Is it possible to imagine a resistance that would be distinct from the idea of being ‘against’? In Michel de Broin’s work, the metaphor of resistance is approached from a perspective of how it is possible to reveal political and social questions without, however, evoking them in their most manifest sense. Refining his concept of resistance, he puts it into problems with another notion not necessarily compatible. The porosity of his setting neutralises the ‘being against’, which normally governs resistance. It would thus be a question of thinking the resistance beyond the partisan quarrels or political activism, and at the same time, of loosening the grip of the peculiar economy of impulse mechanisms, for which psychoanalysis has provided valuable analytical tools. The resistance enters in the other to force them to think together. In this fertile conflict, de Broin approximates what Françoise Proust has described as the “potentiating metaphor”. For de Broin, the resistance is not seen as a strategy of opposition to an enemy, rather, resistance is seen as that which is revealing and activating the sense in the “movement of metaphor in metaphor itself”.

(Bernard Lamarche, summary from: Michel de Broin: A Logic of Being Against? Parachute, #115, 2004)