The Interval of Resistance

To what extent should we still think of resistance as defiance, as an opposing force to that which is to be resisted? Or might we have some basis for conceiving of resistance as persistent yet unpredictable, as pervasive yet unlocalizable, that is, as not simply recognized by and reactive to a morally well-defined enemy? At a time when it seems that all moral and legal standards have been thrown up in the air, what might resistance be that does more than reinscribe death and the unthinkable into a normalcy that reveals itself increasingly to be a phantasmagoria from another century? My paper proposes that Benjamin's concept of "interval" [Abstand], which he first develops in his essay "The Metaphysics of Youth" and which he adapts from the Daodejing's conception of completed time, articulates a theory of resistance that is apropos to a world defined by the lapse of the framework of mutual recognition that continues to inform Western conceptions of political action. In the interval of completion, Benjamin proposes, "past things have a futurity"; their "countermovement" confronts and begets a "time of the self" that defies received logics of purposiveness, utility, calculability, and intention. As such, I argue, the "interval" represents a refusal that reshapes time around beings, bodies, and organizational forms that are disproportionately represented yet intolerable to the social, political, and legal structures of the present