REINHABITING CIVIL DISOBEDIENCEout a certain terrain of ethics, sensing resonances internal to philosophy and its relations
with the world. But philosophy is hardly a single entity (and if it is, it contains a variety
of competing forces), so a sentence in anticipation of our own sectarian battles is in
order: the ethical terrain inhabited and expressed by this essay will be regarded with some
suspicion, from an institutional, we might even call it a ‘‘mature’’ perspective, say that of
Kant specifically as he reappears in Rawls, or Hegel as he reappears, very differently, in
Charles Taylor or in Slavoj Zˇizˇek (who, in a recent essay, formulates his distrust of some
of the conceptual terrain we shall soon cover as a ‘‘critique of the ongoing soft revolu-
tion’’^1 ), or by more recent ‘‘identity’’-based formations such as the postcolonials (and
their critique of ‘‘the West’’ or of ‘‘Europe’’). This argument hopes to elaborate rather
than to abate those suspicions, since their continued friction might create some potential
energy (that is to say, our battles might strengthen, rather than weaken us).
As a point of departure, we can return to the question of globalization. Of the many
significations gathered in this term, let us catch one that is presently dominant, say, from
an oppositional perspective. In recent years, now more so than ever, it is impossible to
speak about this topic without bringing up the subject of ‘‘America,’’ which is accused,
and not unjustly so, both internally and internationally, of being dominated and ruled by
stupid white men (to quote the title of Michael Moore’s popular book). If this is indeed
the case, then perhaps it won’t serve us well to constantly point out just how belligerent,
stupid, and white America has always been, since without an alternative this is a doctrine
of cynicism and despair. In other words, what would it be like to demand intelligence, to
show that there is evidence of it in this milieu, that thinking has been possible here? If we
are to preserve some link, not necessarily given or self-evidently pacifist, between thinking
and philosophy, we might pose the question as follows: In what ways has America ex-
pressed itself philosophically? This has been one of the abiding questions for the American
philosopher Stanley Cavell over the last few decades in his numerous writings on Emer-
son, Thoreau, and Hollywood cinema.^2
If thinking in America is still premature, in the ‘‘new’’ world still constrained by its
adolescence, a dominant strand of early- to mid-twentieth-century Western European
philosophical thought seems to face the opposite problem, that of completion or absur-
dity, the exhaustion or nausea of old age, evident, for instance, in different ways, in figures
such as Heidegger and Sartre. But much has happened since then, and it is with Gilles
Deleuze most powerfully that one might again find a youthful demeanor, a new lease on
life in this territory of philosophy, retaining and inheriting its formative concerns. The
crucial Heideggerian problem of ‘‘dwelling’’ and its oblivion, ‘‘the real dwelling plight lies
in this, that mortals... must ever learn to dwell,’’ fromBuilding, Dwelling, Thinking,^3 a
reinscription of the problem ofWhat Is Called Thinking?, which began with Descartes, is
turned in Deleuze from a ‘‘plight’’ into an affirmative, nomad thought. This is to say that
what were taken to be grim, irredeemable crises across numerous strands of writing—the
impasses of representation, the nonunity of the subject, the presence of the unthought in
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