The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

itself on the side of life, and turns life against power.” 54 Confirming
the direct link between power and life, he continues: “Life becomes
resistance to power when power takes life as its object.” 55 And then,
for maximum clarity, Deleuze states this point a third time: “When
power becomes bio - power, resistance becomes power of life, a vital -
power that cannot be confined within species, places, or the paths of
this or that diagram....Is not life this capacity to resist force? ...there
is no telling what man might achieve ‘as a living being,’ as the set of
‘forces that resist.’” 56
In this sense, life is the capacity to resist force.
Nodes 79
It is the capacity to “not become enamored of power,” as Foucault
put it years earlier in his preface to the English edition of Deleuze
and Guattari’s Anti - Oedipus. Life is a sort of counterpower, a return
flow of forces aimed backward toward the source of exploitation,
selectively resisting forms of homogenization, canalization, and subjectification.
(But then this is really not a resistance at all but instead
an intensification, a lubrication of life.)
On the other hand, life is also that which is resisted (resistance - to - life),
that against which resistance is propelled.
Today “life itself ” is boxed in by competing biological and computational
definitions. In the biological definition, the icon of DNA is
mobilized to explain everything from Alzheimer’s to attention deficit
disorder. In the computational definition, information surveillance
and the extensive databasing of the social promote a notion of social
activity that can be tracked through records of transactions, registrations,
and communications. 57 Resistance - to - life is thus a challenge
posed to any situation in which a normative definition of “life itself ”
dovetails with an instrumental use of that definition. Aiming toward
a transformative, bioethical goal, the resistance - to - life perspective
poses the question: Whom does this definition of life benefit and how?
It asks: Is it enough to define life in this way? What other types of life
are shut down by this definition of life? Here is the critic D. N. Rodo -
wick writing on the theme of resistance - to - life in Deleuze: