BHRIGUPATI SINGHof the welfare state. Cavell, Deleuze, and Gandhi, each from very different intellectual
quarters, are accused of being uninterested in the modern state and its regulatory institu-
tions. Taking this charge to have an element of truth, let us ask: What, then, is the primary
focus of their concerns? Rather than necessarily negating or opposing the state and its
institutions (although in some cases this might be crucial to do), the force of their praxis
and the crux of their concerns lie in the domain of sensibilities, or the directions in which
the body and desire are trained, to enable one to live in a particular way. This also tells
us that theirs is not a libertarian philosophy, since the suspicion of the state extends only
insofar as the law can neither fix morality nor enforce ethics. The modern state cannot
replace an ancient God. Sensibilities take the form of the ‘‘micro’’ or ‘‘molecular ele-
ments’’ of politics for Deleuze (related to but distinct from the molar accretions of the
state and its institutions);^24 in Cavell’s and Gandhi’s lexicons, the conceptual plane of this
word is absorbed into its adjacent term, the soul. We might take this to be Deleuze-Cavell-
Gandhi’s collective inheritance from Romanticism, which refuses to leave the soul either
to be denatured and ignored by the certainties of predictive science or to be obediently
shepherded by the earthly legislators of an omnipotent God.^25 It is commonly said of
Romanticism that it naturalized or secularized theological concerns. The drawback of
such a formulation is that it trivializes the scope and the achievements of the Romantic
quest, renders it banal, without an element of wonderment, as if it were self-evident why
one should need a secular ‘‘theology’’ in the first place, how such a need might persist in
the wake of the Copernican revolution, or what struggles its actual expression might
entail. Turning toward, or returning to, this region of thought, we encounter the distinct
but related problems of souls and of saints. Here we also gradually reenter the question
of the evaluation or training of desire.Soulsandsaints: perhaps no one in my generation
remembers how to use these words. These terms need not be taken only in their Christian
sense, since Romanticism also has strong pagan leanings, usually involving some variant
of nature worship or passionate contemplation. The Romantic aspiration for the soul lay
not in its final salvation but rather in its earthly up-building or cultivation, which is why
the Romantic genre of the confession, in Rousseau, for instance, is empirical: an analysis
of ‘‘successive states of the soul,’’ accountable first and foremost to itself and its desire for
self-knowledge, movement and stasis, reception and transformation.^26
Does this sound very personal, very subjective? That would be precisely the wrong
interpretation. The soul, for Romanticism, lies not in the individual but in specific forms
of life: the interrelations of nature, culture, and individuation or actualization. That is to
say, the soul is primarily impersonal. It is hard to rescue terms such asnatureandculture,
bodyandsoul, from common sense or, rather, to lead them back to a conceptual force
field where they might have some sense and value. Turn again to the following common-
sense proposition: the soul is private, or interior, belonging to the individual, while the
body is the exterior, or public, or common, human form. Working into this problem from
different routes, Cavell and Deleuze both invert this relation: the soul is preindividual, or
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