BHRIGUPATI SINGHconnections that have everything to do with resonance, stimulus, and response, although
they may or may not have anything to do with conscious intention. Extended relations
might be drawn further: Schopenhauer is deeply indebted to Buddhism, Nietzsche learns
from Schopenhauer, Tolstoy is indebted to Schopenhauer, Gandhi learns from Tolstoy.
Or: Tolstoy sets forth his own theory of moral perfectionism, Lenin calls him ‘‘a reaction-
ary in the most literal sense of the term,’’ the Indian organized left in the 1920s and at
various other points accuses Gandhi of being ‘‘a reactionary.’’ And so on to thenth
degree.
But in what way are these lines of resonance, internal to our rhizome, productive for
their constitutive terms—for Gandhi, for example, who in any case is such a monster of
fame that his deeds scarcely need repetition, much less our meager philosophical scaffold-
ing? In many ways, that is precisely the point. If it is Cavell’s claim that Emersonian
thought is repressed or denied in America, it is hard to convey the extent to which Gandhi
has been deadened in India, even when he is praised or commemorated, attached to little
else but the moral pieties of a nativist, nationalist, guilt-provoking imagination, which
has begun, for more than two generations now, to seem oddly anachronistic, exhausted,
and, most damningly, impractical, which is to say, without any future. ‘‘It’s too Roman-
tic,’’ one might say, to use another currently prevalent term of abuse, since the reception
of Romanticism itself lies in ruins. This is in part because Gandhi’s political terminology
seems difficult to stomach, so far from the bureaucratic, technocratic rationalism that has
been at home in India, as elsewhere. ‘‘Force of the soul,’’ ‘‘all-pervading cosmic spirit,’’
‘‘experiments with truth,’’ such terms may not seem so utterly foreign after a particular
route through Deleuze, through Cavell.
The latent global scope of this rhizome does not, however, make the potential inherit-
ability of Gandhi, or of Emerson, any less difficult. And inheritance is a crucial stake here,
since we are turning, returning to yesterday in order to prepare for the day after tomor-
row. The first difficulty: it begins to sound deadly when someone, anyone, who has not
earned the right to speak, in that manner, in that milieu, at a particular moment, begins
to produce ethical noises, or what Cavell calls the sound of moral perfectionism. (How
does one earn the right to speak as such? Such a question is usually both asked and
answered subconsciously, or preconsciously; it is a feeling, or an affect, or an ongoing set
of relations, more than a statement. As a result, it is a difficult matter to ‘‘change one’s
mind’’ about such things, since most of the action has already taken place long before the
matter reaches the mind. Which is why such changes are tectonic, for good and for ill:
an unforeseen co-habitation, a mutation, the geology of morals.) Statements regarding
perfectibility can sound poisonous, or ridiculous. In matters of discredit our attention is
usually directed upward, say, toward George W. Bush in his debasement of the language
of democratic aspiration (‘‘Freedom is on the march,’’ ‘‘Infinite Justice’’—such words are,
in any case, not the stock-in-trade of Emersonian moral perfectionists or Deleuzians, who
are both passionately antimoralist in tone).
PAGE 376376.................16224$ CH19 10-13-06 12:35:51 PS