By Kambiz Behi

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Western philosophical literature on domination and resistance—from Hegel’s portrayal of the slave’s “unhappy unconsciousness” in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, through Nietzsche’s accounts of how bad conscience becomes the essential component of subjectivity, to Gramsci’s hegemony and “false  consciousness”—cast a Manichean view of the world. Studies of domination and resistance across the social sciences suffer from this metaphoric division between res cogitas and res extensa: mind and body, persuading and coercing, colonizer and colonized. Mitchell (1990:573) has raised this critique against recent works on domination and resistance—particularly Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990)—for casting a binary worldview that, far from bringing to light analyses of resistance, “works itself into the very vocabulary with which we speak of power.” According to Mitchell, approaching the question of “domination in terms of essential distinction between physical coercion and ideological persuasion” fails to address the issues of power and only “represents a way of writing in which such two-dimensionality is merely reproduced” (1990:573).

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