Disobey by Frederic Gros

Author:Frederic Gros
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

CHAPTER SEVEN

From Consent to Civil Disobedience

After discussing submission, subordination and conformism, I shall now explore a fourth locus of obedience – consent. This register will enable us to question political relations more directly. Up to now we have remained in the realm of metaphor, since we ended up saying, supported by various demystifiers: ‘Don’t tell me stories, citizens are first and foremost submitted, prisoners of the balance of forces. They obey the laws like slaves. The despotic state makes laws as the expression and multiplier of its strength. If the subject “respects” them, this means they are constrained by the judicial system, the police and the army.’ Another discourse, more sententiously, tries to revive old allegiances: ‘Citizens honour, respect and revere responsible leaders, endowed with knowledge, wisdom, virtue, the sense of sacrifice and the passion for social justice. They obey them just as they should, as reverential children: the state as father and mother knows better than them how to generate their well-being and their happiness.’ Inspired leftists, however, will immediately rise up and say: ‘Stop dreaming, citizens obey as automata. They obey out of habit, inertia, in order to be like everyone else; they obey like robots, they obey just as they consume.’

Like a slave, like a child, like a robot. In the case of consent, it is possible to say that each person obeys as a citizen. It is as if with consent we finally find a style of obedience that is properly political. Whether in the realm of ideas (classical theories of the social contract) or in public debate (rulers’ repeated references to the republican pact), consent is viewed as the rational kernel of obedience to the laws of the city.

As an opening remark, we might point out that anarchists have often focused their critical rage on the right to vote and on marriage. These have been regular targets, two designated enemies.1 But what do these two have in common? Private life on the one hand, the public sphere on the other. The intimacy of the couple on the one hand, the fate of the nation on the other. Yet what makes a bridge between these two is precisely the style of obedience – in other words, consent. In both cases, the marriage of individuals and the voting of citizens, the same refrain is often heard: ‘It’s too late.’ Too late for what? To disobey. If you find conjugal monotony exhausting, if you find the laws voted by a parliamentary majority scandalous, don’t complain: you agreed in front of the registrar, you said ‘yes’ in full awareness, you slipped your ballot paper into the box. No one dragged you by force to your future spouse. Nor did you have a pistol at your head in the voting booth. In both cases, you accepted the rules of the game, democratic and conjugal.

In other words, you gave consent, and freely. Consent is an act by which a person makes themselves their own prisoner.2 Consent is a free obedience, a voluntary alienation, a constraint that is fully accepted.

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