There could not be a more timely moment for this book, when resistance across the world—the Arab uprisings, the Greek revolt against austerity—seem to be succumbing to the brutality of the army and the law; when the heady protests, which many saw as offering the hope of revolution, seem ineffective against the dead hand of the state and the global rule of capital. Acutely attuned to this context, which was unfolding as he wrote, the philosopher Howard Caygill offers a meditation on the history of resistance as idea and lived experience, a term which, as he states at the outset, is "strangely unanalyzed."
