Description
This paper attempts to bridge a conceptual connection between two areas of research which in recent years have received an increasing amount of scholarly attention – pacifism and prefigurative politics. Originally coined out by the anarchists of the 20th century, research on prefigurative politics has celebrated a renewed interest since the 2011 Wall Street uprisings. Seen as an alternative mode of resistance to the dominant contentious approaches, prefiguration is often conceptualised as mode of defiance in which activists enact and embody the socialites and practices they foster for broader society. Scholarly engagements with pacifism, too, have received a growing amount of interest. Traditionally approached as a deontological ethic, research on pacifism is often positioned within debates on Just War theory and posed as moral and ethical critique of war and militarism. Drawing on the work of contemporary new materialists, namely Rosi Braidotti and Manuel DeLanda’s neo-Spinozian and Deleuzian monolithic ontology of the subject and life as immanence, the paper argues for an ontology of pacifism as a prefigurative practice. The paper concludes with a discussion of the future areas of research that a prefigurative conception of pacifism enables.
