Robin Celikates on “Radical Civility? Civil Disobedience and the Ideology of Non-Violence”

• Books & Literature
• Free

‘Civility’ has always been an ideological weapon, a stick with which the moral majority beats unruly subjects into conformity, attempts to control protest by dividing it into a good and bad protest, and justifies the repression and silencing of dissent especially by minority groups.

This lecture will be given by Robin Celikates from Universiteit van Amsterdam, Department of Philosophy

Against this background, it is understandable that many commentators reject civility discourse in principle. In the context of these debates, civil disobedience – in virtue of the ‘civil’ it carries in its name – occupies an ambivalent position. In this paper, I show how the equivocal and potentially ideological meaning of the ‘civil’ in civil disobedience is to blame for the confusion that depoliticizes and thereby distorts both public and philosophical conceptualizations of civil disobedience.

In contrast, I will outline how the ‘civil’ in civil disobedience can be understood in a politically radical way, without falling into the traps of the ideology of civility as non- violence. I will do so in four steps: In the first section, I will revisit the influential definition of civil disobedience in the liberal tradition and show how it presupposes and implies a notion of civility that is problematic from both a political and a philosophical point of view. In the second section, I will briefly outline elements for an alternative understanding of the ‘civil’ in civil disobedience which I will then, in the third section, use to problematize the insistence on its nonviolent character. In the last part, I will argue that the radical political potential of civil disobedience resides in its oscillation between an irreducibly symbolic form of political contestation and the moments of real confrontation that it usually entails – an oscillation that the theoretically confused and ideologically charged dichotomy of violence vs. nonviolence is unable to account for.