REINHABITING CIVIL DISOBEDIENCEThis is the problem with maturity: it ossifies so easily, so democratically, as common
sense; it finds roots rather than rhizomes.
But let us not be too quick in posing the realm of experimentation as a convenient
or easily attainable alternative. Here again stupidity resurfaces, not only as that committed
by others, but one’s own, internal to thought. Take another example. Distinct from Polon-
ius is the stupidity of Pangloss in Voltaire’sCandide, relentlessly satirized for his deluded
optimism in the ultimately harmonious nature of the universe. Emerson, Thoreau, in-
deed, all the theorists of this line have often been accused of not understanding the true
nature of evil, for their seemingly inexplicable faith or optimism, a charge leveled by
Indian political theorists such as Bhikhu Parekh and others against Gandhi.^36 Then there
is also the question of what an ‘‘antimodern’’ attack on modernity might look like, in
terms of a way of life, or technologies, a charge leveled as much against Rousseau or
Romanticism as against Gandhi. At the end ofCandide, the novel’s chief characters decide
that European, or indeed all earthly institutions relating to politics, religion, and war are
so irredeemably disastrous that they will spend the rest of their days in the Orient, work-
ing their garden on a little farm near Constantinople. That this bears some resemblance
to Gandhi’s experiments with collectives or with Thoreau’sWaldenshould alert us to the
specific danger of an incomprehensible asceticism or rarefied withdrawal that this line of
thinking manifests. It is in relation to these threats, nativist nationalism, pious moralism,
naı ̈vete ́, or ascetic snobbery, in light of which most inheritors of Gandhi (of Thoreau?)
have appeared already lost, that Nietzsche, Cavell, and Deleuze, with their sympathetic
but relatively distinct lines of positivity, appear as forces of resuscitation.
Resuscitation toward the eventual. Let us return to the company of those today who
desire that, from within this world, another might emerge. Having invoked the World
Social Forum in this discussion, which has also been about globalization, we cannot leave
it once mentioned as only a utopian possibility. In WSF-Mumbai in India, in January
2004, over one hundred thousand people from various activist groups, NGOs, national
self-determination movements, and political organizations, from one hundred and fifty
countries, gathered to discuss strategies in their respective domains against a common
enemy, neo-imperialism. The excitement and carnival atmosphere of such an event (the
first international institutional arrangement of its kind not wholly determined, or orga-
nized, by states, or by commerce, on its first journey out of Brazil, where it began) coex-
isted with great anxiety, expressed in many of the discussions, about the lack of positive
proposals and an incipient disappointment with the feeble and generalized consensus,
based mainly on negations. These forums are now held annually across four continents
as a response to globalization in the most recent sense of the term: processes put in place
by Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), mainly through their structural adjustment programs, that facilitate the for-
mation of a network of internationally mobile finance capitalism. It would seem that a
struggle against neo-imperialism would do well to take suggestions from Gandhi, one of
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