Disobedience

Concept and Practice

Elena Loizidou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135143916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Disobedience has been practiced and considered since time immemorial. The aim of this edited collection is to explore the concept and practice of disobedience through the prism of contemporary ideas and events. Past writings on disobedience represented it as a largely political practice that revealed the limits of government or law. It was not, for example, thought of as a subjective exigency and its discussion in relation to law and politics was tied to an unduly narrow conception of these terms. Disobedience: Concept and Practice reveals the multivalent, multidisciplinary and poly-local nature of disobedience. The essays in this volume demonstrate how disobedience operates in various terrains, and may be articulated in relation to textuality, aesthetics and subjectivity, as well as politics and law. A rich and useful guide to current legal, political and social possibilities, this book provides a fresh perspective on a subject that is of both historical importance and contemporary relevance.

Chapter 1

Disobedience and atheism

Maria Aristodemou

1 The paperscape

The premise of my chapter is simple: it points out that for the concept of disobedience to have a meaning, we have to be able to presuppose an entity that does not have a duty to obey; an entity, that is, that is not bound by any law. In psychoanalytic terms, since the first law is the law of castration, such an entity is a figure that has not suffered castration; that is, an entity without lack. If castration is the infliction of lack on the human being, disobedience is also an attempt to protest, remedy or refuse that lack. The resort to disobedience therefore assumes that it is possible to escape or limit that lack, an assumption that implies the existence of a being that is not subject to lack: for whom obedience and disobedience are alien and irrelevant concepts. In Freud’s mythology, this is the figure of the primal father of Totem and Taboo (1913), in Lacan’s terms, since castration is inflicted not by a prohibitive father but by the laws of language, this is an entity not subject to the alienation inflicted by language; an entity, that is, where signifier and signified happily coincide and where the word is not the murder of the thing.

As such non-lacking beings are few and far between us (though unfortunately there are no end of pretenders to the throne), we resort to the imagination, to myth and to popular culture for illustration. In this chapter, the conscious examples of our unconscious dreams include G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1986), Michel Houellebecq’s Whatever (1998), Chuck Pahahniuk’s Fight Club (2010) and HBO’s The Wire (2002–8). The suggestion will be that at the background of these cultural products is often a conscious and more often unconscious belief in a figure that is not subject to the lack inflicted by castration and therefore has no need to obey or disobey.

The effect of this belief is that disobedience serves the subject as much as the Big Other. As Kafka’s characters routinely show, by purporting to disobey the Other, the disobedient subject brings the Other into existence: for the subject to posit herself as transgressing the law, by seeking law’s judgment and often its punishment, is a way of making the law exist (Aristodemou 2007). Conversely, the Big Other relies for its definition and existence on the demanding subject. The Lacanian news of course is that it is not only the subject who is irremediably lacking and divided, but also the Big Other.

My argument will be that effective disobedience can only take place when the subject has come to terms with her own finitude as well as that of the Big Other; when the subject has jettisoned the belief that someone is exempt from the law of castration, that someone is non-lacking and therefore has no need to resort to disobedience to make up for her lack. In the terms of this chapter, effective disobedience can only take place when the subject accedes to atheism: that is, when the subject has dethroned the Big Other from their paper throne and let go of her demand to be, and to be seen to be, disobedient. In other words, when the subject has stopped recognising as well as let go of her desire to be recognised by the Other. That can only happen, simply, when she has come to terms with the fact that the Big Other doesn’t exist.

Paradoxically such disobedience has become harder following modernity’s so-called murder of God. When the ultimate disobedience has already and ineluctably happened, in the form of the murder of God, the would-be disobedient subject finds herself at a loss as to when, if and how to disobey. If, to challenge and disobey the one who obeys no one endowed the subject with a place before the law, killing the one who doesn’t obey leaves no axis around which the subject can define and measure her defiance. Modernity’s killing of God and the installation of man in his place, as, for example, with Immanuel Kant’s self-legislative being, has complicated the dialectic between obedience and disobedience. That is, for effective disobedience to take place, the subject must now first and foremost confront and defy the legislator within; once the subject, in other words, has acknowledged and surpassed her own slavery and come to terms with her own limits and her own finitude. In a parallel way, the subject’s re-birth – post an effective disobedience into an ethical subject – must be accompanied with the subject’s acknowledgment of the Big Other’s own slavery and division. In G. K. Chesterton’s reading of Christianity, this feat takes place when Jesus himself disobeys God; when both the subject, and God, have become atheists.

2 The dreamscape

In G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1986), a group of policemen join the inner circle of an anarchist movement, only to discover that the anarchist conspiracy they have been trying to penetrate in order to dismantle has, all the time, been none other than the organisation they themselves created with a view to infiltrating and dismantling the anarchist conspiracy. Like an animal chasing its own tale, the policemen in search of the elusive anarchists find themselves chasing each other, and have to admit that they were in search of and in pursuit of their own values and beliefs, dreams and, of course, nightmares. At the same time, the Arch-Criminal supposedly orchestrating and threatening the end of civilisation and their social order’s very being, was none other than the Big Other they were in awe of and following orders from in their attempts to protect and preserve that same social order from the anarchist conspiracy.

In an article written shortly before his death, G. K. Chesterton found it necessary to clarify to his readers that the book so many had believed to be a description of the Deity was, in fact, nothing of the kind: ‘It was not intended to describe the real world as it was … It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date’ (Chesterton 1936). It was, in short, and had the reader bothered to read the title fully, not The Man Who Was Thursday, but The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare.

Chesterton’s tale does indeed start as a dream, indeed a perfect dream: ‘The place was not only pleasant but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream’ (Chesterton 1986: 9). This perfect evening, however, with its ‘strange sunset’ that is like an intimation of ‘the end of the world’ (Chesterton 1986: 11), soon retreats to reveal the nightmare lurking underneath. One by one the conspirators metamorphose from arch-anarchists to police infiltrators before the eyes of protagonist Gabriel Syme, who is left to observe ‘the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong’ (Chesterton 1986: 53). When in desperate flight from the clutches of arch-chameleon and unaccountably fast and agile ancient Professor de Worms, Syme experiences the chase as if remembering ‘all the nightmares he had ever known’ (Chesterton 1986: 78).

While the reader may delight in the thrill of a hunt which culminates in the criminals chasing the police, she may also wonder what reduced the seemingly articulate and intelligent young man we encounter in the first pages of the book to a terrified animal in fear of his life in a few narrative hours. Syme is one of the ‘two fantastics’ we are introduced to in the impossibly perfect London suburb, advertising himself as ‘a poet of law, order and respectability’ (Chesterton 1986: 12). The second ‘fantastic’, the extravagant Lucian Gregory, advertises himself ‘in a high didactic voice to men, and especially to women’ as a poet and an anarchist: for Gregory it is axiomatic that ‘the poet is always in revolt’, that art is by definition lawless and, by implication, lawlessness is artistic (Chesterton 1986: 13). Syme, on the other hand, having become aware, at an early age, of ‘the bewildering folly of most revolutionaries’ now reserves his rebelliousness for rebelling against rebellion. ‘Chaos is dull’, he explains:

What is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be seasick. Being sick is a revolt … Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It’s mere vomiting … It is things going right that is poetical! … the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

(Chesterton 1986: 13–14)

We are all familiar with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of the limit-loving classes, often in the form of the middle classes for whom legal rules and the legal system provide a safe haven within which to tease but never fundamentally challenge, let alone risk destroying the symbolic order (Hawthorne 1991: 131). Chesterton, however, goes further and reminds us of the attachment to the law not only by those who respect and benefit from it, but by those purporting to defy and break it:

The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle were removed – say a wealthy uncle – he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it … Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy … Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives.

(Chesterton 1986: 46)

The arch-anarchist Gregory has not committed any murders, or thefts, or bigamies, yet he proclaims that his aim is not only to abolish Government, but to ‘abolish God’ (Chesterton 1986: 23). To achieve that, he pays inordinate respect to the form and letter of the law. ‘I must ask you to forgive me all these formalities’, he warns Syme, ‘we have to be very strict here.’ Syme is very understanding: ‘Oh don’t apologise’, he replies, ‘I know your passion for law and order’ (Chesterton 1986: 22). Other police infiltrators are more surprised: ‘Those enemies gave no impression of hurry, but were moving wondrously fast, like a well-trained army. I had no idea the anarchists had so much discipline’ (Chesterton 1986: 132–3). Chesterton leaves us in no doubt that only fools would assume that anarchy could function without adherence to rules. Conversely, and in company again with Kafka’s anti-heroes, Gregory fails to see that positing himself as transgressing the law is another way of making the law exist.

3 The nightmare

My argument is that the nightmare Chesterton has depicted is the nightmare of the would-be disobedient subject following the death of God. God’s so-called murder by the subject of modernity was the high point in the stakes of defiance. The celebrations following his so-called death, however, were shortlived for the subject, and hardly devastating for God, who did not stay in the tomb long. If God has not, as the Christians would have it, risen from the dead, he has at least joined the ranks of the undead, obstinately refusing to die.

One reason why God has persisted despite tidings of his demise is the fact that, as Gilles Deleuze points out, we may have killed God and tried to put man in his place, but we have kept the most important thing, that is, the place (Deleuze 2001: 71). God’s so-called death has not been accompanied with the abolition of this place, but rather the place is still very much present, indeed all the more glaringly and loudly present for having been left spectacularly empty. The modern subject, that is, was not as ready to let go of the idea of God as she had been of killing him. God, too, sensing the halfhearted way his murder had taken place, continued to pretend he hadn’t died. As Freud knew, the subject’s attachment to a delusion is harder to shift than Nietzsche hoped. Killing God was in effect the easy bit, since the fantasy of an all-powerful Being, rather than being abandoned, shifted to a place where it is harder to shift, that is, the unconscious. As Freud illustrated with his myth of the primal horde, dead fathers haunt us forever: they become immortal fathers (Freud 1913).

The morning after the death of God consequently is a nasty hangover without us having had the party the night before; our parents had the party and we are left with cleaning up the mess of their enjoyment. This persistent hangover is variously referred to as guilt, nausea, anxiety or, nowadays, depression. Chesterton in this text calls it a nightmare, another name for the fulfilment of a, however distorted, dream or wish. The nightmare modern man (and arguably, to a lesser extent, woman) is terrified of acknowledging that there is no external enemy we are called upon to wage battle with, but that we are in vain combat with ourselves.

As Chesterton points out, if the pre-modern fear was the fear of the tyrannic accidents of nightmare, the modern fear is even worse: it is ‘the fear of the airless vacuum of science. The first was the old fear that any miracle might happen, the second the more hopeless modern fear that no miracle can ever happen’ (Chesterton 1986: 115). For the group fighting the anarchist conspiracy, therefore, the nightmare is that there is no enemy: no anarchist conspiracy to fight against since the ‘anarchist enemy’ is none other than the Head of Police who recruited them to fight the anarchists in the first place. On realising this, Syme is bereft: ‘The tragic self-confidence which he had felt when he believed that the Marquis was a devil had strangely disappeared now that he knew that the Marquis was a friend’ (Chesterton 1986: 127). Or, as the Greek poet Cavafis put it when the enemy fails to invade: ‘What are we to do without the barbarians? The barbarians were, after all, some kind of a solution’ (Cavafis 2009: 192).

4 Enjoyment and disobedience

How has the death of God problematised the dialectic of obedience and disobedience? God, as Freud famously described, performs many functions, more obviously and uncontroversially of providing reassurance, protection and belonging (Freud 1927: 30). Over and above these functions, the entity called God is also allegedly privy to what us mere mortals can only fantasise about, that is unlimited enjoyment. The fantasy is that there is someone, called God, who is not only omnipresent and omnipotent, but who enjoys fully and is answerable to no one. The question of disobedience, therefore, is intricately mixed up with the question of enjoyment and the question of God. If there is a God, as Lacan puts it, he is first and foremost the one who enjoys without restrictions: ‘The only chance for the existence of God is that He—with a capital H—enjoys, that He is jouissance’ (Lacan 2008: 66). Or, more simply, ‘Christianity naturally ended up inventing a God such that he is the one who gets off’ (Lacan 1998: 76).

For Lacan, with modernity God may have been killed, but rather than dead, God became unconscious (Lacan 1979: 59).¹ The void may be acknowledged consciously, as is the impossibility of filling it by believing anew in God, but the unconscious persists in denying the emptiness and dreaming of substitute replacements. This is because what matters about fantasies is not their content, which is invariably nonsensical and often embarrassing, but the place they occupy in the subject’s psychic structure. The fantasy of a Father, a God, a Master may be, and all too often is, silly and fanciful, but its function is priceless: it fills the place of the lack in the structure, that is, the lack in the subject, but just as importantly the lack in the symbolic order.

So the modern subject may have killed God but, rather than getting rid of the place once occupied by God, she installed an array of other Gods, sometimes known as laws, in its place. The result of this failure is that the death of God, far from liberating the modern subject, has enslaved her even more dramatically. Indeed, being subject to divine laws was easier than being subject to self-made and self-imposed laws. The lack of a God before whom one can pray for protection, confess to, and obtain forgiveness for one’s transgressions, rather than soothing the subject’s predicament, instead exacerbates it. As Kafka depicted so vividly, guilt is redoubled; as Pessoa tirelessly moans, anxiety is quadrupled; for Sartre nausea becomes insufferable; while in Houellebecq boredom levels are raised exponentially: ‘My condition has a name’, Houellebecq’s hero says; ‘it’s a depression. It’s not that I feel tremendously low; it’s rather that the world around me appears high’ (Houellebecq 1998: 135).

Why does everyone around Houellebecq’s hero appear ‘high’? What is it that the Other of the symbolic order enjoins us to do in the twenty-first century? Since the alleged death of God, what the Other insists is that we must enjoy ourselves. And if enjoyment and its prohibition were once an issue for adjudication by the priests of religion, following the so-called death of God, the question of enjoyment has become a question of law. Modern law, moreover, prides itself on removing prohibitions and instead facilitating enjoyment. Further, it prides itself on enabling the subject to partake of the machinery of governance and thereby of the process of law-making. For Immanuel Kant, pure practical reason enjoins the subject to act in such a way as she would will for her action to be a universal law. The resulting moral duty, therefore, is not imposed on the subject, but autonomously assumed by the subject herself: the individual acting in accordance with the moral law identifies her will with the principle behind the law, so the moral law is not dictated, but self-posited (Kant 1996). In other words, if we are not enjoying enough, we only have ourselves to blame.

5 Enjoyment and obedience

If this is how modernity appears on the level of consciousness, what does the unconscious make of its pretensions? Since Freud’s ‘discovery’ of the unconscious, it has been common to glamorise it as a seat of unruly instincts unsettling the subject’s equanimity and threatening the composure of the ego and its relations to the social order: ‘From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality’, Freud suggests, ‘it may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be super-moral’ (Freud 1923: 54). What is less often pointed out is Freud’s insistence that the unconscious is made up not only of unruly impulses, but of contradictory instincts, including the subject’s desire for and enjoyment of obedience. The desire to obey is often no less repressed and hidden from the subject than the desire to disobey and rebel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Table of cases
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: what is disobedience?
• 1 Disobedience and atheism
• 2 Hermeneutics and the art of disobedience: a critical reading of Ricoeur and Derrida
• 3 Breach of the peace or violence and/of silence
• 4 Insubordinate voices: contestation and the right to politics
• 5 Sacropolitics: how to disobey sacred scripture (on Ambedkar’s Bhagavadgītā)
• 6 The case of the naughty in relation to law
• 7 Disobedient objects: Benjamin, Kafka, Poe and the revolt of the fetish
• 8 Disobedience subjectively speaking
• 9 What I believe
• Bibliography
• Index