Embodying Spirits of Resistance

Abstract

There are revolutionary moments of politics that can be most appropriately described as spiritual moments. These are the moments when people are willing to risk their lives while resisting oppressive power. In this paper we address spirits of resistance in a general way, but also as manifested at particular moments in three contemporary resistance movements in England, India, and Palestine. Our intention is not to explain such moments, not to analyze the motivations of those involved, but to follow them in the fashion of nomadic science, critically drawing upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari. In our conclusion we argue that the value of spirits of resistance should be upheld in the face of intellectual strategies to tame them, as it is these moments that best guarantee freedom, whether or not resistance is ‘successful’ .