HENT DE VRIESresituating, Thoreau’s concept of ‘‘civil disobedience’’ was based, Singh claims, on a posi-
tive ‘‘relation to desire,’’ on ‘‘a form of attraction,’’ irreducible to any Kantian sense of
obligation, ought, or pure duty, but rather an experimentation with a ‘‘further self ’’ that
is one with ‘‘another world, the eventual, struggling to emerge from the actual.’’ This
reactualized version of Emersonian ‘‘aversive thinking,’’ Singh concludes, has as its oppo-
site less the imperative- or rule-oriented fear of ‘‘disorder or lawlessness’’ than ‘‘the com-
plete impoverishment of desire and of capabilities,’’ in other words, ‘‘the impossibility of
the emergence of newness (of becoming)’’ (p. 373). Such a view, Singh suggests, invokes
the Spinozist conception of relations between individual bodies (and of these making up
the ‘‘body politic’’), which can be seen in the background of Gandhi’s problematization
of the distinction between the private and the public, as well as between the religious and
the political. This is epitomized in his famous statement ‘‘Anyone who thinks that religion
and politics can be kept apart, understands neither religion nor politics.’’ A more complex
thought, premised less on a ‘‘libertarian’’ philosophy than on cultivated ‘‘sensibilities,’’ is
a legacy of Romanticism and its refusal either to hypostatize and deify or to reify and
materialize the ‘‘soul,’’ a legacy that, Singh argues, should not too quickly be reduced to
a naturalized or secularized theology. Not only is this legacy pagan as much as Christian;
its referent, if one can still say so, is not personal but a ‘‘specific form of life,’’ as it
expresses itself in ‘‘interrelations of nature, culture, and individuation’’ (p. 374).
In his latest writings, especially the ‘‘trilogy’’ consisting ofSpecters of Marx, ‘‘Faith
and Knowledge,’’ andRogues, discussed by Samuel Weber in his contribution, Derrida
argues that the place and function of the body politic is taken by thedemos, now no
longer seen as the fuller and universal expression of humanity but as something—some
‘‘thing’’—that precedes, exceeds, surrounds, and traverses the conceptions and instances
of sovereignty and nationhood, freedom and community (all premised upon necessarily
exclusionary assumptions of oneness and indivisibility, sameness and selfhood, identity
and value, and structurally allergic, if ultimately not immune, to repetition and diffusion,
that is to say, to language and media).^141 Instead, he explains in his dialogue with Haber-
mas, the concept ofdemosshould be viewed as:
at oncethe incalculable singularity of anyone, before any ‘‘subject,’’ the possible un-
doing of the social bond by a secret to be respected, beyond all citizenship, beyond
every ‘‘state,’’ indeed every ‘‘people,’’ indeed even beyond the current state of the
definition of a living being as living ‘‘human’’ being,andthe universality of rational
calculation, of the equality of citizens before the law, the social bond of being to-
gether, with or without contract, and so on.^142The body politic is thus tied to a notion of force and power (a ‘‘-cracy,’’ Derrida writes)
that is no longer identified with instinctual ‘‘social pressure,’’ as, say, in Henri Bergson’s
understanding of ‘‘moral obligation’’ and ‘‘static religion’’ (discussed below by Paola
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