Passive Resistance: A Daoist Approach

Mario Wenning (Loyola University Andalusia)

The talk focuses on the classical Chinese tradition of philosophical Daoism to rethink the nature of passive resistance and its modern applications. While passive or weak forms of resistance are often associated with civil disobedience—as in the case of Gandhi’s anti-colonial struggle and King’s civil rights movement—the paper reconstructs the relevance of Daoist motifs for transcultural resistance movements. By turning to the dissent against National Socialism by the student movement of the White Rose and the Marxist poet Bertolt Brecht, the chapter distinguishes between heroic and nonheroic forms of resistance. The Daoist concept of “wuwei 無為” presents a heuristic tool that helps to identify and interpret otherwise marginalized forms of subversive practice that embrace silent, passive, and rogue forms of dissent over direct modes of political contestation.