The Force of Nonviolence. Judith Butler
power—namely, to cast those on the margins as dispensable, to push them beyond the margins into the zone of non-being, to use Fanon’s phrase. When nonviolent movements work within the ideals of radical egalitarianism, it is the equal claim to a livable and grievable life that serves as a guiding social ideal, one that is fundamental to an ethics and politics of nonviolence that moves beyond the legacy of individualism. It opens up a new consideration of social freedom as defined in part by our constitutive interdependency. An egalitarian imaginary is required for such a struggle—one that reckons with the potential for destruction in every living bond. Violence against the other is, in this sense, violence against oneself, something that becomes clear when we recognize that violence assaults the living interdependency that is, or should be, our social world.
Nonviolence, Grievability, and the Critique of Individualism
Let us begin with the proposition that nonviolence becomes an ethical issue within the force field of violence itself. Nonviolence is perhaps best described as a practice of resistance that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious. In this way, it can be understood as a practice that not only stops a violent act, or a violent process, but requires a form of sustained action, sometimes aggressively pursued. So, one suggestion I will make is that we can think of nonviolence not simply as the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence, but as a sustained commitment, even a way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom. My first suggestion is that what Albert Einstein called “militant pacifism” might be rethought as aggressive nonviolence.1 That will involve rethinking the relation between aggression and violence, since the two are not the same. My second suggestion is that nonviolence does not make sense without a commitment to equality. The reason why nonviolence requires a commitment to equality can best be understood by considering that in this world some lives are more clearly valued than others, and that this inequality implies that certain lives will be more tenaciously defended than others. If one opposes the violence done to human lives—or, indeed, to other living beings—this presumes that it is because those lives are valuable. Our opposition affirms those lives as valuable. If they were to be lost as a result of violence, that loss would be registered as a loss only because those lives were affirmed as having a living value, and that, in turn, means we regard those lives as worthy of grief.
And yet, in this world, as we know, lives are not equally valued; their claim against being injured or killed is not always registered. And one reason for this is that their lives are not considered worthy of grief, or grievable. The reasons for this are many, and they include racism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia, misogyny, and the systemic disregard for the poor and the dispossessed. We live, in a daily way, with knowledge of nameless groups of people abandoned to death, on the borders of countries with closed borders, in the Mediterranean Sea, in countries where poverty and lack of access to food and health care has become overwhelming. If we seek to understand what nonviolence means now, in this world in which we live, we have to know the modalities of violence to be opposed, but we must also return to a fundamental set of questions that belong to our time: What makes a life valuable? What accounts for the unequal ways that lives are valued? And how might we begin to formulate an egalitarian imaginary that would become part of our practice of nonviolence—a practice of resistance, both vigilant and hopeful?
In this chapter, I turn to the problem of individualism in order to foreground the importance of social bonds and interdependency for understanding a non-individualist account of equality. And I will seek to link this idea of interdependency with nonviolence. In the following chapter, I will begin by asking about the resources of moral philosophy for developing a reflective practice of nonviolence, and I will suggest that socially imbued fantasies enter into our moral reasoning on nonviolence such that we cannot always identify the demographic assumptions we make about lives that are worth valuing, and those that are considered relatively or absolutely worthless. That second chapter moves from Immanuel Kant to Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. In the third chapter, I will consider the ethics and politics of nonviolence in light of contemporary forms of racism and social policy, suggesting that Frantz Fanon gives us a way to understand racial phantasms that informs the ethical dimension of biopolitics, and that Walter Benjamin’s idea of an open-ended civil technique of conflict resolution (Technik ziviler Übereinkunft) gives us some way to think about living with and through conflictual relations without violent conclusions. To that end, I will suggest that aggression is a component part of social bonds based on interdependency, but that how aggression is crafted makes the difference for a practice that resists violence and that imagines a new future of social equality. The imagination—and what is imaginable—will turn out to be crucial for thinking through this argument because we are at this moment ethically obliged and incited to think beyond what are treated as the realistic limits of the possible.
Some representatives of the history of liberal political thought would have us believe that we emerge into this social and political world from a state of nature. And in that state of nature, we are already, for some reason, individuals, and we are in conflict with one another. We are not given to understand how we became individuated, nor are we told precisely why conflict is the first of our passionate relations, rather than dependency or attachment. The Hobbesian view, which has been the most influential in shaping our understanding of political contracts, tells us that one individual wants what another has, or that both individuals lay claim to the same territory, and that they fight with one another to pursue their selfish aims and to establish their personal right to property, to nature, and to social dominance. Of course, the state of nature was always a fiction, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau openly conceded, but it has been a powerful fiction, a mode of imagining that becomes possible under conditions of what Karl Marx called “political economy.” It functions in many ways: for instance, it gives us a counterfactual condition by which to assess our contemporary situation; and it offers a point of view, in the way that science fiction does, from which to see the specificity and contingency of the political organization of space and time, of passions and interests, in the present. Writing on Rousseau, literary critic Jean Starobinski opined that the state of nature provides an imaginary framework in which there is only one individual in the scene: self-sufficient, without dependency, saturated in self-love yet without any need for another.2 Indeed, where there are no other persons to speak of, there is no problem of equality; but once other living human creatures enter the scene, the problem of equality and conflict immediately emerges. Why is that the case?
Marx criticized that part of the state of nature hypothesis that posits the individual as primary. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he ridiculed, with great irony, the notion that in the beginning humans are, like Robinson Crusoe, alone on an island, providing for their own sustenance, living without dependency on others, without systems of labor, and without any common organization of political and economic life. Marx writes: “Let us not put ourselves in that fictitious primordial state like a political economist trying to clarify things. It merely pushes the issue into a gray, misty distance … We proceed from a present fact of political economy.”3 Marx thought he could discard fiction in favor of present fact, but that did not stop him from making use of those very fictions to develop his critique of political economy. They do not represent reality, but if we know how to read such fictions, they yield a commentary on present reality that we otherwise might not achieve. One enters the fiction in order to discern the structure, but also to ask: What can and cannot be figured here? What can be imagined, and through what terms?
For instance, that lonely and self-sufficient figure of Robinson Crusoe was invariably an adult and a man, the first figure of the “natural man”—the one whose self-sufficiency is eventually interrupted by the demands of social and economic life, but not as a consequence of his natural condition. Indeed, when others enter the scene, conflict begins—or so the story goes. So, in the beginning (temporally considered) and most fundamentally (ontologically considered), individuals pursue their selfish interests, they clash and fight, but conflict becomes arbitrated only in the midst of a regulated sociality, since each individual would presumably,