Judith
Butler is arguably the most influential critical theorist of our era. Her early
books, such as Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), anticipated
a profound social and intellectual upheaval around sex, sexuality, gender
norms, and power. Like many readers of my generation, I was introduced to
Butler’s work just as these changes began to accelerate, and her ideas became
part of mainstream discourse. In recent years, Butler has turned her insights
about norms and exceptions, the psychic life of power, and the politics of
resistance toward political ethics. In December Butler and I discussed her
latest book, The Force of Nonviolence, which explores “nonviolence” as a
project capable not simply of disclosing structural and repressive forms of
violence, but also of productively channeling the tensions of social life away
from retribution and resentment toward a radical and redemptive notion of
equality.
Brandon
Terry: You begin The Force of Nonviolence with a problem that hangs heavily
over contemporary debates within social movements and in some corners of
academia: How does an apparently moral argument about whether to be for or
against violence quickly turn into a debate about how violence is defined and
who is called “violent”? For example, activists in the Movement for Black Lives
have described a wide range of social phenomena, from mass incarceration to
dominant norms around gender and sexuality, as state violence. Their critics
meanwhile have accused them of promoting or inciting violence, especially against
police officers. And as you point out, these attributions have real
consequences, as we can see with DeRay McKesson, the Black Lives Matter leader
being sued by a police officer injured at a protest McKesson organized.
Some
worry that the idea of violence today has become an unsustainable inflation of
the concept that renders it incapable of doing the normative or analytical work
that some activists and scholars are asking it to perform. They worry that
without a clear and constrained definition of violence, one on which we could
get some consensus, our uses of the term are going to lead our moral judgment
astray. It will make public debate even more acrimonious. You seem to be
skeptical about these criticisms, and you even charge them with a bit of
political and critical naivete. How do you see the link between the ethical
critique of violence and the interrogation of how and why we name certain
practices or phenomena violent?
Judith
Butler: The Force of Nonviolence is not primarily about violence, it’s about
nonviolence, and whether it can still be defended, given all the realistic and
strategic arguments against it. And yet, in order to make an argument for
nonviolence, one needs to know what violence is; if the book’s general claim is
that we ought to be refraining from violence, we still need to be able to
identify violence. That’s where this complex question arises: How do we
identify violence? What forms does violence take?
There’s
no easy answer to that question, but I would say that very often moral
arguments about nonviolence tend to imagine an individual making a decision
about whether or not to engage in an act of violence, either to hit someone, or
to use an instrument to injure somebody, to use a gun or some military weapon,
and yet violence cannot be restricted to the form of the single blow. We know
that there are forms of violence that don’t involve inflicting a blow on
another person. The minute we accept that there is such a thing as
institutional violence, or indeed symbolic violence, we are in a much more
complex field. But I don’t think we should throw up our hands and say, “Oh well
this is all too fuzzy, we can’t make our way here.” Michel Foucault
distinguished between forms of sovereign violence, whereby a king, a monarch,
or someone vested with a sovereign power, decides who should live and who
should die. And there’s a form of violence that he called biopolitical and that
Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics: violence that
leaves a set of people to die, abandons them to death, or refuses to offer the
assistance that is necessary in order to save their lives.
Those
policies and institutions that let people die—that take away food stamps, or
take away health care, or take away shelter—are not only exposing people to
mortality, they’re exposing people to mortality at differential rates. In the
United States, we see that black and brown people, who are disproportionately
poor in this country, are differentially exposed to that kind of violence and
that kind of mortality rate. So maybe nobody is hitting them with a stick, or
shooting them in the head, but there is an institutional violence at work, one
which distinguishes between lives worth preserving and lives regarded as not
worth preserving. So a differential calculus is at work, and it’s an implicit
feature of policies and institutions like that. That’s one way of understanding
institutional violence.
We could
also look at the violence of carceral institutions in the ways that Ruth
Gilmore, or Angela Davis, or Michelle Alexander have done. Violent criminals
are sent to prison to punish their violence, and yet what they enter into is
another form of violence, one that is understood as legally justified. It’s not
called violence, it’s called “necessary coercion,” or “necessary containment,”
or incarceration, but it is often a form of violence, especially in the way
people are treated and how their lives are regarded, and the kind of violence
to which they are subjected—daily, psychically—within the prison facility. So
we can start to think about institutions as violent. But they’re not just
inflicting institutional violence. They are themselves violent institutions.
When we
say we’re opposed to violence, or we are seeking to embrace a philosophy and a
politics of nonviolence, we are obligated to distinguish among those kinds of
violence, to rely on our colleagues who have been doing important empirical and
sociological work and cultural analysis to show us when and how violence
happens and to whom—to whom does it happen more than others, and what radical
thesis about the inequality of lives pervades these disparities.
BT: I am
reminded of the essay you contributed to Robert Gooding-Williams’s volume
Reading Rodney King (1993), where you focus on racial fantasies, or “racial
phantasms” as you call them, following Frantz Fanon. What do you think makes
race-thinking so amenable to our judgments about who or what is violent?
JB:
You’re right. In this book I’m elaborating and revising the thesis I put
forward in that essay. But in this context, I’m trying to understand why
certain actions are called violent when there’s no empirical, or visual, or
testimonial evidence to corroborate that claim. As you know, the Rodney King
beating was already pretty outrageous, although certainly not unusual for black
people, who live in worlds where police violence is constant. King was on the
ground. He was not sitting up, he was not standing up. He was barely moving a
limb, and somehow that video could be pointed to in a trial, and the defense
attorney for the police could claim that King was a threat. And it’s really
hard to understand how a black man lying on the ground, or indeed a black man
running away, or a black man in a full chokehold, could still threaten the life
of a policeman. And I think we could say that those are primarily states of the
black body—social and political states of paralysis, threat, fear—none of which
are arguably threatening, that are nevertheless cast, phantasmagorically, as
states of imminent danger: as if those bodies are about to spring, to kill, to
inflict mortal danger on the police who are, in fact, inflicting mortal danger.
We could
point to that and just say, “Well, that’s absurd,” or we could say, “That’s
unjust,” and we would be right. But we need to look a little bit more closely
at what I call a “phantasmagoric inversion.” It is not uncommon for the forces
that inflict violence to point to their victims and say, “Look, this is the
victim who’s actually inflicting violence on me.” And that’s a trick of the mind,
it’s a trick of the culture, and it’s a fantasy that gets shared when judges
and juries look at the same evidence and decide that the policeman was just
doing his job, or had good reason to think he was in trouble, or that a black
man could have turned around and shot him at any moment. They are living in a
panicked racial phantasm. They are in a war against black people in which they
constantly imagine that those upon whom they inflict violence are the true
source of violence.
BT: How
do we find our way out? I’m thinking about a powerful point in the book where
you contrast your approach with a methodological and ethical individualism.
We’re often given a genealogy of nonviolence that emphasizes individualism and
a personal conscience, sometimes conscripting people such as Henry David
Thoreau into this genealogy, and often treating nonviolence as kind of a
retreat from the storm and stress of politics into a pacific region of the
soul. In the book you say forcefully that this is a profound misdescription of
the ethics and politics of nonviolence. You write, “an ethics of nonviolence
cannot be predicated on individualism and must take the lead in critiquing individualism
as the basis of ethics and politics.” Can you say more about what you see as
the real connective tissue between this critique of individualism and
nonviolence?
JB: If I
am to understand myself as interconnected with other living beings and with
life processes more generally, including all those that sustain the planet, I
have to understand that when I destroy another person, or when I destroy a set
of living processes, I also destroy something of myself, because the self that
I am is not just this bounded and discrete ego, it’s a set of relationships. I
generally hold to the importance of psychosocial studies and believe my book
probably belongs to that field. None of us exist or survive without a set of
relationships that sustain us. That ideal might be maddening to a fierce
individualist who wants to understand themself as completely self-sufficient,
but the ideal of self-sufficiency is a bit destructive. We live in families and
communities, and we’re also, as we know from climate change, interconnected
across the entire globe. We know forms of interdependency throughout the
economic world through the ravaging effects of globalization. We need to come
up with another notion of the global that would avow, affirm, and strengthen
our interdependency, and also the fact that we’re equally dependent on the
Earth. We should strive to be equally dependent upon one another.
So for
me, the idea of equality is not, “Oh, this individual’s equal to another,”
although sometimes we must speak that way and have policies that reflect that
truth. To shift the way we think about equality to help us address violence—and
possibly also climate preservation—we need to move away from the ego and moral
ideals of self-sufficiency. That is one reason I don’t stress the virtue of
equanimity that many classical philosophers in the West have approved. One
finds it in Buddhism and other religions as well. I’m not opposed to
equanimity—it’s great to be calm and pacific and be able to handle life with
some equanimity. I just don’t believe it can be the basis of nonviolence. We
have every reason to be absolutely enraged by the systemic and local injustices
in our world. Not a day goes by under the present regime when I’m not seized
with rage of one kind or another. The question is: What can be done with rage?
We don’t always think about that, because we view rage as an uncontrollable
impulse that needs to come out in unmediated forms. But people craft rage, they
cultivate rage, and not just as individuals. Communities craft their rage.
Artists craft rage all the time. Collective forms of crafting rage are
important. They don’t deny rage, but they also choose not to enter into the
cycle of violence. They seek to expose violence and counter it. We could have
an angry and rageful art practice that exposes and counters violence without
being violent. Being contaminated by violence is not the same as reproducing
the systemic or institutional violence that we’re seeking to oppose.
For me,
the bottom line is that if I destroy another life, I also destroy myself to
some degree, because relations compose who I am, and I am nothing without them.
My life is not sustainable without others, and theirs is not sustainable
without me. We’re attacking the social bond that holds us together when we
attack each other. And I believe we need to cultivate that kind of ethos in
order to support a broader global philosophy and politics that is committed to
radical equality and affirms the equal grievability of lives—the equal value of
lives.
BT:
Climate change seems to play for you the role that nuclear war played for a lot
of the sixties theorists of nonviolence—the invention of nuclear weapons and
the threat of extinction-level events forced them to think about
interconnection, interdependency at the level of ontology, social ontology.
Climate change has now superseded that in some ways and gives a kind of heft to
the sort of thing you’d hear Martin Luther King, Jr., say often, about being in
“an inescapable network of mutuality,” or a “single garment of destiny.”
But in
response, as King’s Black Power critics might say: “Well sure, people are
interdependent, nobody is sufficient in and of themselves, we need communities
to survive, we just don’t want to be in a community with these people who have
oppressed us any longer. We find living in social bonds with them to be
something that is mutilating to our cultural vitality, and our self-respect.”
What do you think is wrong with the longing to reconstitute mutuality in more
restricted terms in pursuit of these goods?
JB: All
relations among humans are vexed, and difficult, and even relations of love are
structured by ambivalence. They carry within them destructive potential, and
those of us who work to acknowledge the destructive potential in our
relationships are better equipped to avoid acting destructively than those who
pretend that there is no destructive potential. One reason I don’t hold to the
notion that we need to reside in the pacific rooms of the soul at the expense
of other or different rooms is that we need to struggle with our anger, our
destructiveness, even our murderous impulse. We need to accept that we have all
of that. Now I think among people who agree to cohabit Earth—as Hannah Arendt
put it in her theorizations, among other places, about the state of Israel in
relationship to the emergent state of Palestine—there does not have to be love
or harmony or even high levels of integration for there to be a basic respect
for the lives of others and as a premise for any kind of collaboration or
integration, an acceptance of the radical equality of lives. Without those, any
other form of social belonging or cohabitation reproduces inequality. And who
wants that? People don’t want to live with others who despise them, or mutilate
them, or regard their lives as dispensable, or who are willing to adopt and
implement policies that have that effect. So there has to be a radical
agreement to this equality for a kind of cohabitation to take place that would
be worthy of the name.
BT:
Let’s explore this question of equality. As somebody who’s followed your work
for a long time, I think that the book develops some long-standing themes: your
interrogation of the fraught relationship of norm and exception in politics,
and your linkage—especially in your work on Antigone and the series of books
beginning with Frames of War (2009)—between questions of equality and questions
of grief and mourning. You’ve done a lot to show us how certain populations and
groups are figured as beyond the reach of humane concern and solidarity by
interrogating practices of mourning and grieving as points of access, places
where we might know what and whom we value, whom we imagine our lives entangle
with and are enriched by, and even who counts as human. In The Force of
Nonviolence you talk not just about equality but what you call “the radical
equality of grievability.” That is such a poignant phrase. What might such an
ideal entail in practice, and why connect it to the politics of nonviolence,
instead of just making it, say, a principle of justice?
JB: Some
people don’t like this word, “grievable.” It’s an awkward word. “Grievability”
may be even worse, but I’m trying to get at a quality of life. We say certain
deaths aren’t grievable, or haven’t been properly grieved. We talk that way all
the time. But I’m referring to people who are living in this world, and who
feel themselves to be living a life that will not be mourned when it is lost,
or who look at others and regard them as lives that will not be mourned if they
are lost.
When we
talk that way about ourselves or others, what we’re really saying is that while
these are lives that can pass without a trace—one could think, for example, of
those who fell or were thrown into the ocean during the Middle Passage—how do
we mourn them, and what does it mean that those lives were considered
ungrievable? There would be no one to grieve them, there’s nothing in them to
be grieved. There’s not value to be grieved. And I think that’s another way of
getting to what some would call dehumanization, a term that we could talk
about, but I’m not sure it grasps everything.
Grievability
is a way of thinking about value. I remember Claudia Rankine published an
article in the New York Times in 2015 called “‘The Condition of Black Life Is
One of Mourning.’” She talks about the sense of anxiety and fear that mothers
have—though not just mothers—that bringing African American men and women into
the world is bringing them into a place of potential mourning. They may be
lost. They may be extinguished. They may not survive. And she writes about what
it means to have a sense that lives may be lost at any moment, or that the
world does not have to seek to sustain those lives and does not recognize the
value of those lives. Of course, this is not a totalizing claim, but this risk
is higher for some than for others.
Equal
grievability would mean that each life has a value and is regarded as a life
worthy of living, to be lived, deserving to be lived. There can be no
inequality there. Now, that’s an ideal, a norm, a principle, and that’s what I
mean by the notion of radical equality. If we had it and we had our
understanding of ourselves as socially interdependent creatures, we would have
a broader understanding of what it means to oppose violence. And I’m not
interested in establishing nonviolence as an absolute moral principle that has
to be applied to every instance. I’m interested in cultivating a new sense of
who we are as human beings and how we treat each other on the basis of an
interdependent ontology, if you will, with a historical, political mindfulness
about the unequal grievability of lives in our contemporary world. Justice is
great, but it would be more probable in a world in which we’d learned to think
clearly about who suffers violence disproportionately and who inflicts it
disproportionately.
BT:
What’s always drawn me to this line of inquiry is that it makes so much sense
of a lot of African American protest and African American mourning practices.
The civil rights movement is shot through with all of these concerns. Why
didn’t President Lyndon Johnson meet with the parents of slain African American
activist James Chaney, but did meet with the parents of Chaney’s slain white
colleagues, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner? Why were Memphis sanitation
workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker allowed to die in the back of a garbage
truck, launching that protest movement that would ultimately bring King to the
place where he would be assassinated? Even W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of
Black Folk (1903) dwells on this question, from his mentor to his own dying
infant son: If you’re born in a society like this, will your life be grievable?
Will anyone mourn your passing? Will you have any potential or possibility or
standing as a cocreator of the society? Or are you already diminished?
JB: The
question is also linked with whether your life will be liveable? Will you
survive, will you persist, and will the conditions of life allow you to flourish?
Some populations dispossess those who are subject to racism, to economic
marginalization, or genocidal violence. They live with that question or have
given up on that question.
BT: What
is so striking about the language of equal grievability is that it also makes
sense of King’s intervention. He said many of the same things you’re saying,
but in his embodied performance, he also tried to disrupt that systemic
violence without inviting the destruction of the lives of either the authors or
ignoble spectators of oppression. He wanted to preserve his enemies’ lives as
well.
To me
that is the most dramatic demonstration of somebody who really believes in the
equal grievability of lives. Should we read you as endorsing, or at least
having a family resemblance with, King’s judgment that it is better to take on
more suffering than you dispense?
JB: I
don’t know, but I do think that there are a lot of people who have every reason
to feel enormous rage, to imagine scenes of destruction, and to even be
overwhelmed with murderous feelings or impulse. The question is: To what
community do we turn in such moments so that we don’t reproduce and heighten a
violent world? I think of the idea of preserving the life of the one you want
to kill as preserving the world you want to fight for, the world in which this
kind of violence is lessened rather than heightened. And so it’s for the world,
for a very difficult social bond, one that is full of passion, ecstatic and
wonderful, but is also destructive and horrid. I guess I’m willing to take that
point from Sigmund Freud; I think Fanon got it. Our relationships with others
have this vexed quality. They can lift us and they can debase us, and we have
to find our way. I think that those have to be collective practices; I’m not as
interested in acts of individual heroism. I worry sometimes that the civil
rights movement, or at least the story that gets told about it in the United
States, focuses on individual heroes and heroines.
I don’t
want it to be a model of an individual, I want it to be a different kind of
sociality that we’re trying to build, and I do see it in some of the social
movements today, in some of the ways that people are working on housing
projects, and climate preservation, and climate activism. I see it in many
different parts of the world. In the feminist movement, in the Black Lives
Matter movement. It’s not always easy. We struggle, we fight, we disagree, but
we come back somehow to continue to build a world that is less violent and more
free and more equal. And I think if we want to talk about justice, it would
have to have all those components.
BT: You
end the book with reference to some of these movements —Ni Una Menos, the
protests at the European refugee camps, the Standing Man protest in Turkey. I,
like you, take a lot of hope from these practices. But as a scholar of black
protest movements, I wonder if maybe the long-term threat to nonviolent action
is not that it would be falsely characterized as violent, but that it gets
absorbed into our sense of the everyday and becomes what King called “a merely
transitory drama.” That it becomes ritualized or folded into our sense of,
“That’s what these kinds of people do.” What if it becomes a spectacle that
fails to unsettle or even register as spectacle, and that might be in part
because it’s not considered violence or violent enough. What do you think might
break through our existing attention economy and media environment that are
arguably fascinated with violence above all else?
JB: You’re
right to name the media, because I think more and more what we see happening,
especially with violence in schools, is that kids, you know, even when they
commit suicide, say, “Well, this was the only way to get my name in the
newspaper, this was my only way to get attention.” What are they responding to?
They’re on social media, they’re on the internet, and they see that an act of
violence appears to break through quotidian life and grab worldwide attention.
Now, the problem with that media rhythm—and there is a pattern that social
media and conventional media have developed—is that it suggests that quotidian
life is not violent, even though there are huge amounts of domestic violence,
violence in prison, violence on the street, and violence in the workplace all
the time. Actual quotidian violence gets repainted as nonviolent, and then the
very dramatic violence catches attention, but only for a moment because the
next one is on its way, and the next one is in competition with the last one.
We need
to think more clearly about a media presence that counters that particular
rhythm, which propagates a certain kind of lie about what violence is. It
becomes a sensationalist moment, rather than part of the structure of life. We
need to turn a lens on the forms of violence that are part of the structure of
life for women, for minorities, for the dispossessed, for the poor. Until we do
that, we will continue to think that violence is this extraordinary thing that
captures attention for a minute and is then dispensed with. So we have a
broader problem in thinking about how the media covers violence, and how it
tends to define it, which means that cultural workers and academics and artists
who are really concerned with this issue need to develop a stronger media
presence, or maybe even a counter-media presence, to shift the terms.
BT: A
profoundly difficult challenge, indeed, but with the proliferation of cameras,
the low barrier of entry to social media distribution, and the increasingly
sophisticated popular criticism of media frames and narrative strategies,
perhaps we might yet see our way out. Another set of crucial questions, from an
exciting book full of them.
JB:
That’s very kind, thank you so much.
The
Radical Equality of Lives. By Brandon M.
Terry and Judith Butler. Boston Review ,
January 7, 2020.
I
reached out to the philosopher Judith Butler last year, not long after I wrote
an article titled “I Am A Sexist,” as the #MeToo movement was in full swing. I
hoped to get an unvarnished critique of the essay. I got much more: A bracing
and profound exchange that led to this interview and the reminder that violence
against women, in its many forms, is a global tragedy.
Judith
Butler is known for her decades of work in philosophy, feminism and activism
worldwide. A professor in the department of comparative literature and the
program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley, she is
the author of numerous influential books, including “Notes Toward a
Performative Theory of Assembly” and the forthcoming book, “The Force of
Non-Violence.” The interview was conducted by email.
George
Yancy: I know you are familiar with the multinational activist movement Ni Una
Menos. The movement, which spans several countries in Latin America, is
fighting many forms of violence, in particular femicide, which is the
intentional killing of women and girls because of their gender. (One example:
In Argentina, one woman is said to be murdered every 30 hours.) In the United
States, of course, we have the #MeToo movement. What do you make of these
different but similar mobilizations?
Judith
Butler: It is important to underscore that there are many feminisms right now
(as there have always been) and they differ in regard to their focus and
framework. Ni Una Menos is a movement that has brought millions of women into
the street across Latin America to fight violence against women, trans people
and the indigenous. The slogan “not one less” means that not one more woman
will be lost to violence.
Importantly,
this is a call that is uttered by a collective: “Not another one will be lost
from the class of women, this expanding collective that resists the violence
directed against them.” But also: “As women, we will not lose another life.”
The movement is not based on a narrow idea of identity, but is a strong and
intensifying coalition that draws support from women and trans people who are
workers, who belong to unions and churches, who may or may not have any
relation to universities.
The
fierce collective opposition to the killing of women is paramount, but this is
also violence against trans people, especially trans women, and “las travestis”
(who do not always identify as trans). That is why it is sometimes referred to
as a movement against “feminicidio” — all those who are feminized or regarded
as feminine. This is important because it is not just that murder is committed
on the basis of gender; violence against women is one way of establishing the
femininity of the victim. The violence seeks to secure the class of women as
killable, dispensable; it is an attempt to define the very existence of women’s
lives as something decided by men, as a masculine prerogative.
The
movement is equally a struggle for freedom and equality, and it struggles for
the right to abortion, the right to equal pay and the struggle against
neoliberal economics that is intensifying precarity, especially for women, the
indigenous and the poor. The right to abortion is based on the right of every
individual woman to assert freedom over her own body, but follows from the
collective demands of women to be able to live their desires freely without
state intervention and without the fear of violence, retribution and
imprisonment.
The
movement has distinguished itself from individualist modes of feminism that are
based on personal liberty and the rights of the individual subject. That does
not mean that individual histories and stories do not matter. They do, but
forms of feminism that do not engage a critique of capitalism tend to reproduce
individualism as a matter of course. Collectives are formed through a
realization of a common social condition and a social bond, one that recognizes
that what is happening to one life, whether it is violence, debt or subjection
to patriarchal authority, is also happening for others. And though they may
happen in different ways, the patterns are there, and so also are the grounds
for solidarity.
In the
United States, “#MeToo” has been very powerful in exposing the pervasive
character of sexual harassment and assault across every kind of workplace.
There is no way to shut our eyes to how long women have suffered with
harassment, retaliation, and the loss of their careers — the loss of trust in
those upon whom they often depend for work. But the “me” in #metoo is not the
same as the collective we, and a collective is not just a sequence of the
stories of individuals. The basis for solidarity, for collective action,
requires that we depart from the presumption of individualism; in the United
States, the tendency is to reaffirm that tenet of political liberalism at the
expense of strong and enduring collective bonds. In Argentina, Ni Una Menos is
in some ways taking up the ethical and political obligation of “Nunca Mas!” or
“Never Again!” forged in the aftermath of the dictatorship. The destruction and
disappearance of the lives of thousands of students and activists on the left
has led to a sharp opposition to state censorship, repression and violence. The
killing of women is equally horrific, very often aided and abetted by police
and courts who fail to acknowledge the crime and by a government that refuses
to assert the equal rights of women to live their lives in freedom and without
the fear of death.
Yancy:
The reasons for these two movements are linked to political and economic
structures that marginalize and oppress women. Political and economic
structures are inextricably linked to machismo, the toxic sense of male
identity that translates into male entitlement to women’s bodies; indeed, tied
into whether or not women live or die. Talk about the performative dimensions
of machismo.
Butler:
I am no longer sure what counts as performative, but my view is that one reason
that men feel free to dispose of women’s life as they see fit is because they
are bound to one another through a silent (or not-so-silent) pact of
brotherhood. They look the other way; they give each other permission and grant
each other impunity. In so many places, the violence done to women, including
murder, are not even conceptualized as crimes. They are “the way of the world”
or “acts of passion” and these phrases disclose deep-seated attitudes that have
naturalized violence against women, that is, made it seem as if this violence is
a natural or normal part of ordinary life. When feminist men break that pact of
solidarity, they risk exclusion by some communities, and yet that kind of
defection from the ranks is exactly what is needed.
In
Barcelona, a well-meaning man told me he was not entitled to join in a feminist
demonstration against violence. But I disagreed with him. Well, maybe I agree
with him: participation is not an entitlement; it is an obligation. But men who
join that important fight against violence against women and trans people need
to follow the leadership of women. If they stand together against the lethal
pact of brotherhood that permits, deflects and exonerates, they do it first and
foremost by confronting other men, and by forming groups that reject violence and
affirm radical equality. After all, when the lives of women and minorities of
all kinds are taken, that is a sign that those lives are not treated as equally
valuable. The struggle against violence and the struggle for equality are
linked.
Yancy:
In what ways does your new book on nonviolence speak to questions regarding the
vulnerability of women?
Butler:
The new book, “The Force of Non-Violence,” is concerned with women, for sure,
but with all people who are considered to be more or less ungrievable. I work
with the feminist idea of “relationality” in order to show not only how lives
are interdependent, but also how our ethical obligations to sustain each
other’s lives follow from that interdependency. The interdiction against
violence is a way of asserting and honoring that bond based on the equal value
of lives, but this is not an abstract or formal principle. We require each
other to live and that is as true of familial or kinship ties as it is of
transnational and global bonds. The critique of individualism has been an
important component of both feminist and Marxist thought, and it now becomes
urgent as we seek to understand ourselves as living creatures bound to human
and nonhuman creatures, to entire systems and networks of life. The various
threats of destruction can take the form of state violence, feminicidio,
abandonment of migrants, global warming. We have to rethink the ties of life to
know why we are obligated to oppose violence even when, or precisely when,
hostilities escalate.
Yancy:
In what ways does your discussion of nonviolence address our pervasive cultural
practice of specifically male violence?
Butler:
That is a good question. For me, violence is not male or masculine. I don’t
think that it comes from the recesses of men or is built into a necessary
definition of masculinity. We can talk about structures of masculine
domination, or patriarchy, and in those cases it is the social structures and
their histories that call to be dismantled. It is difficult to know how to
understand individual acts of violence within social structures that encourage,
permit and exonerate such acts. It may be that we are social creatures whose
lives are lived out in social structures that we have some power to change. So
I don’t think individual men can point to “social structures” as an excuse,
i.e. “the social structure of masculine domination made me commit this act of
violence.”
At the
same time, it is all of our responsibility to ask ourselves how we are living
out, reproducing or resisting these structures. So though change can happen at
an individual level, restorative justice models tell us that individuals change
in the context of communities and relationships, and that is how new structures
of relating are built and older ones are dismantled. In turn, this means that
ethics has to become more than an individual project of self-renewal, since
lives are renewed in the company of others. Those relations are what sustain us
and, as such, deserve our collective attention and commitment.
Judith
Butler: When Killing Women Isn’t a Crime. By George Yancy. The New York Times, July 10, 2019.
My Life,
Your Life: Equality and the Philosophy of Non-Violence.
The
Gifford Lectures, Glasgow, 2018. 1,2,3 October
‘What does inequality have to do with non-violence?’
These lectures will suggest that a philosophy of non-violence has to take into
account forms of inequality that value certain lives more highly than others.
So the task is to develop a philosophy of non-violence that allows the moral
questions usually associated with non-violent practice to be seen as bearing on
questions of political inequality as well. The purpose would be to show that the
defence of non-violence cannot be successful if it does not take this kind of
differential valuing of life into account, which means that a philosophy of
non-violence is only possible within a broader commitment to equality. These
questions bear as well on the concepts of grievable and ungrievable life that
Professor Butler has developed elsewhere as well as a conception of livable
life at work in her critique of precarity.
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