Judith Butler

Intro­duction — By Stefan Lessmann

Can non­vi­o­lence be an aggressive political tool? What does it mean to argue for non­vi­o­lence in the current political sit­u­ation?  In her recent book, Judith Butler ana­lyzes the philo­sophical con­fig­u­ra­tions of non­vi­o­lence, engaging with the works of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Frantz Fanon and Walter Ben­jamin. From this inter­section of political phi­losophy, psy­cho­analysis and social theory, Butler stresses that non­vi­o­lence is a nec­essary ethical position in order to pre­serve lives.

Key term in her analysis is the question of griev­ability: Whose lives do we mourn? Butler builds on her pre­vious work pre­sented in Pre­carious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Vio­lence (2004) and Frames of War: When is Life grievable? (2009).  Not all lives that are attributed with griev­ability: “[…] those who are grievable would be mourned if their lives were lost; the ungrievable are those whose loss would leave no trace, or perhaps barely a trace” (75).  Butler counters this inequality with a claim for the ‘equal griev­ability of lives’. She aims at nothing less than con­structing a new political imag­inary in which all lives are grievable, hence safe­guarded in life – and thus pro­tected from vio­lence. Such an imag­inary is grounded in equality within radical democracy. It is set up against a ‘logic of war’, in which cri­tique, dissent and civil protest are framed as ‘violent’. This dis­course is applied by insti­tu­tions and orga­ni­za­tions that depend on racial struc­turalism and gender inequality, and for which, fol­lowing Butler, every­thing is war. Hence, she sug­gests that the way to escape this brutal mech­anism of attributive vio­lence is to con­cep­tu­alize effective nonviolence.

In doing so, The Force of Non-Violence is not limited to the United States. Butler embeds her analysis within various social move­ments such as Ni una menos in Latin America, or the protests at Taksim Square in Istanbul, 2013. 

Pub­lisher’s Presentation

Towards a form of aggressive nonviolence.

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of non­vi­o­lence must be con­nected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that non­vi­o­lence is often mis­un­der­stood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an indi­vid­u­alist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, non­vi­o­lence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of non­vi­o­lence accepts that hos­tility is part of our psychic con­sti­tution, but values ambiva­lence as a way of checking the con­version of aggression into vio­lence. One con­tem­porary chal­lenge to a pol­itics of non­vi­o­lence points out that there is a dif­ference of opinion on what counts as vio­lence and non­vi­o­lence. The dis­tinction between them can be mobilised in the service of rat­i­fying the state’s monopoly on vio­lence. Con­sid­ering non­vi­o­lence as an ethical problem within a political phi­losophy requires a cri­tique of indi­vid­u­alism as well as an under­standing of the psy­chosocial dimen­sions of vio­lence. Butler draws upon Fou­cault, Fanon, Freud, and Ben­jamin to con­sider how the inter­diction against vio­lence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By con­sid­ering how ‘racial phan­tasms’ inform jus­ti­fi­ca­tions of state and admin­is­trative vio­lence, Butler tracks how vio­lence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for non­vi­o­lence is found in move­ments for social trans­for­mation that reframe the griev­ability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the inter­de­pen­dency of life as the basis of social and political equality.