REINHABITING CIVIL DISOBEDIENCEprimarily Spinoza, Bergson, and Nietzsche for Deleuze, and Austin, Wittgenstein, and in
recent years, most importantly Emerson for Cavell (hisCities of Wordsattempts to render
a history of the philosophical impulse to moral thought from Plato to Rawls in relation
to what he names Emersonian moral perfectionism).^12 Moving between these series, we
will assert that, as attempted inheritors of Nietzsche and of Emerson respectively, Deleuze
and Cavell move tantalizingly close along this particular trajectory of their work.^13 This
mutual hospitality or resonance surely has something to do with a previous alliance, on
which Cavell has written a number of times, namely, Nietzsche’s admiration for the writ-
ings of Emerson, an engagement sustained over two decades of the most productive phase
of his career. Here is Nietzsche in 1881: ‘‘Emerson. I have never felt so much at home in
a book, so much in my own house as,—I ought not to praise it, it is too close to me.’’^14
Cavell works through texts, particularly Nietzsche’s ‘‘Schopenhauer as Educator,’’ as well
as portions ofEcce Homo,The Gay Science, andHuman, All Too Human, in which Nietz-
sche can be seen to be transfiguring and absorbing Emersonian sentences into his own.^15
Aside from conceptual overlap, this sympathy rests on the resonating tonality of a pas-
sionate antimoralism and on a profound similarity of attitude, that of a turning away in
dismay from one’s given culture, particularly its institutionalized forms, a distrust of the
present or the actual state within which one finds oneself, which is not a withdrawal but
rather a turning toward the eventual, in the task of attempting to sense the new, to create
a philosophy of the future. Cavell reads Emerson’s recurrent references to ‘‘my constitu-
tion’’ not only as it has most often been interpreted, as a celebration of his own individu-
ality or nonconformity, but also as a reference to the constitution of the United States,
which he is attempting to amend in finding or founding philosophy for America.
To be done with morality is not to be done with ethics. If these vibrations outward
from Nietzsche and Emerson are noteworthy, inasmuch as we are trying to align what
might at first seem contradictory banners, Emersonian transcendentalism and Deleuzian
immanence, then let us add a third series to disperse things even further and see if the
resonance can still be maintained. Consider my surprise, sometime back, in a U.S. book-
store, to open distractedly the pages ofHind Swaraj(translated asHome Rule for Indiaor
Freedom for India), the text in which Gandhi first set out his political-philosophical ideas,
and to find that the preface sums up its entire intellectual debt in only four proper names,
thanking: ‘‘Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson and others, besides the masters of Indian
philosophy.’’^16 A sentence or two of background to situate Gandhi’s text, in what is also
a footnote on the theme of globalization, and how unclear the conceptual significance of
this term is apt to become when we stop to consider varied trajectories or histories of
travel, migration, and displacement, likewise critiques of Western civilization, trade pol-
icy, and the violence thereof.Hind Swaraj,orHome Rule for India, was published not in
India but in South Africa, where Gandhi spent the first twenty years of his adult life, part
of a wave of trader migration from Western India in the 1880s that followed a previous
wave of indentured labor two decades earlier. The text is written in dialogue form between
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