AT THE HEIGHT OF THE PAPAL INQUISITION IN 1318, THE Franciscan friar William of Ockham was summoned to the papal enclave at Avignon to account for certain theological and political ideas contained in his writings. Suspected of heretical thought, Ockham traveled, as a mendicant, from England to Avignon to face the accusations—at grave risk to himself. He was absolved of those charges, but became embroiled a few years later in another papal quarrel over Franciscan poverty. Ockham ultimately sought refuge in the court of Louis IV of Bavaria, and there penned a short treatise in response to the overreaching, inquisitorial, sovereign power of the Avignon Papacy—but not before writing, in staccato form, while still in Avignon, undaunted and in an insolent rhetoric reminiscent of the Cynics of antiquity, that the series of papal bulls on poverty and Church property were chock full of “haereticalia, erronea, stulta, ridiculosa, fantastica, insana et diffamatoria”—“heresies, errors, stupidities, ridiculousness, fantasies, insanities et defamations.”1
In the short treatise on tyrannical government that ensued—the Breviloquium de principatu tyrannico—Ockham fearlessly spoke against the absolute powers that the popes claimed over both theological and secular matters. Boldly, in a frank but insolent tone once again reminiscent of the cynical parrhesiasts, the Franciscan declares that “subjects should be warned not to be subjugated more than is strictly necessary.”2 To accept the plenipotentiary power of the pope over temporal matters, Ockham protests, would amount to a form of servitude that would be “truly dreadful and incomparably greater than under ancient law.” To fail to actively resist, Ockham declares—at the risk of his very life—would produce not “a realm of freedom,” but instead, “the rule of intolerable servitude.”3
Not to be governed in this tyrannical fashion. Not to be subjected to a regime of intolerable servitude. That was precisely the reason to reject ancient laws and embrace a new path, which, Ockham adamantly maintained, “represents not a greater servitude, but precisely a lesser servitude” than the earlier regime. “It is evident,” Ockham wrote, “that it would simply be wrong to impose a yoke as heavy to bear, or found a bondage as constraining as the laws of our ancestors.”4
Ockham called, courageously, for less tyrannical subjection: for a political realm in which forms of sovereign power—inevitable though they may be, necessary in certain domains, eternally recurring—would be contained and limited, chastened as much as possible. He called not for a world devoid of subjection—that would not be possible—but one in which the reach of the tyrannical is restricted, limited to the greatest extent possible. Not, as Michel Foucault would remind us more than five hundred years later, a world without government, but one in which we are “not governed like this”—referring precisely to those elements of political tyranny, repression, and domination that Foucault witnessed in French president Georges Pompidou’s security measures of the early 1970s and analyzed in Cardinal Richelieu’s suppression of the Nu-pieds peasant rebellions of 1639.5 And the first step in that direction is to understand, as Ockham underscored, that “subjects cannot be on guard against excessive subjection unless they know what kind and how much power is being exercised on them.”6
The eternal recurrence of new forms of intolerable servitude, and with them new forms of resistance, reveals that human history—rather than a progressive march toward absolute knowledge, the withering of the state, or the end of history—is a constant struggle over our own subjection, a recurring battle over the making of our own subjectivity, of ourselves as subjects. Once we recognize the perpetual recurrence of this struggle, then and only then will we know our task, for today and for the future: to resist the always encroaching forms of tyrannical power, those violent desires for subjection, the constant and recurring attempts to govern through fear, through terror, through absolute domination.
Today, it is not the inquisitorial theocratic tyranny of Ockham’s time that we face, even though the inquisitorial dimensions are not entirely absent. No, what we face today in the West—in the United States and some of its allies—is a new form of governing rooted in a military paradigm of counterrevolutionary war. The very methods and strategies that we developed to contain the colonized other have come back to inflect the way that our government now governs us. We in the West now live, at home, shoulder to shoulder with the insurgent other—ourselves—and have started to govern ourselves, at home and abroad, as we brutally and mistakenly learned to govern the colonized others.
Brutal excesses, terror, and tyrannical power dominate the wider political and social realm—whether in the form of sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib, indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay, solitary confinement in prisons, surveillance of American mosques, or the fact that our precision drone strikes have, as of April 2017, killed upwards of 200 innocent children outside war zones.7 The fact that US drones have killed more civilians than high-profile targets and that our policing at home has now become hypermilitarized is precisely the rule of a despotic power. When sitting presidents condone this kind of terrorizing “collateral damage,” when our highest public officials justify and legalize it, when presidential candidates up the ante—seemingly without consequences—by literally calling for the violent torture of innocent family members of suspected terrorists or the outright ban of Muslims, we need to take heed. Just as we must when some people strap bombs on themselves or mercilessly kill innocent civilians in Beirut, Paris, Istanbul, Orlando, or Baghdad.
This contemporary form of terrorizing tyrannical power is not exceptional, as we know from the tragic history of totalitarianism in the twentieth century, the ghastly record of slavery in the nineteenth, the brutal supplices of the eighteenth, and forms of inquisition before then. Just as torture was legislated and legally regulated during the Inquisition, ordeals during the ancien régime, and pogroms during the twentieth century, The Counterrevolution is firmly within the structure of a rule of law. We simply fail to recognize how manipulable the rule of law can be—we fail to acknowledge the dark side of legality.
In the end, though, the fact that we are not facing an utterly exceptional, but rather a fully coherent and systematic paradigm should neither render us complacent nor resigned, but rather, on the contrary, like William of Ockham, intolerably insolent.
Neither resigned, of course, but not too ambitious or arrogant on the other hand: not too confident or superior to believe that we could reverse the facticity of social conflict—that we, mere mortals, could here and now end the phenomenon of violence that has marked all known human existence and all known human history. No, we would just as much fail by overreaching.
Another battle in an endless struggle—that is what we face.
William of Ockham understood this well. And so would a long line of women and men who followed in his footsteps, over the ages, and resisted new tyrannous forms of government. Women and men who contested the rule of intolerable servitude, whether in the form of the Inquisition or chattel slavery, of fascism or mass incarceration, of colonialism or of the counterinsurgency practices of torture, summary executions, and total information awareness.
Women and men during the Algerian war like Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Ahmed Ben Bella, or countless others who put themselves at risk to denounce the terror and disappearances—as de Beauvoir reminded us, “The most scandalous part of scandal is the getting used to it.”8 Scholars and historians like Pierre Vidal-Naquet who took his pen and pulpit to denounce counterrevolutionary methods.9 Conservative thinkers like François Mauriac, Nobel laureate of literature, who famously decried the inquisitorial tactics of the French army.10 Even government officials such as General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière (himself a torture victim at the hands of the Gestapo) who demanded that he be relieved of his duties in the French army in Algeria in March 1957 when he became aware of the use of torture, and for which he would serve sixty days in prison; or Paul Teitgen, secretary general of the police in Algiers, who resigned his post in September 1957 in protest over the three thousand disappearances.11
Women and men in this country like Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Daniel Ellsberg, and countless others who, with great courage and risk to themselves, challenged counterinsurgency practices abroad and their domestication at home. Many Americans before us contested COINTELPRO, the brutal repression of the Black Panthers, the violent excesses at Attica and elsewhere. And many today continue to challenge the excess of counterinsurgency warfare and the domestication of the counterinsurgency—women and men like Linda Sarsour, Alicia Garza, Rachel Herzing, Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and so many others—so many unnamed others—and collectivities, who defy these new forms of tyranny.
There is ongoing resistance. The Black Lives Matter movement, Black Youth Project 100, Critical Resistance, and other groups have challenged the militarization and lethality of the police. United We Dream, the New Sanctuary Coalition NYC, metropolitan cities, and even the state of California have actively challenged the demonization of undocumented residents. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American Civil Liberties Union, again even states, such as Washington and Hawaii, have challenged the Muslim ban.
But it is time to see the larger arc of what we are facing. It is critical to understand what exactly we are up against. The militarized policing, the demonization of Muslims and Mexicans, total information awareness—these are all interlocking pieces of a larger phenomenon: The Counterrevolution. We now need to visualize the whole, to see the governing paradigm, in order to translate our activism into a truly effective mobilization.
And in resisting The Counterrevolution, my only hope is that we, and our children too, will be mindful of the words and the courage, and will heed the parrhesia of the friar Ockham.