Voicing Duty, Performing Rights: Insubordination and Republican Wars

This article discusses the distinction between rights and duties in relation to the reaffirmation of ‘duty’ as a condition of ‘rights’ in contemporary Republican politics in France. It displaces this conditionality by exploring the equivocations between duty and rights expressed in and through the influential ‘Manifesto of the 121’, published as a declaration of insubordination in the last phase of the Algerian War (1954–62). It draws out residual expressions of devoir, or duty, within this text and its drafts, revealing significant efforts to conceptualize the experience of obligation in the context of war. These efforts enable a reassessment of Étienne Balibar’s reading of the text. In contrast to an emphasis on individual sovereignty, consolidated by the positioning of the Manifesto in the ideological turn of the early 1980s, we focus on how collective enunciation works here, drawing on a contrast between what Balibar calls the ‘mots justes’ (‘right words’) of the Manifesto and James C. Scott’s account of ‘the hidden transcript’. What emerges is a conceptualization of mutual obligation that runs counter to the demand for duty issued by the state. This offers a means to recalibrate the way we hear often latent expressions of obligation and duty and their significance in contemporary insubordination.