THE FORCE OF NONVIOLENCE
THE FORCE OF
NONVIOLENCE
An Ethico-Political Bind
Judith Butler
First published by Verso 2020
© Judith Butler 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-276-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-278-9 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-279-6 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Butler, Judith, 1956- author.
Title: The force of nonviolence : an ethico-political bind / Judith Butler.
Description: Brooklyn : Verso Books, 2020. | Includes index. | Summary:
“Situating non-violence at the cross-roads of the ethical and political, The Force of Non-Violence brings into focus the ethical binds that emerge within the force field of violence. Non-violence is very often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethic with an unrealistic relation to existing forms of power. This book argues for an aggressive form of non-violence that struggles with psychic ambivalence and seeks to embody social ideals of inter-dependency and equality. Only through a critique of individualism can the ethical and political ideal of non-violence be understood in relation to the ideal of equality and the demand for grievability. In this psychosocial and philosophical reflection that draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin, Butler argues that to oppose violence now requires understanding its different modalities, including the regulation of the grievability of lives. The book shows how “racial and demographic phantasms” enter into the rationale for inflicting state violence and other modes of “letting die” by investing violence in those who are most severely exposed to its effects and subjugated to its lethal power. The struggle for non-violence is found in modes of resistance and movements for social transformation that separate off aggression from its destructive aims to affirm the living potentials of radical egalitarian politics”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019038460 (print) | LCCN 2019038461 (ebook) | ISBN
9781788732765 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788732796 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Nonviolence--Moral and ethical aspects. | Nonviolence. | Individualism.
Classification: LCC BJ1459.5 .B88 2020 (print) | LCC BJ1459.5 (ebook) | DDC 179.7--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038460
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038461
Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
Whenever and to whatever extent there is room for the use of arms or physical force or brute force, there and to that extent is there so much less possibility for soul force.
Mahatma Gandhi
The choice today is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The legacy (of nonviolence) is not that of an individual legacy but a collective legacy of vast people who stood together in unity to proclaim that they would never surrender to forces of racism and inequality.
Angela Davis
Contents
1. Nonviolence, Grievability, and the Critique of Individualism
2. To Preserve the Life of the Other
3. The Ethics and Politics of Nonviolence
4. Political Philosophy in Freud: War, Destruction, Mania, and the Critical Faculty
Postscript: Rethinking Vulnerability, Violence, Resistance
Notes
Index
I am thankful to audiences and respondents who heard earlier versions of these chapters as the Tanner Lectures at Yale University in 2016, the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 2018, and the Cuming Lectures at University College Dublin in 2019. I thank, as well, audiences and colleagues for their critical engagement at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, University of Zurich, Sciences Po in Paris, Meiji University in Tokyo, the Free University of Amsterdam, the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research, WISER at the University of the Witwatersrand, the Psychology and the Other conference in Cambridge in 2015, and the Modern Language Association meetings in 2014. I am most thankful to my students at the University of California, Berkeley, and my colleagues in the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, who have kept my mind sharper than it otherwise would have been. As always, I thank Wendy Brown for the joyful company of her intelligence, and for her enduring support. I dedicate this book to a friend and colleague precious to the UC Berkeley community, Saba Mahmood. Of course, she would have disagreed with my argument here, and I would have treasured that exchange.
Chapters 2 and 3 are revised and expanded versions of the Tanner Lectures delivered in 2016 at Yale University’s Whitney Humanities Center. Chapter 4 appeared in earlier form in Richard G. T. Gipps and Michael Lacewing, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
The case for nonviolence encounters skeptical responses from across the political spectrum. There are those on the left who claim that violence alone has the power to effect radical social and economic transformation, and others who claim, more modestly, that violence should remain one of the tactics at our disposal to bring about such change. One can put forth arguments in favor of nonviolence or, alternately, the instrumental or strategic use of violence, but those arguments can only be conducted in public if there is general agreement on what constitutes violence and nonviolence. One major