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REINHABITING CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Much harder to notice is a more pervasive threat, internal to any line of thinking,
not that of error or of misunderstanding but of what Deleuze names, following Nietzsche,
the problem of ‘‘stupidity,’’ moments in which we ourselves come to embody or to will
vacuousness, which could be within our scope to notice, or not. Take an example: ‘‘Above
all to thine own self be true.’’ This maxim could be sensibly asserted through Emerson,
Nietzsche, or Gandhi (keeping in mind that in none of these cases is the ‘‘self ’’ necessarily
equal to an ‘‘I’’), but Shakespeare puts it in the mouth of Polonius, as Laertes makes fun
of him behind his back, pointing us to the ease with which the bestowal of such an
injunction can be perverted. Or how utterly pious and vacuous it can seem to a succeeding
generation, which has no predetermining criteria with which to differentiate between
education, indoctrination, paternalism, or piety. In other words, a loss of knowledge, or
of faith, or of a corresponding form of life: who or what to be disobedient to?
Thus any continuation of Gandhi, for instance, requires us to consider him not only
as a rhizome, but also as a singularity, in his status as a saint, Mahatma. Who would be
the equivalents of saints in secular life? Whom should one admire, be attracted to, as to a
higher self? This was another pressing concern for Romanticism and its inheritors. Here
we find the sense of the nineteenth-century theme of ‘‘the Hero’’ in Carlyle, whom Gan-
dhi also admired, transfigured into the problem of ‘‘representative men’’ in Emerson, the
‘‘man of action’’ in Bergson, the ‘‘exemplar’’ or ‘‘specimen of the species’’ in Nietzsche.
Gandhi, it would seem, is an outstanding personification of these hopes of the philoso-
phers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In such a reading (an influential
one, since Romanticism in contemporary sensibilities is best remembered for its cult of
the genius, or the author) it would seem that no one but Gandhi himself could speak that
language, perform those actions. This would leave no hope for Gandhianism to re-emerge
as a future politics, since all that is then left for us ordinary mortals to do is wait, in that
most theological of gestures, for another such Messiah to appear.
This is the point at which Cavell and Deleuze reopen the lines of experimentation, in
what Cavell calls the ‘‘democratization of moral perfectionism.’’^30 Difference precedes
repetition. What would constitute a repetition of Gandhi? How many variations are possi-
ble within the theme ‘‘Gandhi,’’ without losing its sense? My experiments with truth,
Gandhi might say, were mine alone, for everyone and no one to follow. What then? Here
is a phrase to restart with: a way of life. In a recent paper, Ajay Skaria points out that
Gandhi was criticized by members of the nationalist movement for spending too much
time tending to the daily upkeep of the ashrams.^31 The empirical connection back to our
philosophical route here is Gandhi’s engagement with two texts by Henry Salt,A Plea for
Vegetarianism, which he read in his early years as a student of law in London, and Salt’s
Life of Henry David Thoreau, which he read during his first incarceration in South Africa
in 1908, an engagement that can be traced in Gandhi’s correspondence with Henry Salt
and his discussion of Thoreau’sWaldenand experiments in living.^32 For Cavell and for
Deleuze, philosophy bears a crucial relation to ways of life. How might one live? What

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