REINHABITING CIVIL DISOBEDIENCEasubjective, while it is the body and its capacities that individuate and actualize. Now we
are in a somewhat better position to receive Gandhi’s recurring invocation of ‘‘soul-
force,’’ his work on bodies, on himself, to produce a more general political effect. Does
culture have a soul?^27 The answer may not, in most cases will not, be in the affirmative. If
culture had a birth, it might also decline. This is the crux of Cavell’s essay ‘‘Declining
Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture’’ and the more general conception,
through Spengler and others, including much of Romanticism, of culture as a garden
requiring nourishment, tending, and cultivation (a matter of nutrition, Nietzsche might
say). The garden has often been falsely conceived on the model of a tree, while the concern
should really be with grass,Leaves of Grass, the rhizome, immanence, such that a change
in sensibilities is something like a tectonic shift, creating thereby not only a genealogy,
but also a geology of morals.^28
A postcolonial suspicion: by reinserting Gandhi into this line of thinking, indebted
to Emerson, alongside Nietzsche and Thoreau, have we secretly reinscribed the primacy
of ‘‘the West’’? To say this would be to ignore a previous set of resonances internal to the
lines of thought we have been describing. Thoreau structuredWaldenin eighteen sections
to mimic theBhagavad-Gita. Emerson, in what Cavell describes as his ‘‘Eastern longings,’’
refers constantly to Vedanta philosophy, much in circulation in New England at the time.
Nietzsche’s texts have extended discussions of the law book of Manu, ofArthaShastra,
and recurrently seek to absorb Sanskrit terms (Nietzsche describes the speed of his writing
asGangasrotagati, strong as the flow of a river, and that of his rivals asMandukagati, like
the hopping of a frog), alongside reverential invocations of ‘‘the ancient sages’’ (or ‘‘the
masters of Indian philosophy,’’ as Gandhi refers to them inHind Swaraj), quite apart
from the fact that the key Nietzschean concepts of the Eternal Return and the dice throw
are direct transfigurations of theRig Veda.
It is hard to discuss such matters sensibly, for the time being, while one is as yet
uncertain what manner of classification the termHinduprovides. (We have been reclassi-
fying such identities throughout this argument. On closer scrutiny, we might find Gandhi,
for instance, to be more Christian than Thoreau, but we shall leave that aside for now,
since it is not directly relevant to this essay.) Meanwhile, within a certain kind of interna-
tional scholarship, which could have pursued such inquiries further, a term of abuse has
emerged to attack, or to inhibit, what could, until even one generation earlier, innocently
be described as Emerson’s ‘‘Eastern longings.’’ This would now be called ‘‘Orientalism,’’
a term and a world-historical sensibility, once vibrant, that has degenerated into a mode
of resentment in cruder hands, now stultifying and inhibiting rather than encouraging
research. In the interactions we have been describing, rather than a strict West/non-West
demarcation, what we have are attractions, or rather rhizomes (as described by Deleuze
and Guattari inA Thousand Plateaus), ‘‘that pertain to a map that must be constructed
... that is always detachable, connectable, reversible... and has multiple entryways and
exits and its own lines of flight.’’^29 Based on the principle of heterogeneity, we can make
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