BHRIGUPATI SINGHin a position to gesture toward their kinship. The problem of transcendence, or an ‘‘ascent
of the self,’’ is perhaps the first question of, or impulse to philosophy and to philosophical
cultivation (and the grounds of its overlap is also the very point of its separation from or
competition with religion), particularly in the ancient Greek conceptualization of spiritual
exercises and of philosophy as the ascent of the soul into the celestial heights, a conception
common to the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Cynics, continued by Plato in the discus-
sion of the ‘‘transmigration of souls’’ in theRepublic, and of ‘‘the soul’s flight into the
infinity of the heavens’’ in theTheaetetus.^20 While the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
dream of producing a new Lucretius all but disappears by the twentieth century, the
terrain of this problematic falteringly reappears, for instance, in the late Foucault (with
his discussion of the Stoics and the ‘‘cultivation of the self ’’) and is present throughout
Deleuze, as perhaps the central question of his entire oeuvre, that of the ‘‘outside’’ or the
‘‘virtual’’ (‘‘thought comes from the outside’’).^21
How transcendence turns to immanence in Deleuze, Cavell, and Gandhi respectively
must wait for a longer discussion elsewhere. Closer to the matter at hand, in his invoca-
tion of this philosophical genealogy of what Cavell would call an unattained but attainable
self, Gandhi is activating a conception of freedom (‘‘I must be free to build a staircase to
Sirius’’) that displaces the demand for or threat of uniformity that might accompany a
call for equality (say that of socialism), or national or cultural unity (say that of national-
ism). The question of consent and its potential transgression stands in relation both to
the state, to being ruled, and to morality, or obedience to society, more generally. ‘‘The
virtue most in demand in society is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.’’ This is
Cavell’s favorite Emerson quote, the stimulus for his essay ‘‘Aversive Thinking in Nietz-
sche and Heidegger,’’^22 a line of thinking that continues into Deleuze’sDifference and
Repetition, where the beginning of the refusal of the dogmatic image of thought is ‘‘a
question of someone—if only one—with the necessary modesty not managing to know
what everybody knows, and modestly denying what everybody is supposed to recog-
nize.’’^23 Gandhi claimed of Thoreau’s ‘‘Civil Disobedience’’ that it had offered him ‘‘scien-
tific proof ’’ for his own method of struggle, Satyagraha.
Let us try to make this formulation a little more precise. Disobedience is not ‘‘resis-
tance.’’ The question of consent is constitutively ambiguous, since it is unclear in which
instances one’s consent to a presently existing state, a state of affairs, has already been
given and in what manner it might be withdrawn, or if we are even actually aware of the
manner of our participation or perpetuation. After the age of national consciousness,
colonialism now seems an unfathomable outrage, but for more than two hundred years
it was lived habitually, taken to be a tolerable state of affairs. How is the seemingly normal,
the accepted, to be brought into crisis? If the stability of the social demands that morality
take the form of law, in what context is it necessary to insist that this law be broken, and
in what manner might this be done? Since this is not knowable in advance, disobedience
being both a threat and a possibility, philosophy of this genre and its related form of
PAGE 372372.................16224$ CH19 10-13-06 12:35:48 PS