“Resilience is a technology of consent. It is about consenting to the inevitability of disasters, particularly technological disasters, in order to learn to ‘live with’ them, without ever tackling their causes. It is about consenting to training, learning and experimenting with living conditions degraded by disaster. To agree to participate in order to absolve decision-makers of their responsibilities and make victims feel guilty.” Thierry Ribault
A whole host of ‘experts’, collaborators of the system to designate them more clearly, are working to establish a vocabulary, a language that can make the ignominy of the present era acceptable. Often linked to other fashionable concepts (sustainability, governance, etc.) with a similar plasticity and in the face of the evidence of a general catastrophe in progress, the injunction of “resilience” is now that of adapting to it. By mobilizing a desirable expectation horizon for all, resilience makes it possible to impose choices, the “good” city, the “good” citizens, the “good” poor, etc., to the extreme of reducing the global social issue to an individual issue where each of us should look within ourselves for the resources that will enable us to “adapt”. From this perspective, anyone who fails to adapt has only themselves to blame. Someone irradiated in Fukushima or poisoned by pesticides, or even someone blinded by the police, should certainly not ask themselves about the type of social organization at the root of their misfortune. No, it is enough for them to be “resilient”.
Resilience is therefore part of a moral and teleological reading of disasters, with a linear approach to time, tending towards the progress and adaptation of societies. This linear approach explains the insistence of international programs on an injunction to adapt. And this moral dimension is accompanied by a transformation of the people to whom they are addressed, they are no longer victims but actors. Resilience is therefore above all a discourse of political economy instrumentalized to impose choices that should be publicly discussed, while its use tends to divert attention from political and social processes to econometric tools and technical solutions. As opposed to a promising horizon, the use of the notion of resilience therefore presents a major risk: that of tirelessly pursuing the constrained and suicidal logic of capitalism, that of “grow or die”.
The introduction of this permanent confusion over the meaning of words is one of the most marked characteristics of contemporary forms of domination. And the small part of truth that is always present is there only to better convey the very large part of lies.
“In the truly upside-down world, the true is a moment of the false.”
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.
Rebounds:
- “La tragédie de l’adaptation” (The tragedy of adaptation) published in lundimatin#467, March 21, 2025
- “LIBÉRALISM” – Social Ecology ABC