On the Praxis of Philosophy from Below
RICHARD GILMAN-OPALSKY
In the existing world, largely governed by the logic of capital and the pathologies of accumulation, revolt is an expression of reason. In light of so many measures, such as the basic macroeconomic facts of global poverty and inequality, the absence of revolt may even appear as the height of unreason. A society that does not revolt against a social order that damages it with such escalating facility—psychologically, collectively, ecologically—is a society that, if it were a person, would be living at the terminal stage. Revolt functions like an antidote, or like part of the immune system of the body politic, generating forces against what kills us. In this opening flourish, much needs defining. For starters, we must define revolt and reason, and only then can we move on to consider the normative claims of these statements, and their social and political contexts.
In so doing, the work of George Katsiaficas provides an invaluable resource. Katsiaficas has been arguing for the reasonable content of social movements and rebellions for almost thirty years and has applied that general perspective to an analysis of historic and recent revolt around the world, including to uprisings in Asia, Latin America, Europe, the United States, and in other geographic and historic locations. Katsiaficas is not alone in seeing the reason of revolt, since many thinkers before him have accepted the logic of this general perspective. Some of those thinkers will also be consulted in the present consideration of the praxis of philosophy from below.
In addition to making the case for understanding revolt as reason and reason as revolt, I shall argue for a certain twist, not against, but beyond the work of Katsiaficas. I argue for an extension of Katsiaficas’ general theory into a rethinking of theory itself. Specifically, we need to shift from understanding the affective and reasonable dimensions of upheaval, to an understanding of the philosophical content of revolt, to an understanding of revolt as philosophical work. This shift, at bottom, can be understood as a shift from an explanatory and descriptive mode of analysis, conducted by social scientists on the object of revolt, to recognizing that much of the work of social science is itself carried out more effectively by the subjects of revolt. In short, we need another inversion, from the intellectual analysis of revolt, to revolt as intellectual analysis itself.
But, before engaging this bigger question vis-à-vis the work of Katsiaficas, let us establish some basic terms and concepts.
For brevity’s sake, I shall retrieve some basic understandings of revolt and reason from sources that stipulate the meanings I would like to defend and deploy.
Julia Kristeva has thought about the conceptual and etymological meaning of revolt perhaps more than any other scholar in history. Kristeva, a critical theorist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher, has written many books and novels dedicated to the topic of revolt. She is particularly useful here because, as we shall see, Katsiaficas’ theory of the eros effect draws out the psychoanalytic dimension of revolt by way of Freud and Fromm through Marcuse, and that dimension is also the central preoccupation of Kristeva’s work on revolt. In her book Intimate Revolt, Kristeva writes: “The word ‘revolt,’ with its rich and complex etymology, acquired its current, distinctly political meaning with the French Revolution. Thus when we speak of revolt today we first understand a protest against already established norms, values, and powers.”1
Kristeva affirms that revolt is protest of already established norms, values, and powers, but she also wants to retrieve certain meanings of revolt that date back before the French Revolution and to expand revolt into psychological and affective spheres of life. Kristeva does not depoliticize revolt, and she understands its ongoing and necessary connection to politics and revolution, but, rather, she wants “to wrest it, etymologically, from the overly narrow political sense it has taken in our time.”2 She sees
revolt as a dialectical process. … Today the word “revolt” has become assimilated to Revolution, to political action. The events of the twentieth century, however, have shown us that political “revolts”—Revolutions—ultimately betrayed revolt, especially the psychic sense of the term. Why? Because revolt, as I understand it … refers to a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, of change, an endless probing of appearances.3
Kristeva argues that, after the French and Russian Revolutions, those revolutions stopped calling into question their own values and started to defend themselves rather than to continually question themselves, and in this way, the revolutions came to betray revolt itself.
In his 1989 essay “The Eros Effect,” Katsiaficas focuses on how social upheavals “imagine a new way of life and a different social reality” and “may be considered collective liberatory sublimation—a rational way of clearing collective psychological blockages.”4 Thus, Katsiaficas explicitly connects revolt to processes of working through psychological, as well as social and political, problems. His sense of revolt is both consistent and resonant with that of Kristeva. And, it is important to notice that Katsiaficas finds in revolt a critical text full of “imaginative” proposals and “rational” activity.5 Following this, revolt may be defined as a permanent state of questioning, transformation, and change, as a form of reason or critique; it is an active feature of the psychological health of society, and it embodies and expresses the social imagination and desire for new ways of life.
Next, what are reason and rationality? The liberal political philosophy of John Rawls is of little use for a discussion of revolt, making him a rather strange place to start. A general position of liberals, held faithfully by Rawls, is that revolt is superfluous in liberal societies, which can address most problems within the limits of the law. Moreover, Rawls fundamentally disagrees with the basic premises of my own work, in that he holds out hope for a fair capitalist society, which I take as a contradiction in terms. Rawls devoted his life’s work to theorizing a “practical” way toward that great contradiction. Rawls’ premises continue to ground the most fundamental of liberal conceits, including that perplexingly unshakeable faith in “capitalist democracy.” Like most liberals, Rawls never placed his faith in riot, revolt, or revolution.
Having said this, Rawls’ famous distinction between the “reasonable” and the “rational” is convincing and useful for purposes other than his own. Here, I shall use it to make the case for both the rationality and reason of revolt. Rawls writes:
Reasonable persons are ready to propose, or to acknowledge when proposed by others, the principles needed to specify what can be seen by all as fair terms of cooperation. … Some have a superior political power or are placed in more fortunate circumstances; … it may be rational for those so placed to take advantage of their situation. … Common sense views the reasonable but not, in general, the rational as a moral idea involving moral sensibility.6
In other words, if something (in thought or action) can be made to make sense, then it has an accessible rationale and is thereby “rational.” Everything that is understandable, explicable, or that can be comprehended from someone’s experience and point of view, is rational. If you murder someone in a jealous rage, in a “crime of passion,” the action is rational to the extent that we understand why you did it, even though we can say it was unreasonable at the same time. Some things are rational and unreasonable at the same time. What makes something reasonable, according to Rawls, is its “moral sensibility,” the idea that it is the right thing to do and, especially for Rawls, that it is fair. There is always your rational self-interest, and then there is what is good for the community, and sometimes (not always) the two are mutually exclusive. In many cases, there is a rationale for doing X, but it is more reasonable to do Y instead.
Part of what is good in Rawls’ definition is that he makes it difficult to be “irrational.” To be irrational, one has to do or think something that cannot be understood, that is totally inexplicable—that cannot be made to make any sense. Throughout history, this has been the plight of the “mad,” of “madness”—a history of horrific misunderstanding, wherein failing to understand a person’s rationale for doing something leads to the conclusion of irrationality.7
But if something can be given a rationale, then it is at least rational, even if it is not the right thing to do (i.e., reasonable). On this view, we can say that rioting and terrorism are rational, even when we do not want to call them reasonable. What is nice about Rawls’ distinction is that it creates the space for us to acknowledge the rationality of an action, but to denounce the action on the grounds of reason. With Rawls, we can say, for example, that we understand the rationality of a war, but condemn it as unreasonable at the same time. We cannot disqualify thoughts and actions as irrational as long as they embody and reflect grievances we are capable of understanding. Whereas revolt is often characterized as being both irrational and unreasonable, I argue the opposite—that revolt is both rational and reasonable.
In 2000, in a conversation about the 1999 Seattle protests of the World Trade Organization, Katsiaficas said:
It seems the revolutionary subject, as Marcuse said, emerges in the course of revolution. Regions are another way of organizing ourselves, and they would emerge in the course of making themselves real. We can’t just have our alternative to capitalist globalization emerge full blown from our brains. Some people have attempted to create models for how this country could be organized. I’m not sure that’s the way. I think the way is for people to do it, to actually reorganize, live it.8
Here, both Katsiaficas and Marcuse are right to highlight the productive and formative work that revolt does. Marcuse wrote about a “new sensibility” that emerges directly out of “praxis; it emerges in the struggle against violence and exploitation where this struggle is waged for essentially new ways and forms of life.”9 Marcuse also wrote about “the changing composition of the working class,” about the possibility for a “new working class” that, “by virtue of its position, could disrupt, reorganize, and redirect the mode and relationships of production” (although he was doubtful they would do so).10 Katsiaficas understood that the 1999 Seattle protests expressed a new sensibility and, potentially, a new composition of the revolutionary subject position, which seemed to confirm Marcuse’s contention that revolt is a process of shaping, of actually producing new subject positions, and of working out alternatives to capitalism.
Yet, there is another line in Katsiaficas’ thinking that expresses his affinity for the politics of prefiguration, which can be seen in the preceding passage, for example, in the closing call to construct and to live alternatives to the existing society in the here and now. I believe that the politics of prefiguration, which has seen a resurgence of interest since 2011 and has the good favor of too many anarchists, is the wrong orientation. I want to suggest that prefiguration leads to misdiagnoses in the analysis of revolt, and that the rich critical content of revolt is always more important than what it prefigures.
Prefiguration suggests that actors construct and experience new ways and forms of life by directly organizing and living them in the present. Advocates of prefiguration generally adopt the praxis of “learning by doing,” suggesting that a liberatory politics reveals both its desirability and possibility when we directly experiment with and experience alternatives to the capitalist present. The politics of prefiguration can be found in many diverse places, for example, in John Holloway’s discussion of “other-doing,” Hakim Bey’s idea of the “temporary autonomous zone,” and it goes back at least to Michael Bakunin’s arguments in Statism and Anarchy.11 More recent articulations and defenses have been taken up by many anarchists, including Uri Gordon, Cindy Milstein, and Benjamin Franks.12 As Franks briefly summarizes: “Prefiguration involves using means that are in accordance with the goals, creating in the present desired for features of the future.”13
To be clear, I do not deny the importance of experiments in prefiguration, of learning and building alternatives directly by trying to make and to live them, a radical politics of “experiential learning” as it’s often called in academia. In fact, I agree with Bakunin, Bey, Holloway, Katsiaficas, and others that prefigurative politics can reveal logics of life alternative to those governing the capitalist lifeworld. At the same time, however, prefiguration neglects the more significant, impactful dimensions of revolt, which regard its theoretical content. As shall become clear in the remainder of this essay, by “theoretical” I do not mean “academic,” “textual,” or “impractical.” I intend this as good news, for if prefiguration was the way to construct real alternatives, then any hope for real alternatives would be lost.
Of course, on a micro-political scale, anarchist co-ops, community gardens, and groups like Food Not Bombs do challenge the logic of capital. They have a different operational logic than the logic of capital. But the capitalist world is mostly untroubled by them. Unless there is a direct conflict of interest, capital can even (and often does) encourage the existence of such projects. The peaceful coexistence of grocery stores and community gardens, for example, can be invoked to bolster the defenses of the tolerant, flexible, and “democratic” present. For this reason, I am critical of any praxis that overdetermines the transformative power of prefigurative politics. In all politics, it is critical to pay attention to the significance of the real mismatch of scale between our position and our opponent’s, even if we do not know how to solve that problem. However, so much of prefiguration does not do this with sufficient seriousness. Therefore, most prefiguration only contests the existing world in ways that are compatible with the reproduction of the existing world indefinitely into the future.
It is therefore good news that prefiguration—or building alternatives by living them in the present—makes up a miniscule part of what happens in revolt. Revolt throws the world into question far more effectively than it makes new worlds. It is necessary to seriously consider the severe limitations imposed on us by this world to create new worlds. Indeed, if there were no severe limitations to creating alternatives to the existing world, radicals would have little to criticize. What can be done to create alternatives to capitalism in a world organized largely (even if not totally) by the logic of capital? What could be prefigured in Seattle in 1999 or, later, in the Occupy encampments of 2011? In capitalist society, most of what we do in school and work is governed by the logic of capital, and even leisure time is determined as the time left over after work (and that time is rapidly disappearing for reasons that I have discussed elsewhere).14
Without a doubt, certain forms of alter-relationality (relations beyond exchange-relations) and human solidarity are available for direct experience in social movements, and these are all good things, and good reasons to participate. But, in the existing capitalist world, people invariably “retour à la normale,” as appeared on the popular poster in Paris during the uprisings of May–June 1968.15 Seattle and Occupy protestors rupture the normality of everyday life, but the call to return to normal can only be resisted for so long before having to go back to work, school, and so on.
Moreover, we cannot stay in park encampments for at least two good reasons. First, we never intended to choose homelessness (and we do not want to sleep outside in subzero temperatures), and work is necessary even if it is hated. Second, and more importantly, we do not choose to live in park encampments in order to live in park encampments, but for other reasons worked out in the activity of occupying the park. That is to say, the critical content of the occupation, and not the occupation itself, expresses the radical thinking of the practice.
Historically, revolt does not have the perpetuity of its opponent, for revolt occurs in saturnalias, festivals of resistance and spontaneity that flourish and dissipate over short durations of time (typically days, sometimes weeks). Saturnalias of revolt cannot reverse the logic of the capitalist world, and they cannot produce alternative forms of life that can be selected over capitalism. The opponent, on the other hand, is not temporary like a saturnalia, but deeply entrenched, reproduced by everyday life, and enjoys enough confidence in its own permanence such that, in most countries, it can allow room for revolt without too much worry.
The foregoing analysis would seem dissuasive of revolt, were it not for the fact that revolt can be understood as accomplishing a very different thing. Revolt is an organic intellect at work, a collective philosopher, the old subversive philosopher, not a professional thinker in a university. Revolt does what all good philosophy has always done—it throws the reality and justice of the world into question. The most striking difference is that revolt accomplishes this far better than anything else or anyone else, far better than any professional philosopher or book.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their short essay “May ’68 Did Not Take Place,” argue that events like the revolution of 1789, the Paris Commune, the revolution of 1917, and the uprising of 1968 enact “a lawless deviation, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible. … There can only be creative solutions. These are the creative redeployments that can contribute to a resolution of the current crisis and that can take over where a generalized May ’68, amplified bifurcation or fluctuation, left off.”16 What Deleuze and Guattari argue is that historians are always trying to settle insurrectionary events as phenomena that begin on a certain date and end on another, which leads to a discourse about the Paris Commune having “happened” or the events of ’68 having “taken place.” This is a view that Deleuze and Guattari reject on the grounds that it fundamentally misunderstands the eventuality of the events. They argue that what is most interesting about revolt is the way in which it opens an unfinished questioning, which other insurrections had previously begun, and which new ones can pick up where they have left off. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari shift the emphasis from what is concretely accomplished in or by the revolt, from what was prefigured or achieved by it (i.e., from a discourse of success or failure), to how the revolt participates in an unfinished questioning about radical possibilities, about creative solutions to crises.
As stated at the outset, there is no hard disagreement here with Katsiaficas, but rather a twist, a turn, an extension, a critical emphasis with consequences, which changes the way that we understand the relationship between revolt and philosophy.
In The Subversion of Politics, Katsiaficas writes: “As expressions of antisystemic participatory politics, autonomous social movements seek to live without a control center, no matter how rationalized its operation may be.”17 What Katsiaficas emphasizes here is an aspiration to live without a control center. This great aspiration, however, cannot be realized in existing capitalist societies, save for short-lived experiments in marginal and radical milieus. On the question of control, capital is decisive (though not totalitarian). Most of what we do, and when and where we do it, is decided by capital.
But Katsiaficas also touches upon another point that I must elaborate more fully here, and that is the objectionable rationality of the control center itself. Revolt opposes that rationality with a different rationality, a different reason. If we do not want to temporarily prefigure other forms of life, but to actually create the conditions where we can live alternatives in perpetuity, this is what is called “revolution” or “transformation.” Revolution or transformation, first of all, engages in the negation of the constituted reality, or as Marx put it, “abolishes the present state of things.”18 New forms of life that come about but that leave the present state of things essentially unchanged are not new forms of life at all, but only developments or experiments within the limits of capital.
To be clear, I am by no means stating that nothing can be done until after capitalism is already in a museum or a graveyard. To the contrary, there are many forces of negation working against capitalism, from within capitalism itself. This dialectical sensibility reveals a certain Marxist orientation on my part, which many autonomists and autonomous social movements have also grasped, and which should be argued against the coterie of anarchists who cling to a politics of lifestyle and prefiguration. Revolt is only one form of negation.19 Negation can also come in the form of crisis, such as the global economic crisis that has been fueling insurrectionary activity around the world since 2008, or in the growing climate and ecological crisis.
One thinker who expressed a profound understanding of the intellect of revolt was Raya Dunayevskaya. She focused on the philosophical content of what she called “spontaneous mass action,” which she argued emerges as a dialectical force within and against the capitalist lifeworld.20 In 1981, Dunayevskaya wrote that “there are certain creative moments in history when the objective movement and the subjective movement so coincide that the self-determination of ideas and the self-determination of masses readying for revolt explode. Something is in the air, and you catch it. That is, you catch it if you have a clear head and if you have good ears to hear what is upsurging from below.”21 On the one hand, there is a certain spontaneity to revolt, and yet, revolt articulates and communicates a critical content that those with “clear heads” and “good ears” can hear. Often, the spontaneity of revolt masks its rationality and reason, because the iconic image of the reasonable is calm, objective, and carefully presented. Revolt does not look reasonable in that conventional way, because it is unsettling, subjective, and unruly. But Dunayevskaya contends that those who are willing to think and to listen can and do receive the messages of revolt.
In Philosophy and Revolution, Dunayevskaya explicitly addresses the intellect of revolt, arguing that revolt is itself a form of theory, that revolt embodies and reflects “a new stage of cognition.”22 She focuses on Marx’s concept of praxis, contending that the word “praxis” cannot and must not be reduced to a synonym for the word “practice.” Reducing praxis to practice strips the concept of praxis of its theoretical and critical dimensions. Dunayevskaya maintains that, for Marx, praxis never simply means action, but it is also a form of theory, and not theory in any narrow academic sense but, rather, a “critical-practical activity” that sees revolt as a form of philosophy from below.23 Perhaps most sharply, Dunayevskaya ripostes
it is fantastic that some of those who hail new forms of revolt still do not see the masses as Reason. Instead, they interpret these upsurges as if praxis meant the workers practicing what the theoreticians hand down. … No new stage of cognition is born out of thin air. It can be born only out of praxis. When workers are ready for a new plunge to freedom, that is when we reach also a new stage of cognition.24
It would be fair to say that “spontaneous combustion” was Dunayevskaya’s central and enduring interest. Marcuse was closely following her work and always learning from her analyses, as is well documented in their extensive correspondence and also reflected in his preface to her book, Marxism and Freedom.25 For Dunayevskaya, to be a Marxist was to oppose every statist transposition of Marx’s work in the twentieth century, to critically condemn so-called socialist states as “state capitalism” in disguise. In her view, to be a Marxist was to always return to “spontaneous action,” to “upsurging from below,” as the source of revolutionary negation. “The core of all of Marxism begins with and centers around the activity of labor in the process of production itself. It is here that the living laborer revolts against the domination of dead labor, against being made an appendage to the machine.”26 Dunayevskaya reads the revolts of everyday people around the world, which she constantly watched with a close eye throughout her life, as both an oppositional force to and philosophical questioning of, the capitalist reality.
Key to bringing these considerations of revolt together is the understanding that they all integrate (1) the psychological and affective dimensions of revolt, with (2) sociological and political-economic empiricism, and (3) the importance of spontaneity. An everyday life tied to the productive and consumptive apparatus of capitalism gives rise not only to certain social conditions but also to certain pathologies, and to certain feelings against it. Here, despite other differences, Dunayevskaya, Kristeva, Katsiaficas, and Marcuse are in full agreement. And it is worth pointing out that this was a fairly consistent feature of the critical theory of Marcuse’s generation. Erich Fromm, for example, a close colleague of both Dunayevskaya and Marcuse, was a practicing psychoanalyst. In Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, he offers a psychoanalytic critique of contemporary social life: “Today the vast majority of the people not only have no control over the whole of the economic machine, but they have little chance to develop genuine initiative and spontaneity at the particular job they are doing. They are ‘employed,’ and nothing more is expected from them than that they do what they are told.”27 In this short passage from Fromm (which comes from the concluding section of the book on the subject of spontaneity), you can see the integration of psychoanalytic and political-economic concerns, and the importance of spontaneity.
Yet within this milieu, only Dunayevskaya regularly insisted upon seeing revolt as a philosophical event. In a 1960 letter to Marcuse, she put it this way:
Subjectivity as objectivity absorbed is not for the philosophers, but for the masses and it is they who are writing the new page of history which is at the same time a new stage in cognition. Even as every previous great step in philosophic cognition was made only when a new leap to freedom became possible, so presently the new struggles for freedom the world over will certainly shake the intellectuals out of the stupors so that they too can create freely a new “category.”28
Like Katsiaficas, Dunayevskaya took very seriously what Marcuse wrote about eros in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. According to Marcuse: “The world of nature is a world of oppression, cruelty, and pain, as is the human world; like the latter, it awaits its liberation. This liberation is the work of Eros.”29 And although Marcuse understands the opposition of Eros to Logos, the antagonism of Eros against what is conventionally accepted as “reasonable,” he stresses that “Eros redefines reason in his own terms.”30
Beyond this, and as expressed in the preceding passage, Dunayevskaya articulates a distinct position that connects mass rebellion to “philosophic cognition.” Eros is indeed a liberatory and libidinal force that gives rise to (and lives in) revolt but, for Dunayevskaya, it dies in state power. For Dunayevskaya, if we follow the reason of revolt, the reason that eros defines, we discover that the real continuity of the currents of radical theory, of Marx’s thought, cannot be found in Stalinism or in any state power.31 Eros redefines reason in revolt, showing us the opposition between (1) Gemeinwesen (commons, public good/commonwealth) and Gemeingeist (common spirit/sensibility), on the one hand, and (2) purportedly representative states, on the other. In other words, states always claim to embody and reflect the eros of the polity, the Gemeinwesen and Gemeingeist. But the embodiment of eros in revolt directly and clearly refutes such claims, making it difficult for states to defend their reason (and sometimes, their raison d’être).32
Much of Katsiaficas’ thinking about the international contagiousness of the eros effect predicts perfectly what has happened in the so-called Arab Spring. In his essay “Seattle Was Not the Beginning,” Katsiaficas wrote:
Because of the power of the media and the global village character of the world today, the eros effect has become increasingly important. Social movements are less and less confined to one city, region or nation; they do not exist in isolation in distant corners of the globe; actions are often synchronically related. Social movements in one country are affected sometimes more by events and actions outside their own national context than they are by domestic dynamics.33
Katsiaficas viewed Seattle in 1999 similarly to how Deleuze and Guattari viewed Paris in May–June 1968. Seattle, Katsiaficas argued, was yet another nodal point in a recent history of revolt in various geographic locations. The expressions of disaffection in Seattle would inevitably continue elsewhere in other ways, as we saw shortly thereafter in mass protests at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meeting in April 2000 in Washington, DC; during the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy; at the first World Social Forum in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil; and at many other locations up to the present.
In this way, the eros effect helps to explain how, for example, upheaval in Tunisia in 2010 resonates with (and helps to detonate) Egyptian disaffection under Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and how the spirit of revolt there seems to “catch on” in countries like Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, among others. One thing to keep in mind in the present macro-level view of revolt is the fact that within each specific location there is an incredible and even overwhelming amount of complexity. It is important to avoid a reductionist view of upheaval that sees it as being the same across countries and time, to avoid stripping each occurrence of its particular communicative content. One of the places you can see this complexity very well is in Jehane Noujaim’s remarkable film The Square (2013). Despite some of the faults of this film (a discussion of which is not relevant here), it succeeds in conveying the difficulty and complexity of the communicative content expressed by and through revolt. The intellect of revolt does not share a single brain. Throughout the waves of revolt in Egypt, positions on the military, Muslim Brotherhood, and Morsi were developing and shifting in relation to very particular political moves, and religious and cultural commitments.
A national and subnational level of analysis of the specificity of the intellect of revolt is an important endeavor, but that is not my current concern.34 There is a different comportment involved in explaining what has happened, on the one hand, and in coming to terms with the critical content of revolt as an unceasing human phenomenon, on the other. I am thus concerned with the question: What is the general schematic of such critical content?
Katsiaficas explains distinctions that help to define a certain schematic in his book The Subversion of Politics. On the characteristics of autonomous social movements in Europe, in the three decades after 1968, Katsiaficas writes:
Parliamentary groups operate according to the logic of the established political system. The first rule of any party must be to obey the law. To ensure members’ compliance with existing rules for participation in the government, a structure must be maintained that is compatible with the state. Insurgent social movements aimed at limiting the power of government and creating autonomy seek forms of decision-making of a qualitatively different kind.35
So what is the critical content, at least paradigmatically, that the qualitatively different logic of revolt poses to the logic of the established order? Here, I shall provide a rudimentary sketch of the content and logic of revolt in both positive and negative (and normative) terms:36
1.Revolt is writing and speaking by other means than words. That is to say, revolt articulates questions, criticisms, visions, and it expresses disaffections. Following Immanuel Kant, we might say that revolt is a “public use of reason,” and yet contrary to Kant, revolt writes and speaks by other means than those he recommended.37 Revolt is an experimental form of writing and speaking in that it makes use of nontextual and nonverbal communication—for example, musical, visual, symbolic, and theatrical forms.
2.Revolt writes and speaks against the existing state of affairs. Revolt rejects the world as it is, not wholly per se, but in some defining regard.
3.Revolt writes and speaks for some other state of affairs (or states of affairs) that can be imagined. Revolt imagines a state of affairs that does not exist yet seems both possible and desirable to participants. That is, revolt imagines possible and desirable transformation.
4.Revolt writes and speaks against conventional politics and established channels of reform. Revolt emerges in the face of frustrated and failed reform.
5.Revolt writes and speaks for positions that are marginal or invisible without revolt. Revolt seeks to eliminate the invisibility and oblivion of its own reasonable positions.
6.Revolt writes and speaks against both the boredom and acceptance of everyday life by way of their opposites: excitement and rejection, an ecstatic refutation. Raoul Vaneigem declares that “wherever passionate acts of refusal and a passionate consciousness of the necessity of resistance trigger stoppages in the factories of collective illusion, there the revolution of everyday life is underway.”38 Revolt is a rupture with everyday life and its ideological defenses.
7.Revolt writes and speaks for the direct experience of autonomy and spontaneity (this acknowledges the prefigurative aspects of the rupture with everyday life).
8.Revolt writes and speaks against the separation of theory from praxis. This is, perhaps strangely, another Kantian dimension of revolt; like Kant, revolt rejects the notion that what makes sense in theory (i.e., justice, freedom, dignity, liberation) is impractical.39
9.Revolt writes and speaks for resolutions of anguish and hope. Revolt is not, in-and-of-itself, a solution to a problem, and yet it conceives of itself as part of resolutions.
10.Revolt writes and speaks more desperately and dangerously than conventional writing and speaking. Even where revolt is nonviolent, it self-consciously risks various forms of violence.
Of course, given a particular case of revolt—in Germany, Italy, France, Egypt, Turkey, Mexico, Spain, the United States, or Brazil—we can and must make further specifications. Locations and eruptions of revolt are not generic. Revolt arises from circumstances, within historical contexts, and in response to changing material and immaterial conditions, even specific policies or verdicts in some cases.
Nonetheless, I offer the preceding general picture of revolt, which I maintain does something important and productive. It stipulates a logic and content of revolt that distinguishes revolt from other forms of praxis. This is precisely a qualitative distinction that expands upon and helps us to understand the logic of insurgent social movements that Katsiaficas speaks about, an oppositional logic to that of the established social, political, and economic system.
Why should there be any enduring interest in exploring old and making new connections between philosophy and revolt here in the context of the present essay? I claim that doing so is fundamental to the tasks of revealing the reason of revolt, on the one hand, and to revealing the praxis of philosophy, on the other. Moreover, the carrying out of either one of these tasks is critical to the carrying out of the other. But how, precisely, is that the case?
First, revolt—and especially seemingly spontaneous uprising—is typically characterized as the opposite of thinking, as an emotional outburst that is entirely destructive and always condemnably violent. This characterization rests upon the familiar idea that reason must be dispassionate, purely objective at its best, and that it is impossible to be reasonable while also being affected by anger or indignation, among other tumultuous feelings. Thus, exploring and establishing the reason of revolt, and even more, the notion of revolt as reason, challenges widespread assumptions about not only how reasonable persons act but also challenges the notion that good thinking is dispassionate. As has been more fully argued in the preceding sections of this essay, unpacking the critical content of revolt produces new understandings of what thinking is and may be, and how thinking happens.
Second, philosophy as an academic field can be seen as the discipline that stood before and gave rise to all the others.40 From the point of view that identifies philosophy as the first form of all the sciences—natural, mathematical, and social—philosophy works with the unknown to search out and discover truths, which it collects, and eventually to establish formal bodies of knowledge. Philosophy typically claims to systematize the separation of good thinking from bad, truth from falsehood, much of which can be measured by logic. These fundamentally epistemological and moral dimensions of philosophy define so much of the analytical school.
Friedrich Nietzsche has been taken far more seriously outside of the analytical tradition. In many ways, Nietzsche’s critique of philosophy was more ferocious and unsparing than Marx’s. Claiming that the purportedly dispassionate objectivity of philosophy conceals its ulterior and moralizing motivations, Nietzsche famously wrote: “I distrust all systematizers, and avoid them.”41 In the same book, Twilight of the Idols, alternatively titled How to Philosophize with a Hammer, Nietzsche devotes whole sections of criticism to Socrates and the assumptions of “reason” in philosophy.42 “All the ideas that philosophers have treated for thousands of years have been mummied concepts; nothing real has ever come out of their hands alive. These idolaters of concepts merely kill and stuff things when they worship—they threaten the life of everything they adore.”43 In Nietzsche’s work, a key problem in the history of philosophy is that it purports virtue in its distance from the living world. Whereas for Nietzsche, feeling and thinking are not antithetical, and any pretension to their separation is a lie, indeed, one of philosophy’s favorite deceptions.
Philosophy has long suffered its own caricature, the very one Nietzsche attacked, and has mostly positioned itself (and has been positioned by others) as being so far removed from the world of real life that what it offers to practice is always unclear. In teaching political philosophy and theory in a department of political science, the same demand to answer the question of practice haunts every session. Much like Kant, I have chosen to substantiate the connections between philosophy and praxis, between theory and practice, rather than to accept some metaphysical conceit that the real world is somewhere beneath philosophy. What philosophy offers, at its very best, are transformative understandings of the world that can reveal the limits of ideology and radical reevaluations of the principles that organize our lives. Following this contention, when other practices than philosophy offer such transformative understandings and radical reevaluations, we must consider the other ways that philosophy happens, challenging the notion that the most serious thinking is the purview of professionals.
Still, how do these two tasks intersect, and why does the intersection matter for a theory of revolt?
There is a long history of people in positions of power calling everyone who opposes their position “irrational.” There is also a long history of turning that inverted perspective on its head. Despite Nietzsche’s derisions, Plato understood this point well, as he and Socrates argued against the Sophists (whom Nietzsche, interestingly, defends), against those “professional intellectuals” who sold ideas to the sons of wealthy families. Since the time of Plato and Socrates, one defining vision for philosophy was as a discursive and dialectical force against the existing state of affairs. Central to this philosophic vision was an opposition to professional philosophy. Beyond Socrates’ notoriously pejorative regard for the Sophists, we might also consider the argument of Socrates in Plato’s Meno that the formally uneducated slave was already fully capable of doing philosophy. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates engages in discussion with one of Meno’s slaves to prove that the slave possesses intellectual capabilities that must not be denied. Eventually, Meno’s slave comes to feel that he has “spontaneously recovered” knowledge, an epiphany that was dialectically aroused.44 And most importantly, we must consider the fact that Socrates—iconic philosopher of philosophers—was an enemy of the state, ultimately put to death for doing philosophy in the streets. In many ways, the guiding question of the present essay has been: Who else does philosophy in the streets?
The problem with the case in the Meno is that the midwife for the slave’s epiphany is the guidance of the great philosopher; so the slave cannot take full credit for his achievement in the end, since Socrates appears as the one to thank for the revelation. But often, there aren’t any knowing philosophers, iconic, professional, self-proclaimed, or otherwise, helping make philosophy happen. Sometimes social upheavals arouse the deep questioning and epiphanies that philosophers seek to arouse. Often, nothing does philosophy better than revolt. In other words, Socrates did not go far enough.45
I would affirm Alain Badiou’s statement that “as a philosopher, I never accept the world as it is …”46 Good philosophy throws the world into question. But no conventional text can expect to be as provocative or compelling as creative, unpredictable uprisings that seize attention and ignite imaginations. Revolt is a philosophical modality, a way of doing and surpassing the work of professional intellectuals. If we fail to recognize reason as revolt and revolt as reason, then we fail to see that the Greek uprisings in 2008, the “Arab Spring,” Occupy, and uprisings in Turkey, Brazil, and Spain, for example, are doing the most important philosophy of our time. It is necessary to theorize a “philosophy from below,” which understands that professional thinkers have more to learn from insurrectionary movements than to teach them and, also, that understands the deficiencies of reason within the limits of law. Is it even possible to take seriously the claim that authors of books on politics and morality and philosophy can throw the reality and justice of the world into question as well as occupied buildings and public squares? A philosophical text may conceal or confess its aspiration to be as provocative as a riot, but this remains an enduring and lofty goal.
In the wake of the riots around London in early August 2011, Darcus Howe, a West Indian writer and broadcaster in London, was interviewed on the BBC. From his perspective, it was quite clear that the riots were an insurrectionary expression of youth defiance against constant police brutality and racism throughout many London boroughs. Howe understood the riots to be telling us that there was something seriously wrong in the country. As he put it, “What is obvious is that these young people will go on relentlessly. … They’ve seen Syrians, Libyans, Egyptians and insurrection. I don’t think four months jailed in a miserable little hole will change them. It’s a different set of youths today. … That’s been going on since I landed here 50 years ago, now it’s almost complete. I think this insurrection is the last stop in its completeness.”47 Whether one agrees with Howe’s analysis (and he was at least wrong about the insurrection of 2011 being the “last stop”), he is rightly interested in the rational and reasonable content of the events. Meanwhile, Howe’s interviewer at the BBC would not recognize the existence of anything sensible in the riots, because her position expressed the general view of the opposition in power, denying the upheavals any rationality or reason, reducing the whole expression to an aberrant, senseless episode of violence.48
But when we speak of insurrection, we need not invoke some narrow notion of armed militant factions in a standoff with state power, or of violent conflict and murder. We can recover the word’s fifteenth-century meaning, which is defined by the idea of “a rising up.” The risings-up of insurrection start from within a system or place and involve going against from within, making problems from inside. Insurrection says something legible about the system in which it arises, even when its opponents deem it “irrational.” Insurrection does not necessarily seek political solutions like “new government.” New government is likely to make new betrayals and may bring forth the reasonable criticisms of new insurrection, as materialized in the Egyptian uprisings against Morsi in the summer of 2013.
To be sure, many uprisings do not have what we could reasonably call “revolutionary” content. If, by revolution, we mean some kind of structural transformation, some kind of transformation of power relations, or of everyday life, then we cannot necessarily call uprisings that occur in response to contested election results, court decisions, or even electrical blackouts “revolutionary.” Some uprisings neither seek nor result in transformations of power or conditions of life. For example, masses of unruly people breaking down doors are sometimes mobilized by the shopping prospects of Black Friday in the United States, or by a new Nike sneaker debut (e.g., a so-called riot at a mall in Orlando, Florida, in February 2012). But even a frenzied mass of consumers stealing sneakers in a mall or TVs during a blackout expresses something quite serious about a culture, if we want to listen.
Often, rioting and looting are easier to read, as in the case of the tumultuous response to the police shooting and killing of an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. This typically calm St. Louis suburb was rocked for days by rioting, smashed shop windows, protests, fires, confrontations with police, and looting by people outraged by the murder. While news reports openly and reliably condemned these uprisings, never hesitating to call them “violent,” some participants in the upheavals have been interviewed explaining their rationality and reason. Participants have expressed the need for exceptional outrage against exceptional injustice, to show the police that even if the law allows the police to use their violence, the community will not. One participant in the rioting, DeAndre Smith, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the Ferguson revolt was exactly the right response to the injustice, saying, “I think they got a taste of what fighting back means.”49 Once we abandon the disqualifying and vilifying discourses of irrationality and violence, it is obvious that any honest consideration of the Ferguson uprisings will require a confrontation with questions of racism, power, poverty, justice, and police brutality. These are just some, among many other contents, that a dedicated reading could explore.
Nonetheless, on the issue of reading the rational and reasonable content of revolt, I must address the fact that outsiders consuming unsympathetic reports of the uprising from a distance are unlikely to carry out the close and dedicated reading I’ve been discussing. For many observers at a distance, the communicative content of revolt may not be sufficient to overturn the vilification of the uprising as irrational violence, or to shift their ideological commitments against it.
While revolt gets more attention than a book, and more effectively and directly communicates than intellectual analysis, a network of supportive activities—outside of and after the uprising—can help revolt defend itself against reductionist and ideological readings. The usual activities come to mind: articles, books, blogs and social media, independent media, radio shows like Democracy Now!, documentary films, sit-ins, die-ins, solidarity demonstrations, university classes, conversation with family and friends, and so on. One example, in response to Ferguson, was the organization of the Black Lives Matter reading list and the Ferguson Reads Discussion Group at Left Bank Books in St. Louis. As described by Left Bank Books: “The events in Ferguson have been upsetting for nearly everyone in our community. This reading group is an attempt to add some civility and context to the mix by exploring race, not only in St. Louis, but America as a whole.”50 The group started meeting to discuss Ferguson in September 2014 and continued into 2015.
Regarding this example and others, in Missouri and around the world, in the network of supportive activities for a close reading of the content and contemplation of revolt, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the revolt itself is the catalyst, the unit of study, the agenda-setting event. All of the follow-up analysis about race and class, economic crisis, capital, the opportunity structure in impoverished Black communities, tactics and rebellion, police brutality, and the sociological and historical context of violence in America emerge from the communiqué of revolt. Well over a dozen teenagers have been killed by police since the Michael Brown shooting to the time of this writing, and, sadly, we can be confident that the number is far greater by the time you are reading this. What makes the difference between the ones we know about and the ones that we don’t is revolt. It is therefore clear that revolt is a discourse that participates in the proliferation and production of knowledge.
Beyond the old idea of “permanent revolution,” which goes back to Marx and Trotsky, among others, I recommend something like “permanent revolt,” which is close to what Kristeva calls a “culture of revolt.” Kristeva says: “The permanence of contradiction, the temporariness of reconciliation, the bringing to the fore of everything that puts the very possibility of unitary meaning to the test (such as the drive, the unnamable feminine, destructivity, psychosis, etc.): these are what the culture of revolt explores.”51 She further claims that the culture of revolt “poses the question of another politics, that of permanent conflictuality.”52 Seen this way, revolt is part of revolutionary transformation inasmuch as it is an active, physical, and philosophical force of negation that throws the existing state of affairs into question. It is not only philosophical in some narrow intellectual sense, for it is also visible, public, and eventual (as some philosophy is). Following Kristeva, I see revolt as the conflictual activity of ongoing challenges to every celebratory discourse that defends each new reconciliation in society and politics. Thus, for example, revolt opposes the intrinsically conciliatory dispositions of liberalism and conservatism.
Still, revolt is not a clear step toward revolution in any certain or linear sense. It is, rather, an activity that reveals problems and generates real, concrete thinking about the problems. The position I have outlined is self-consciously precarious: Those who make revolt do not share a single blueprint for the different world(s) they desire, and revolt does not know how to make new worlds. Indeed, even after the establishment of some new lifeworld, revolt would return to challenge its limits and failures. In this way, revolt is a precarious politics of world-making. In the beginning of every revolt, the only great confidence is that the present state of affairs is unacceptable. Yet, we should never minimize the significance of that epiphany. In between every revolt, we are accustomed to accepting the unacceptable, to tolerating the intolerable. Revolt breaks that pathological obedience. The practical hope of revolt is a reasonable aspiration that what emerges from it may constitute a nodal point in the development of transformative politics.
Because the messages of insurrection are written by those who want to live in a different world, but cannot say exactly what that world is, uprisings always appear irrational from the point of view of power. They speak a different language altogether. Thus, the demand to “be rational” typically functions much like the demand to “be practical,” which is essentially a demand to play by the rules. Everyone knows that “rational people” write letters to editors, vote, and abide by the laws. But it is exactly this “rational-practicality” that the most radical elements always reject, and for good reasons, which is to say that there are other reasons and other rationalities, ones that are excluded by the ideological narrowness of those who defend existing society. Revolt is largely about wrenching open that narrowness so that we can see other rationalities, another reason.
Insurrectionary movements exceed the diagnostic and prescriptive efforts of scholars, and everyday people are capable of discovering (as they have been discovering in uprisings across Middle Eastern and North African countries, in the wave of occupation movements, and in Spain, Turkey, Brazil, and elsewhere) that they are the midwives, which puts them beyond the subordinate relationship of Meno’s slave to Socrates.
From philosophical, psychological, social, and ethical perspectives, the absence of revolt is more frightening than its presence. The absence of revolt signals the acceptance—or at least the toleration—of what is. But an acceptance of the reality and justice of the existing world is an acceptance that good philosophy never grants easily. We therefore have good reason to be reassured by occurrences of riot, insurrection, and revolt, understanding these as modalities of the collective questioning of the world. The various risings-up of insurrection, the activities of everyday people who throw the world into question, are writing philosophy from below. And it is philosophy from below—not the professional thinking of academics—that raises the most pressing questions. This calls for a reversal of general perspectives commonly held in both society (i.e., notions of practicality, violence, irrationality) and science (i.e., notions of objectivity, intelligence, analysis), but it is a reversal that makes sense when we listen to—and learn from—the reason of revolt.
1. Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 3.
2. Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 3.
3. Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keeffe (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2002), 120.
4. George Katsiaficas, “The Eros Effect,” personal website, 1989, http://www.eroseffect.com/articles/eroseffectpaper.PDF.
5. One excellent discussion of these themes can be found in George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland: AK Press, 2006). See, specifically, the section “Toward a Rationality of the Heart,” 228–233. See also tables 7.2 and 7.3 and the corresponding discussion, 246–248.
6. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6–7.
7. In many interviews and books, Michel Foucault has discussed how “madness” has been used to establish and maintain relations of power in society and politics. His most extensive study, which supports the claim here, is Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1988).
8. George Katsiaficas, “Is There an Alternative to Capitalist Globalization?,” in The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization, ed. Eddie Yuen, Daniel Burton Rose, and George Katsiaficas (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001), 321–322.
9. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press), 25.
10. Ibid., 55.
11. See John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2010), 3; Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991), 97–103; Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, trans. Marshall S. Shatz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 133.
12. See Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2008); Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (Oakland: AK Press, 2010); Benjamin Franks, “Anti-Fascism and Prefigurative Ethics,” Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action 8, no. 1 (Summer, 2014): 44–72.
13. Franks, “Anti-Fascism and Prefigurative Ethics,” 53.
14. See Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Precarious Communism: Manifest Mutations, Manifesto Detourned (New York: Autonomedia, 2014), and Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).
15. Atelier Populaire, Posters from the Revolution, Paris, May 1968: Texts and Posters (London: Dobson Books, 1969).
16. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “May ’68 Did Not Take Place,” in Hatred of Capitalism, ed. Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lontringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 209–211 (209 and 211).
17. Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 257.
18. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in The Portable Marx, trans. Eugene Kamenka (New York: Penguin, 1983), 162–195 (179).
19. Throughout this essay, I variously consider both the negative and positive dimensions of revolt. Negative, in the sense of revolt’s negation, refers to the critical refusal of and opposition to constituted reality. Positive, in the sense of the creative and purposeful dimension of revolt, refers to the imaginative anticipation of desirable possibilities. I cannot suggest that one of these dimensions comes first, or that they do or must always occur simultaneously. I do not think we can or even should foreclose the possibility of any order or of the simultaneity of these dimensions in revolt. What I would assert with more confidence is that the transformative power of revolt is bolstered by the depth and clarity of both its positive and negative content.
20. See, for example, Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), chap. 11; and Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until Today (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), chap. 11.
21. Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, xxvii (original emphasis).
22. Raya Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1982), 255.
23. Dunayevskaya, Philosophy and Revolution, 265.
24. Ibid., 265 (all emphases in original).
25. See The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954–1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory, ed. Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012); and Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom.
26. Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom, 177.
27. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart, 1941), 272–273.
28. Dunayevskaya, The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 74.
29. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 166.
30. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 224.
31. See Dunayevskaya’s discussion of Marcuse in Dunayevskaya, The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 222.
32. While I’m not taking it up more fully here, I acknowledge that the question of the relationship between revolt and the state is a large and complex one. For example, can’t revolt democratize the state rather than undermine its legitimacy? Or, can’t the state be the reasonable side of the antagonism? While it is tempting to take a detour into such questions here, I will only note that the thinkers cited earlier (Dunayevskaya, Fromm, and Marcuse) do take up the question of the state extensively in their work. I have also done so in my book Unbounded Publics: Transgressive Publics Spheres, Zapatismo, and Political Theory (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008).
33. George Katsiaficas, “Seattle Was Not the Beginning,” in The Battle of Seattle, 29–35 (32).
34. I have and would of course read such works, which are mainly historical and documentary, like Noujaim’s The Square (2013), or descriptive works of political science or sociology. Such work is important, but it is not my concern. I am interested in the theoretical dimensions and the practical and political implications of revolt as a persistent and interminable human activity.
35. Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, 100.
36. I should briefly define what is meant here by “positive and negative (and normative) terms.” By “positive,” I mean to indicate what revolt is and is for. By “negative,” I mean to indicate what revolt is not and is against (as in a negation). The is/is not distinction belongs to the descriptive account of the critical content and logic of revolt. The for/against distinction belongs to the normative account of the critical content and logic of revolt.
37. See Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’ ” in Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60. Kant favors the public speech and, especially, the published writing of “men of learning.”
38. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Rebel Press, 2006), 271.
39. See Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice,” in Political Writings, 61–92.
40. See Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 89–94.
41. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008), 4.
42. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 7–17.
43. Ibid., 13.
44. Plato, Meno in Protagoras and Meno, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie (London: Penguin Books, 1956), 85d.
45. This is also because, while Socrates insists on philosophical currents that test the limits of the laws, he ultimately accepts and defends the laws.
46. “BBC HARDtalk Interview,” with Stephen Sackur, March 24, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPCCNmE7b9g.
47. “Darcus Howe: ‘My Father Curfewed Me and I Jumped through the Window,’ ” Socialist Worker, Issue 2265, August 20, 2011, http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=25714.
48. “Darcus Howe BBC News Interview on Riots,” BBC News, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzDQCT0AJcw.
49. “DeAndre Smith Justifies the Looting in Ferguson,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 11, 2014, http://www.stltoday.com/news/multimedia/video-man-justifies-the-looting-in-ferguson/html_7699be22-bb74-5d4f-aa49-fcc46f5cb025.html.
50. Left Bank Books has multiple pages on their website dedicated to their efforts to further an understanding of the events in Ferguson. Originally posted at http://www.left-bank.com/fergusonreads.
51. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 10.
52. Ibid., 11.