Abstract
In the monograph Who Said Victory? Eight Exercises in Philosophical Resignation, the concept of resignation is used in two different, yet related senses. On the empirical level, it is a type of self-relation.
The resigned person realises that she must give up certain aspects of her personality if she is to fulfill her potential. Such an "ascetic" exercise is articulated by all the thinkers I discuss in this book, from Hegel to Cioran and Weil.
Resignation, in this sense, is the suspension of our reflexes at the level of physicality and thought. At the level of the body, we suspend the urge to fulfill our desires, and thus discipline ourselves, for example, at work; at the level of thought, it means that we do not give in to personal opinions or viewpoints, which are often mere first reflexes.
In the course of the eight chapters, I discuss individual resignation techniques introduced by the respective thinkers. The individual techniques are schematized into main characters; the "protagonists" represent what the individual resignation should amount to.
The main characters include Hegel's bureaucrat, Kafka's hunger artist, Nietzsche's snake shedding its skin, Kierkegaard's knight of infinite resignation, Camus' indifferent stranger, Cioran's spy of the saints, Agamben's scribe Bartleby, and Weil's mystic. Why should I introduce characters in a philosophical treatise? The aim is to indicate that milder or more extreme techniques of self-limitation are not in the foreground of this work; rather, through this schematization, the aim is to show that resignation can have a more fundamental significance.
In fact, the monograph proposes to demonstrate that the dynamic of resignation is constitutive of subjectivity and different types thereof. Starting from the notion of resignation, which I understand in its original meaning as re-signatio, I argue that the very self is re-signatory in its essential structure.
Etymologically, re-signatio means breaking the seal; however, in the process of a mistaken understanding of the word's etymology, in English, it has come to mean "to sign again" too. Consequently, in re-signing, we consider something previously agreed to, revisit our decision; additionally, the word can also refer to the process of re-writing or re-signing something.
Accordingly, re-signatio is an ambivalent movement by which one gains distance from one's life, becomes aware of who one is, realises that one is free concerning one's life, and returns in some respect to what one originally re-signed on. The situations in which one found oneself before resigning are, after all, not random; at least as to their form, they reflect what one really is.
In this sense, it is argued that to distance oneself from. what one is, is central, even constitutive of any subject. Paradoxically, it is this distance that brings us closer to ourselves or to be more precise, this distance makes it possible for us to be ourselves in the first place.
In this respect, negativity, through which we turn away from what we live, even from ourselves, and repetition, by which we return to life, are central concepts of the treatise. After all, the term re-signatio represents an essentially ambivalent movement: it consists in the affirmation of something negative - it is negativity generating positivity.
As resigned, the subject is what it is once again, but a-new. The process of re-signing is, consequently, a practical form of reflection that begets a conscious and also authentic and powerful - because resigned - self.