Part I - A genealogy of popular dissent

Summary

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void, of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

The first part of this book examines the historically constituted dimensions of transversal dissent. The focus rests, in particular, with theories and practices of popular dissent. More specifically, the inquiry investigates how ideas about popular dissent have emerged and evolved during the modern period, and how the political practices that issued from them have come to transgress boundaries of national sovereignty. The main objective of this endeavour is to understand how centuries of practising and thinking about resistance have shaped the nature of dissent and its role in contemporary global politics.

This history of the present, to use Foucault's well-known terminology, takes the form of a genealogy. Its purpose is to illuminate relatively unknown aspects of our past to then illustrate how they have gradually grown into ideas and practices that are more familiar to us. The inquiry begins with a sixteenth-century French text, Étienne de la Boétie's Contr'un, or Anti-One. Despite its relative obscurity today, this text played a significant role in shaping practices of dissent in the early and middle stages of the modern period.