Roots, Rites and Sites of Resistance : The Banality of Good

He is the editor of The Arts of Imprisonment: Control, Resistance and Empowerment (forthcoming in 2010) and the co-editor (with Sappho Xenakis) of Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Greece: International Comparative Perspectives (two volumes, forthcoming in 2010). He is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Law and Order in the Margins of Europe: A Political Economy of Othering. Which practices count as resistance? Why, where, and how does resistance emerge? When is resistance effective, and when is it truly progressive? In addressing these questions, this book brings together novel theoretical and empirical perspectives from a diverse range of disciplinary and geographical locales. Whilst the condition of a damaged ethical life has received due scholarly attention to date, only rarely is resistance to it conceived as an actual possibility with the potential of real effects on a macro-social scale. This is not just a curious lacuna in the literature. To ignore or miss concrete possibilities or even instances of resistance is to reinforce the apparent naturalness and inevitability of structures of injustice. The aim of this edited collection is to help address this epistemological neglect, exploring the multiplicity of motives, presuppositions, sites, ways, and consequences of acts of resistance. As shown in the ensuing contributions, resistance can be recalcitrant or transformative in its aims, discursive or physical in its means, and local or generalized in its loci. If there is a single argument that can be distilled, it is that the emergence of progressive resistance entails the incessant rational critique of so-styled 'common sense' and prevalent ethical claims--a process which could be called 'the banality of good' Front Matter....Pages i-x Roots, Rites and Sites of Resistance: The Banality of Good — An Introduction....Pages 1-11 Values, Crisis and Resistance: Prospects for Freedom Reconsidered....Pages 12-35 Narcissism, Humanism and the Revolutionary Character in Erich Fromm’s Work....Pages 36-58 Thinking after Terror: An Interreligious Challenge....Pages 59-79 Ecce Homo: The Political Theology of Good and Evil....Pages 80-94 Resistance as Transformation....Pages 95-107 Acting on Vulnerable Others: Ethical Agency in Media Discourse....Pages 108-124 Sites of Resistance: Death Row Homepages and the Politics of Compassion....Pages 125-150 Face to Face with Abidoral Queiroz: Death Squads and Democracy in Northeast Brazil....Pages 151-177 Resisting Submission? The Obstinacy of ‘Balkanist’ Characteristics in Greece as Dissidence Against ‘the West’....Pages 178-196 Legitimation and Resistance: Police Reform in the (Un)making....Pages 197-219 ‘Governmentality’ and Governing Corrections: Do Senior Managers Resist?....Pages 220-245 Back Matter....Pages 246-288 Whilst the condition of a damaged ethical life has received due scholarly attention to date, only rarely is resistance to it conceived as an actual possibility with the potential of real effects on a macro-social scale. This is not just a curious lacuna in the literature. To ignore or miss concrete possibilities or even instances of resistance is to reinforce the apparent naturalness and inevitability of structures of injustice. The aim of this edited collection is to help address this epistemological neglect, exploring the multiplicity of motives, presuppositions, sites, ways, and consequences of acts of resistance. As shown in the ensuing contributions, resistance can be recalcitrant or transformative in its aims, discursive or physical in its means, and local or generalized in its loci. If there is a single argument that can be distilled, it is that the emergence of progressive resistance entails the incessant rational critique of so-styled 'common sense' and prevalent ethical claims6a process which could be called 'the banality of good' "Which practices count as resistance? Why, where, and how does resistance emerge? When is resistance effective, and when is it truly progressive? In addressing these questions, this book brings together novel theoretical and empirical perspectives from a diverse range of disciplinary and geographical locales"--Provided by publisher