Agency need not be framed only as subversion versus subordination

Evidence

Let me make clear once again that in spite of ‘the overwhelming tendency … to conceptualize agency in terms of subversion or resignification of social norms, to locate agency within those operations that resist the dominating and subjectivating modes of power’, I am not particularly invested in portraying myself as a agent of protest, a subversive person, nor as a freedom fighter or as a lone ranger engaged in the transvaluation of all values. Surely, my general goal is a liberatory one, but the agency that I wish to affirm and that I see myself deploying is not necessarily ‘conceptualized on the binary model of subordination and subversion’. I would certainly not want a priori to dismiss, nor even elide, those ‘dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance’. I gladly concede that with regard to the most striking portraits that have been drawn of pertinent figures of modern subjectivity, and particularly with regard to situations where hatred is involved, the general inclination has been to focus on oppressor (‘portrait of the coloniser’, ‘portrait of the antisemite’) and victim (‘portrait of the colonised’, ‘portrait of the Jew’). Indeed, I would not presume to know whether we have transcended the master–slave dialectic, nor am I entirely confident that we should. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1193

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies a scholarly binary: agency conceived as either subordination or subversion, and the refusal to map all ethical action onto that logic.
• QUESTION: Which specific ‘dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance’ does the author have in mind here? His own examples would clarify.