On the sense of direct action as social monads: Resisting a hopeless world as hopefuls

Clint Verdonschot’s contribution focuses on resistance through direct action and is titled "On the sense of direct action as social monads. Resisting a hopeless world as hopefuls". Verdonschot examines three paradoxes of direct action that lead agents into practical irrationality: direct action is imprudent, incontinent, and performatively self-contradicting. But in suggesting that there is some truth to bourgeois outrage over the praxis of direct action, Verdonschot does not aim to reject direct action. Rather, by adapting the concept of the social monad from Adorno’s aesthetic theory, Verdonschot aims to offer a non-practical, aesthetic account of the sense of direct action that he exemplifies by the current cases of transnational climate change activism. Such an aesthetic account, Verdonschot suggests, is better able of capturing the role of hope in contemporary radical resistance against a hopeless world.