source of opportunities. Bloom illustrates how postmodern interpretation could temper the hegemonic status of key political concepts. Summing Up: Recommended. Faculty only. * CHOICE *
Peter Bloom ambitiously sets out to deconstruct the ‘power & resistance’ paradigm still dominating critical theories as well as much of emancipatory political practice. He offers a challenging genealogy of this fundamental political fantasy highlighting its various uses and its debilitating implications. He also discusses a set of much-needed alternatives for effective social change. Operating at the disavowed threshold where discursive/affective hegemony and post-hegemony never stop morphing into each other, he charts an original course that will surely mark future debates. -- Yannis Stavrakakis, Professor, School of Political Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece