REINHABITING CIVIL DISOBEDIENCEpolitics courts both tragedy and farce. How, then, might one proceed? Fundamentally,
disobedience is based on a simultaneously positive and evaluative relation to desire, from
Emerson through Nietzsche all the way to the ‘‘desiring-machines’’ of Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia books. The Emersonian constraint, or necessity, is
not expressed as an ‘‘ought’’ or an obligation but rather as a form of attraction, an attrac-
tion to my further self, which is also to another world, the eventual, struggling to emerge
from the actual. The underlying fear of this strand of aversive thinking is not disorder or
lawlessness but rather the complete impoverishment of desire and of capabilities, the
impossibility of the emergence of newness (of becoming), self-directed (bewitched in
some cases, sacrificed in others) to the powers of conformity and the requirements of
obedience. But to affirm desire and speak ill of restrictions in a neo-liberal regime is a
tricky matter, since the entire socio-economic apparatus seems organized to constantly
multiply needs and cravings, worldly attractions joined to a sense of affirmation. (‘‘Ex-
press yourself,’’ says the mobile phone; ‘‘Excel yourself,’’ says the business suit, and ever
so often it is experienced as such. ‘‘Satisfaction guaranteed.’’) Keep in mind that we men-
tioned a positive and anevaluativerelation to desire.
So by what criteria are human desires to be evaluated, those of this world or of
another? Consider that the practical work of almost every religion, at least in its ascetic
forms, has been to set replicable limits, to design a regime of the body to train and guide
human desire in quest of a realm above worldly ends. But can these limitations, or re-
gimes, or criteria, be fixed, once and for all, as a source of judgment? This would be the
aim of a moral law, which we are saying we turn against. So let us leave this question of
evaluation in limbo for the moment and continue with the consideration of positive
desire, or affinities. The question of attractions rather than obligation creates a line of
flight back toward (Deleuze’s materialist, antimoralist) Spinoza: hisEthics, a potentially
productive link that remains to be made, since Gandhian politics is above all about new
arrangements of bodies (consider the self-imposed restrictions, the voluntary frugality
that was briefly experienced asfreedomby a generation of Gandhians), the relations be-
tween bodies (his own) and the body politic. At the same time, the centrality of the body
and the question of modes of existence puts substantial pressure on the relation between
the ‘‘private,’’ say, the domain of religion, and the ‘‘public,’’ say, that of politics. ‘‘Anyone
who thinks that religion and politics can be kept apart, understands neither religion nor
politics’’: this is probably one of Gandhi’s most famous statements. Yet this must be
countenanced by his lack of endorsement for the officially existing forms of organized
religion, and their concomitant distrust of him—Christian missionaries who told him to
convert, since he had drawn so heavily on the teachings of Jesus, or those belonging to
the Hindu right, who accused Gandhi of being a ‘‘Muslim-lover,’’ for which reason he
was finally assassinated.
A statist suspicion: discussions regarding the ‘‘self ’’ or ‘‘modes of being’’ are usually
met with some distrust when confronted with talk of, say, global inequality or the duties
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