Who Resists Resilience? The Concepts of Resilience and Its Critics

Resilience has become one of the most powerful concepts of the XXI century. It travels between disciplines and contexts: psychological, social, political, economic, ecological, and political. It has shifted from its narrow meaning (recovering from an illness, withstanding misfortune, or catastrophe) to the broad one, relating to peoples, economies, communities, states, and the environment. However, as Sarah Bracke, among others, has recently noticed those shifts require conceptual work that seems largely absent. This paper examines the concept of resilience and asks: when do individuals and collectives reject resilience and resist? It will explore resilience as a concept as well as its boundaries. Additionally, it will focus on the tensions (and clashes) between the politics of resilience (aimed at coping with suffering caused by wrongs) and the negative politics (aimed at reacting to wrongs and evils). When is the price of being resilient too high for individuals and groups? Who resists being (called) resilient and why? Naturally, there are multiple ways of answering this question. The paper will present the criticism of resilience by Isaiah Berlin and Sarah Ahmed and their shared sensibilities (above obvious differences) of minority-majority relations, mistrust toward the adaptive strategies undertaken by minority members, and the importance of negative freedom. Using social protests in Poland as a case study – protests against narrowing access to abortion by the decision of the Constitutional Court in 2020 and the much smaller protests of families of children with disabilities (2020-22) – the paper highlights that the language of dissent is about resisting resilience: absorbing the humiliation inflicted by the state and its institutions. It speaks the language of negative politics: it addresses the wrong and cries for change. While the language of resilience is a language of acceptance and muted tones, the language of protests says “Fuck off!”, “It is enough!”, or “We want the whole life!” (instead of fighting to survive).