Abstract
In a political world where some claim that radical social, economic, and cultural transformation can only happen through acts of violence and repression, and others argue that violence is an important tactic to bring about such change, it is a major challenge to fight for the case of nonviolence. Given this context, it is extraordinary that a small book can make such a giant argument against war, ferocity, harm, hate, and rage; that we have to imagine a new way of thinking, which Butler describes as “radical equality,” a world in which nonviolence is the best way to choose. Judith Butler, best known for her work on gender theory, and especially for the book Gender Trouble (1990), is currently a Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has taught since 1993. In her latest volume, The Force of Nonviolence, she makes a proactive stance for the question of what world we want, thereby developing a powerful argument against violence. She states that harm against others has been and will always be harm against ourselves, as we are all dependent on one another. The book points out that we are already inside the sphere of violence where it is happening all the time. Thus, nonviolence is a physical assertion of the claims of all human life toward preserving this world.
In this sense, in chapter one, the book examines nonviolence as an ethical obligation within the force of violence itself, and it can be best described as the practice of resistance during the moment when engaging in violence seems the most justified and obvious choice. It is argued that nonviolence requires a commitment to equality because we live in a world where some lives were considered to be more valued than others. Similarly, not all lives are considered ‘grievable‘ (worthy of grief). The reasons for this include racism, xenophobia, homo- and transphobia, misogyny, religious hatred, and the systemic disregard for the poor and the dispossessed. Equality, which consists of the idea of equal ‘grievability,‘ links both to interdependency and to the questions of why and how to practice nonviolence. In a liberal political thought, we have emerged into this social and political world from a state of nature in which we are already independent individuals (from German selbständig), and we conflict with one another. The problem with this justification for individualism is that it posits the first human was a male creature. What the book proposes is not a re-formulation of this assumed state of nature but an altered imagery that acknowledges the dependency of all human beings upon one another, as we are all social creatures. Such an imagery provides the way toward an ethical and political life in which we might be able to endure the difficulty and the hostility of the social bonds we never chose. Although the author of this book does not refer to the patriarchs and matriarchs in the Hebrew Bible, the analogy to the covenant in which God revealed himself to Abraham announcing a divine bond on which his descendants would inherit the Land of Israel seems obvious and assures us of a deeper meaning of Butler’s argument right in the center of monotheistic religious thought.
The book’s chapter two dwells upon the question of how we make assumptions about what counts as life, when and where it begins or how it ought to end, and whose lives count as living? Why do we seek to preserve the life of the other? What motivates us to do so, or what justifies our refusal or failure to preserve a life? The first question is one of moral psychology; the second belongs to moral philosophy, ethics, or religion. The way this question is posed raises another: that of paternalism. Who belongs to the group who does the “preserving,” and who belongs to the group who is “preserved”? To say that a life is grievable is to claim that a life, even before it is lost, will be grieved on the occasion of its loss. If all lives are considered equally grievable, then a new form of equality is introduced into our understanding of social equality.
Moral and ethical debates on nonviolence, as discussed in chapter three, can take two forms: the grounds for not killing another or others and our obligations to preserve the life of others. Michel Foucault describes how there is no sovereign center but multiple agencies of power operating in a post-sovereign context that decide who will live and who will die. This type of biopower emerges for example in forms of pronatalism and “pro-life” positions that regularly privilege some lives over others. Thus, the “pro-life” position is committed to inequality, and in that way, continues and intensifies the social inequality of women and the differential grievability of lives. We may think that a stronger and more just sense of law could bring about equality, but it must be made sure that the law does not wield its own violence and that it does not redouble the violence of any crime. Nonviolence is an ethical obligation by which we are bound precisely because we are bound to one another; it may well be an obligation against which we rail, but the obligation to preserve the social bond can be resolved without precisely resolving that ambivalence. The obligation not to destroy each other emerges from and reflects the vexed social form of our lives, and it leads us to reconsider that self-preservation is always linked to preserving the lives of others.
In reviving Sigmund Freud’s political philosophy in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, chapter four opens up a reflection on the bonds that hold a community together as well as the destructive powers that could break those bonds. Concerned with the destructive capacities of human beings, he developed the theory of “death drive,” the primary representatives of which were “sadism,” “aggression,” and “destructiveness.” As technology would allow for greater destruction than ever before, it is claimed that we must educate ourselves about the forms of consciousness that can turn us against violence on the one hand, and that we must foster bonds of love on the other hand. Both break with nationalist and militarist forms of social belonging through turning one sense of the critical faculty against another. Especially this critical faculty should become active in the name of democratization of dissent, opposition of war, and resistance to the intoxications of nationalism, populism, fascism, etc.
The book breaks new ground in reading existing sociological, psychological, and philosophical literature on violence to refine the scholarship on nonviolence. Butler‘s main contribution is that neither nonviolence nor vulnerability equate with passivity, but rather can be understood as two moments of a continuum to foster resistance against systemic violence, destruction, war, and all other “death driving” forces. This book is a reminder, for not only academics but all citizens, to engage in the discussion on an individual, societal, and global level.
