BHRIGUPATI SINGHshould one eat? How is the soul to be nourished? Who should one look up to? Is anyone
still interested in such questions? A sampling of pop bestsellers in a train-station book-
store would confirm that such discussions continue (Chicken Soup for the Soul;The Atkins
Diet;The Art of Living;My Life, by Bill Clinton; and other ‘‘exemplary men’’ autobiogra-
phies). Are these books of philosophy or of religion? Or are they simply indefinably de-
based pop (dare we even call it ‘‘culture’’?) mishmash, answering to no genuine need
other than that of capitalist profit?
Whether or not this question can be definitively answered in terms of need, one can
at least ask: Is there intelligence in evidence here? If so, what manner of nutrition is it, if
these books are, in fact, food for thought? We might say that these books are the textual
equivalents of the junk food (that uniquely American invention), lying on the adjacent
shelf of the same train-station shop, alongside a shelf of pharmaceuticals, that other great
contemporary opiate. What, then, would be healthier, or more nourishing for the soul,
thanChicken Soup? The rarefied diet of philosophers? But that is hardly digestible, or even
producible or replicable on a mass scale. What then? Genuine religion? But would that,
then, be food forthought(or opium for the masses, as we once called it)? What is food
for thought? What is called thinking?
Most thought-provoking in this thought-provoking age of ours is the fact that we are
still not thinking. After ‘‘reversing Platonism’’ we are left, not with the problem of false
competitors for the form of the good, requiring, say, the expulsion of the poets or the
Sophists—that is, of a particular type of speech—but rather with the threat of lifeless
expression, words in exile, habits deadened by conformity, stupidity.^33 So what do we
need, a reawakening? A new moral law? Enlightenment? At this point Deleuze looks to
lunatics, drug addicts, primitive nomadic hordes; Cavell, to a vaguely defined figure of
the child. Hardly material for a Sunday-school sermon. At the end of the day, Nietzsche
tells us, Kant was a cunning Christian, a moralist. Enlightenment is humanity’s passage
to its adult status: ‘‘Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity,’’
this is the first line of Kant’s ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’^34 Unmundigkeit, the word used
by Kant to describe the state of bondage from which the human seeks freedom, or tran-
scendence, translates both as ‘‘tutelage’’ and as ‘‘minority.’’ It is in relation to the force
of this word that we must place Deleuze and Guattari’s central concept of ‘‘minority-
becoming,’’^35 or Cavell’s stress on the problem of re-education, rebirth, or coming into
language, the figure of the child that haunts his reading of Wittgenstein’sPhilosophical
Investigations, or Emersonian passivity: ‘‘All I know is Reception.’’ The Gandhian paradox:
freedom through submission. Civil disobedience, then, is also about learning or creating
a different obedience, in uncertain variation between a potential transgression and a nec-
essary limitation. Rather than arguing for or against the Enlightenment, this is more a
problem of embodiment, of actualizing an attitude, of staking one’s territory in a line of
flight (the claim of reason), for an ethos, and the variations it might attain, or need to
attain, over time, over barely noticeable tectonic or technological shifts and upheavals.
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