Abstract
Love it or leave it: it’s a familiar dilemma for troublemakers of all stripes. But can leaving one’s polity in protest ever be a way of loving it? This is the question Jennet Kirkpatrick poses in The Virtues of Exit. The book makes a compelling case for thinking about exiting in protest, from migration to resignation to marronage, as something nobler than opting out of political life. Leaving “is not the end of politics or the cessation of political struggle; it is a continuation of both by other means” (51). Kirkpatrick offers a dazzling survey of how performances of exit constitute everyday acts of resistance that fall below the hallowed heights of civil disobedience but are no less worthy of theoretical attention. Tightly written and historically erudite, The Virtues of Exit proposes a bold way of rethinking the meaning of egress as an expression of civic attachment that connects James Baldwin’s self-exile to Paris with Mohamed Bouazizi’s sacrificial act of self-immolation.
In Albert O. Hirschman’s classical formulation, exit is the antithesis of voice. Consumers choose to exit their relationship with a declining brand when it fails to secure the loyalty to make them want to improve it by exercising voice. Similarly, citizens choose to check out of political association rather than voice their grievances where loyalty to shared institutions is waning. Kirkpatrick counters Hirschman’s familiar “negative” account of exit with a “positive” one that portrays leaving as collective rather than individual, as expressing loyalty rather than signaling its exhaustion, and as responsive to the conduct of one’s fellow citizens as much as to the legitimacy of the state. This positive conception blurs the boundaries between exit and voice in order to reconceptualize withdrawal as a speech act addressed to the very association left behind. The book’s four chapters examine the many faces of exit—as noisy, expressive, and attached—but Kirkpatrick’s central concern is what she calls resistant exit: “The goal of resistant exit is to disrupt, interrupt, or even to unseat those in power albeit from afar. In other words, resistant exits are attached exits, because the ones who leave remained invested in the politics of the place or group that was left” (20).
Kirkpatrick considers a wide set of cases of dissent at a distance, ranging from monarchial courts in exile to draft dodgers evading the Vietnam War, but the icon of resistant exit is a familiar figure: Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau has received much attention in recent years from political theorists looking beyond his reputation as the “paterfamilias of civil disobedience” to consider his less dramatic acts of withdrawing from public life to sojourn and pick berries as modes of ethical self-fashioning (48). Kirkpatrick’s Thoreau, by contrast, doesn’t withdraw; he resigns. Like an elected official who steps down from office in protest, Thoreau declares his resignation from the office of citizen to voice his objection to the U.S.’s war for slavery in Mexico. Exit here is not the opposite of loyalty, but rather the highest expression of Thoreau’s attachment to the democratic republic he would reform.
If exit can be a powerful way of expressing voice, it is not always an easy one. Kirkpatrick is keenly attuned to the burdens exodus places on dissidents who must leave friends and family behind to face isolation in a strange land. The book frames this “dilemma of exit” in its chapter on Plato’s Crito. Kirkpatrick reads the dialogue against the grain to set aside the familiar question of whether or not Socrates is morally obligated to accept legal punishment and instead reframes the debate between Crito and the Laws as staging the internal dilemma faced by refugees and asylum seekers weighing the question of whether to honor their civic obligations or flee. One might question whether or not Socrates’s situation offers a clear parallel to these contemporary cases due to the gendered character of his deliberation. Kirkpatrick notes the patriarchal nature of the Laws’ arguments for filial piety, but Socrates weighs exit in no less masculine terms. He tells Crito not to fret about leaving family members behind. Socrates’s dilemma is not a conflict of obligations to the state and to those depending on his care, but rather the unencumbered question of whether or not to honor one’s moral duties or act immorally for the sake of self-preservation.
These encounters with Plato and Thoreau set up the remaining chapters’ more wide-ranging discussion of how dissidents, ranging from Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt to fugitive slaves in antebellum America to human rights activists behind the Iron Curtain, negotiate the burdens of resistant exit. American slave narratives in particular are taken to exemplify how collective acts of flight do not only resist injustice but actively deepen attachment to community. Frederick Douglass may have fled slavery as a lone individual, but his autobiographies transform this singular act into a moment in a collective struggle for abolition. Voicing the story of his escape became a way of deepening his solidarity with the enslaved, just as this solidarity empowered him to speak out against injustice. Voice and exit here amplify each other. Moreover, freedmen and women on the run resolve the dilemma of exit through pledging to never lose sight of their duty to liberate those left behind.
This brief summary illustrates just some of the wide terrain covered in a thin volume. Across the book’s many examples and sources, three archetypes of exit emerge: the immigrant, the émigré, and the fugitive slave. Whereas the immigrant represents Hirschman’s negative conception of exit as an individual’s choice to severe bonds with their association as loyalty wanes, the émigré embodies the practice of positive exit by loyally fighting to reform his former community in hopes of return. The fugitive slave, however, draws a line of flight that escapes even this dichotomy. Like the émigré, the fugitive flees the plantation and steals back at night to free others left behind. This is attached exit, but her attachment is first and foremost to her fellow oppressed and not to the state or citizens that enslave them. Fugitivity, as theorized in the black radical tradition, rejects the idea that the white supremacist state could ever be democratically repaired and figures flight as seeking out alternative sites of freedom and collective self-rule. Harriet Jacobs’s time spent hiding in the garret deepens her commitment to liberating “her tribe—her people” rather than redeeming the republic as a whole (87).
It is therefore surprising that, despite the focus on instances of black fugitivity from Jacobs’s escape to Stokely Carmichael’s flight to Guinea, the book’s aim of defending its particular conception of positive exit privileges the ideal of the émigré and his longing to reform as its ideal of properly political exit. This conclusion is key to the book’s argument that resistant exit does not simply disrupt the status quo but can “cultivate new democratic forms and revitalize democratic life” (111). Douglass, for example, pledges solidarity with those still in bonds but he is ultimately championed as a Walzerian “connected” critic who seeks to “jolt” white readers into critical reflection on their shared principles by retelling his personal experience of bondage (98, 84). Obscured by this conclusion is the generative tension between the elements of the émigré and the fugitive in Douglass’s critique of slavery, or what Juliet Hooker has recently described as a tension between fugitive democracy and black fugitivity. This is perhaps a small quibble but it points towards a broader puzzle posed by Kirkpatrick’s valorization of émigré exit.
What attaches Douglass’s exit to community and gives it its disruptive force to “jolt” is its literary representation. On Kirkpatrick’s account, it is the publication of an autobiography recounting his experience, not the fight with Covey or plotting escape with others on the plantation, that turns his exit into an act of resistance. It is therefore the voices of the authors representing exit more so than embodied acts of exit per se that occupy the center of The Virtues of Exit’s analysis: James Baldwin found respite from American racism in Paris but its consequences for resistance lay in the “essays, novels, and plays” he wrote for audiences back home; Plato conveys the existential dilemma of exit through a dialogue form that “slows down the [reader’s] decision”; Thoreau’s resignation is incomplete without the “aesthetic act of writing, broadcasting, and communicating” his dissent in an essay; draft dodgers continue their war against war from abroad by circulating instructions on how to immigrate to Canada (15, 46, 60). If exit disrupts and resists, it appears to do so primarily through the written word. I take this point to be the crux of Kirkpatrick’s criticisms of James Scott in the book’s fourth chapter. Scott’s account of hidden transcripts stretches the concept of resistance “too thin” by losing sight of the fact that political acts of dissent “should be somewhat public-interest focused and should be connected in some measure to communities of resistance” (95, 96). The work of connecting exits and publics seems to fall to the author who discloses and narrates these hidden transcripts in the bourgeois public sphere more so than to the activist who performatively enacts them in the streets, even if it is sometimes these embodied performances that set the stage for authorial voice.
This is to say that exit and voice remain in a complex and uneasy tension throughout the book. Leaving in protest sometimes speaks for itself. Take, for example, the case of students at the University of Notre Dame who walked out of their graduation ceremony to protest their Commencement speaker, Vice President Pence. However, performative enactments that signify clear and uncontested meanings may be few and far between. If exits often require the supplement of voice, it is because political struggles are struggles over both deeds and their meanings. Edward Snowden’s choice to flee prosecution in the United States may have given him a platform for voicing his critique of the surveillance state, but it also raised questions for many about whether or not this was a case of loyally “attached” exit, a quest for celebrity, or simply treason. Similarly, Bouazizi’s spectacular self-immolation may have “garnered the attention of various publics” but in doing so its proliferating meanings quickly escaped whatever purpose he could have attributed to his deed in advance (106). Exits, in short, have no intrinsic meaning that distinguishes them from other forms of noisy and disruptive dissent, like civil disobedience, that can serve to spark public deliberation. The slippage between word and deed furthermore raises questions about the status of exit itself. Must exit be a physical act to authorize persuasive voice or might metaphorical exodus be a sufficient source for cultivating critique, as Edward Said’s depiction of the intellectual as occupying a state of permanent exile would suggest? Kirkpatrick acknowledges this possibility of metaphorical exit in her discussion of Thoreau only to put it aside. Facing this prospect more directly may put some stress on the book’s account of how physical acts of egress hold distinctive powers to “disrupt, interrupt, and even to unseat those in power.” If exit can be a way of provoking the public, as Kirkpatrick persuasively demonstrates, then one can say that The Virtues of Exit leaves its readers with the provocative challenge to further take up its rich insights into how the arts of resistance are inextricably bound up with the poetics of resistance: namely, how literary form, rhetoric, and genre’s roles in reinterpreting the world are inseparable from embodied action’s power to change it.