104 Philosophical Frames
esistance need not be considered as a mere substitute to action in R
the proper (foundational) sense of the term, either. Curiously enough, the
relationship that Arendt establishes between acting and resisting follows
a logic that is somewhat similar to Turner’s. Arendt begins her essay, “The
Gap between Past and Future,” with one of René Char’s aphorisms: “Our
inheritance was left to us by no testament.” As a member of the French
Resistance, Char and others find that they are stripped of all the masks
that society assigns to them; they go naked, as it were, caught between
the past and the future. The “apparition of freedom” visits them in their
togetherness as résistants in the space of relationality that they create in
becoming “challengers” and in taking the initiative upon themselves to
fight “things worse than tyranny.”^35 No other testament than their own
imagination and togetherness guides their future action. Instead of being
substitutes for action, resistance under domination—and redress in crisis
situations—may actually be how we enact “initiatory, agonistic action and
spontaneous, independent judgment”^36 in today’s world.
e “revolutionary tradition,” as Arendt somewhat awkwardly calls Th
it, may involve both resistance and a new beginning. But it is actually the
world-making capacity of any collective endeavor that confers permanence
upon spaces of freedom that may emerge in the course of action. As Villa
rightly remarks, Arendt is
acutely aware of the modern de-worlding of the public world
to subscribe to the belief that a politics of everyday life con-
fined to ‘local’ struggle and resistance can effectively prevent
the further withdrawal of the political ... A slightly different
way of putting this is to say that not all forms of resistance
(or activism) are political and that resistance itself is, at best,
a kind of displaced or second-best form of political action.^37The preceding elucidation of the creativity of conflict needs to be thor-
oughly qualified, for it is as provocative as it is risky. Liminal situations
may in fact stem from the hubris-generating capacities of political action
that fail to bring a common world or public sphere into being. Fanatical
frenzy or mob reactions do not create liminality in that they accentu-
ate normative or ideological-structural distinctions rather than disturb-
ing them; but the rise of the Nazi movement undeniably carries liminal