ABSTRACT
I want to begin with Derrida’s nostalgic reflection on the notion of ‘resistance’. The chapter as a whole focuses more on the conceptualization of resistance in the work of Freud, Foucault, Butler and also Lacan, but Derrida’s delicate and reflexive account in Resistances of Psychoanalysis (1998) has helped me to develop an understanding of these other theorists. He begins with an account of his own attachment to an idea of resistance, saying that for him ‘the word “resistance” does not play just any role’. He talks about his love for the word and associates this affection with the specific meanings the word connotes in French, which, he suggests, cannot be translated:
This word, which resonated in my desire and my imagination as the most beautiful word in the politics and history of this country, this word loaded with all the pathos of my nostalgia, as if, at any cost, I would like not to have missed blowing up trains, tanks and headquarters between 1940 and 1945 – why and how did it come to attract, like a magnet, so many other meanings, virtues, semantic or disseminal chances? I am going to tell you which ones even if I cannot discern the secret of my inconsolable nostalgia – which thus remains to be analyzed or which resists analysis, a little like the navel of a dream.
