Beyond Power and Resistance: Politics at the Radical Limits by Peter Bloom (review)

Peter Bloom's Beyond Power and Resistance: Politics at the Radical Limits is a welcome argumentative synthesis of a range of important political theory that also encourages us to consider the possibility of "an existence beyond power and resistance" (197). Positing power-and-resistance as a binary opposition ripe for deconstruction, the book delineates the eponymous dyad and its history, from its "roots in classical and medieval thought," through the Enlightenment, and on to the present day (11). According to Bloom, "power and resistance" has served since the Enlightenment as the increasingly dominant affective grounds from which (Western) individuals and communities have understood themselves in relation to society and history. For Bloom, the historical entrenchment and naturalization of this discourse of power and resistance make up a development with significant repercussions for radical politics. His reasoning is as follows: Since the Enlightenment's ethos of critique "paradoxically entrenched a 'power and resistance' worldview," that worldview has itself become hegemonic. It structures selfhood by offering a "psychic 'safe history'" (11–12), while also confining conceptions of both the self and political practice to the question of their relation(s) to "the struggle for and against sovereignty," by which Bloom usually but not always means state sovereignty. Political radicals, by contrast, need to find instead the analytic and affective means to affect a shift away from a politics of "permanent revolution" to one of "eternal possibility" (197).

Bloom's is undoubtedly a timely theoretical project in an era in which, in the United States, at least, imperatives to "Resist" have been reduced to a t-shirt slogan while simultaneously finding themselves wielded by the well-connected denizens of the center of contemporary politics, including those who once functioned at the very heart of the national security apparatus. For all that timeliness, however, there are aspects of the argument that one might legitimately question. Take the question of sovereignty. A key premise of Beyond Power and Resistance is that much purported radicalism has focused on capturing and wielding "sovereignty" at the level of the state, not only a practice that has perpetuated the historical "cycle of power and resistance," but one that, for Bloom, appears increasingly anachronistic in an age in which, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have claimed, state sovereignty is so far from what it used to be (167). In an age of "Empire," as Hardt and Negri style it, power is dispersed and globalized by what Bloom characterizes as "a new form of market imperialism" (138). Notably absent, however, is any discussion of competing visions of today's geopolitical scene, such as that laid out by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, in which the sovereign nation-state remains a more significant player than Bloom's argument at times implies.¹ That is by no means to say that Bloom's claims about sovereignty are indefensible. It is just that on the question of sovereignty and its various forms, further and more explicit discussion of this slippery notion's history and present status would have been appreciated, especially since the term is deployed without modification across a range of contexts.

Depending on one's disciplinary background, the book's overall approach may at times prove forebodingly theoretical, particularly as it pertains to large historical claims about, for example, the relationship between colonialism and the self. Even for those attuned to the modus operandi and frequently opaque prose of the contemporary critical theorist, there are also queries worth raising about the rhetoric of "newness" that recurs throughout Beyond Power and Resistance. These come to the fore in the book's closing chapter, in which Bloom ponders how we might move beyond power and resistance toward a radical politics of possibility unbounded by contests for sovereignty and hegemony, one in which, as Bloom puts it, we might "revolutionize revolution" (167):

What is presented is an opportunity to escape the stagnant fate of permanent revolution. Traditionally the term...