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Resilience is the trailblazing saviour of contemporary social and political life. Politicians, scientists, self-help experts, public school administrators, military officials, and psychologists increasingly tout resilience-building as the only rational solution to a twenty-first-century world of unprecedented uncertainty. The underlying (pessimistic) promise of resilience is that people, and by extension global systems, can not only survive but flourish through crisis. In order to underscore the material, ideological and political danger that this logic poses, I examine NASA/SpaceX's plans for interplanetary colonisation – a project explicitly intended to promote a resilient human species – as promising pessimism's devastating finale. Despite this dire trajectory, I conclude by considering the cost for left feminist thinkers and activists of reducing the concept of resilience to a neoliberal technology of power. To this end, I contend that Octavia Butler's prophetic diptych Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) counters the colonising project of promising pessimism and recovers a liberatory account of resilience: one which refuses to exchange utopian surety for acquiescence to power, but which recuperates the present as a practice ground for transformation. Ultimately, this article insists that to engage in political struggle over how to govern ourselves and our world, in a shared context of escalating crises, requires sustained critical investment in the ethical and political implications of valorising certain kinds of resilient life.

"In the wake of ten years of police murders of Black people, including Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor; massacres of women by incels like Elliot Rodger; anti-LGBTQ mass murders like Colorado Springs; and numerous white-supremacist activities during Trump's presidency, including Unite the Right, a number of progressive movements and actions, from the Women's March on Washington to #MeToo and most significantly Black Lives Matter, encouraged some to see in Biden's 2020 election signs of a triumphant success. But for many on the Left what is unfolding, exemplified by the ruling elite's cooptation of protest, is the evisceration of the radical potential of resistance, a continuation of the status quo since the aftermath of the 1960s. Resistance has been personalized and emptied of its revolutionary critique of socioeconomic domination, a consequence of neoliberalism; it has been defined as political protest and dissent rather than as the work of a life to overthrow existing institutions; and finally it has been criminalized, subsumed under the rubric of national security. Resistance has been replaced by resilience, the ability to adapt to and benefit from adversity. Given its long history of disappointments, can there be a form of resistance that works? What would it look like? Alix Olson and Alex Zamalin argue that, if resistance is to be successful in the struggle against neoliberal racial capitalism, it must take the form of what they call "unruly world-building," which already exists in movements such as BLM, Extinction Rebellion, and Standing Rock. Often leaderless or led by young people from marginalized groups, they articulate a refusal to be defined by a "politics of maturity"; they reject realism, pragmatism, compromise. They aim not to reform but to overturn the capitalist state. These movements break norms; their members think beyond personal freedom toward living collectively and in solidarity with one another and with the planet. Learning from and nourishing them are our only means of talking seriously about the future"--