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webb_beb's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
I don’t know quite what possessed me to pick up another book by Butler after she was my main antagonist in many a gender studies course. However, much of this book was informative and thoughtful, and more often than I expected Butler tied her philosophy back in to real world examples of Palestine, police violence, migration and refugees, etc. in ways that helped me comprehend the material. I feel that I learned a lot about the intellectual history of non-violence and some of the pieces around this idea, like grieveability and interdependence. However, there were many parts that were incredibly long winded and dense. The final chapter before the post-script was on Freud and I can say that it was completely undecipherable to me. Perhaps if you were familiar with Freud’s work on the death drive it would have been understandable but for me it was so bad I almost didn’t finish the book.
Content Warnings
Minor: Death, Genocide, Sexual violence, Violence, and Police brutality
buttchinbookchin's review against another edition
2.0
If you are looking for a coherent history, explanation, or argument about nonviolence, this book is not it. It is like beads on a string of interesting claims related to those made in the introduction, but never returning to the points promised at the outset of the book. This is not to say that Judith Butler is flawed, being the titan that she is, and her writing being majestic. It’s clear that she decided this book was not worth her time and rushed it. But who am I to complain? I got it 60% off, and it’ll still help me write my paper!
I don’t think this book is too useful for non-academics. It’s written in the dense, winding prose that characterizes sociological literature (although lacks the rigor of publications in those fields). However, Butler gives names to ideas that I previously did not know despite having encountered them in my life. I think, however, the main argument of the book was made in the introduction and I spent the rest of the book looking for it and thinking I missed it because it wasn’t there. Should you buy it, read the introduction and the conclusion and the chapter on law. Or if you’re an academic, assign those in your classes.
I don’t think this book is too useful for non-academics. It’s written in the dense, winding prose that characterizes sociological literature (although lacks the rigor of publications in those fields). However, Butler gives names to ideas that I previously did not know despite having encountered them in my life. I think, however, the main argument of the book was made in the introduction and I spent the rest of the book looking for it and thinking I missed it because it wasn’t there. Should you buy it, read the introduction and the conclusion and the chapter on law. Or if you’re an academic, assign those in your classes.
nprtotebag's review
2.0
boy this was tough to get through. maybe not the best choice for my first dip into theeeoooryyy. interesting points about grievability and those that are treated as "already dead." so much psychoanalysis. also....so much Freud! will need to be aware of what i'm getting into next time i pick up a book like this, because as fun psychoanalyzing can be, i came out of reading this still wondering - how can these ideas actually be applied to REAL LIFE?? how can we use the ideas judith proposes to improve our world??
richthegreat's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Amazing! Profound and deeply impactful. Really need a slow reading to get the max out of this.
yelafeld's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
avolaster's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
johnaggreyodera's review against another edition
4.0
I used to experience an odd sensation every time I listened to Yoko Ono’s and John Lennon’s song “Imagine”. It was this strange mixture of righteous indignation and hope. The song seemed to me incredibly naive, silly even - “Imagine there’s no country/ it’s easy if you try/ … Imagine all the people/ living life in peace/ . Every time I heard those words, I thought, “well, that’s stupid: there is a country; we don’t live in peace”. The song, when such thoughts crossed my mind, was a hipster’s hope at changing the world, without actually attempting to confront the messiness of it. I used to think, “Well, what if Yoko and John didn’t live in the Dakota? What if they were not millionaires? What if they had to go through the drudgery, the small daily humiliations; the working sixty hour weeks while making minimum wage and not being able to afford rent or childcare? Would they then still preach the virtues of living in the imagination?” At such moments, I used to think that rich people, or at the very least, people relatively removed from some dire situations, had no business offering hope.
Nevertheless, for some reason, the song always left me hopeful. It insisted, despite my most ardent attempts, to free my frame of thinking from the actual, and to relocate it to the possible. It said that to construct a utopian vision of the world - to abandon the “real” or the “realistic”, so to speak- while seemingly a practically useless endeavour, was nonetheless an unfurling of horizons; a necessary precondition to creating a better world. The entire song was an acknowledgment of the idea that sometimes vision (or the lack of it), and the language we use to speak of it thereof, shapes and even entrenches reality. It maintained that sometimes, some things are impossible precisely because we refuse to think of them as possible.
Recently, reading Judith Butler’s new book, “The Force of Nonviolence”, gave me a new vocabulary for thinking about my conflicted feelings about “Imagine”, and made me much less of a skeptic regarding the political uselessness of songs like “Imagine”, and of stances that might be termed “naïve idealism”.
Butler’s main argument in the book is that we need to entirely reimagine a whole new way for human beings to coexist with each other. She calls this world a world of ‘radical equality’. In this world, our realization that human beings are inextricably bound with each other would lead us to view violence, in all its manifestations, not just as an affront on the other, but on our very selves, and on the bond that binds us. In this world, we would have abandoned the individuation of liberalism; the view that our lives, our projects, our goals, are entirely our own. By so doing, and thereby understanding that we do not have Selbstständigkeit, Butler thinks that we would then recognize the interdependence of our lives, which would lead to us treating each other - and our environment -nonviolently.
To be clear, Butler’s call for nonviolence is not instrumentalist; not in the way that Martin Luther King’s or Mohandas Gandhi’s was. Her argument is not that nonviolence is the best way to achieve the political goals we would like to see - though I doubt she disagrees with this. Rather, she is arguing more in line with what supposed “realists” would deridingly call “Kumbaya”; something in the mould of Ono and Lennon. She’s articulating a possible world, not making arguments about the real one; and that possible world may perhaps not seem to many people, well, realistic. But she doesn’t care.
Butler points out, quite accurately, that the liberal idea of the free-standing individual has always assumed as its subject the adult male; ideally (but not necessarily) well-off, and in the prime of his life. This adult male seems to have no needs he cannot find satisfaction for by himself - or by doing violence on another; no external dependencies he need concern himself with. He does not see himself, like the adult woman, as being tied to overpowering social expectation- sometimes to provide care, sometimes to look and act in certain ways etc. He does not see himself, like the child, as materially, developmentally and emotionally wholly dependent on others. And he does not see himself, like the old person or the infirm person or the disabled person, as physically dependent on another. Unable to recognize his interdependence to others in the various ways that supersede his narrow conception of individuality (for example, he never thinks of himself as dependent on the Bangladeshi sweatshop workers who make his clothes, or the Mexican farmers who grow his food, or the doctors who heal his body etc), this male does violence to others and to the environment, not realizing that, in doing so, he is also doing violence not just to himself, but also to the very bond of interrelationality that unites him with these others.
This male, because of his perceived independence, Butler also notes, is the one whose life is seen as most "grievable", thus more important than the female life, or the queer life, or the disabled life. In creating this distinction, violence against those whose lives are seen as not worth grieving is legitimized. Thus, starting from President Reagan himself, the AIDS crisis was not considered particularly important when it mostly ravaged the gay community, precisely because those lives were deemed not worthy grieving; and our tolerance towards gender violence, and attacks on trans people (mostly of colour) are also rationalized through similar thought processes.
Sometimes, Butler argues, group bonds are themselves the outcomes of processes of violence, both to the self and to others. University fraternities, for example, haze so that, by subjecting their pledges to acts of violence, they supposedly strengthen the bond between these pledges - and put these pledges in line to themselves do future violence. Racism and sexism and homophobia, too, are grounded on the dehumanization of the other as deserving of violence, such that, were racists or nationalists or homophobes to think of themselves as a group, the supposed unity they would have between them would only be a product of their view of themselves as doers of violence to others - even if they failed to recognize their acts as particularly violent.
Butler argues that the key to getting rid of this violence - what leads us to the ideal world of nonviolent radical equality, exists in our imagination. She therefore cites an ethical obligation to be unrealistic, to be imaginative, in the face of this violence, just like Ono and Lennon similarly did. She wants us to avoid Realpolitik, arguing convincingly that when “reality” is invoked, it is often as a dismissing of more imaginative possibilities; sometimes, as an outright mockery of the people who hold out hope for these radical possibilities as “naive” or “silly” - like I once did with Ono and Lennon. When we say, “Bernie Sanders will never be president”, for example, what we are doing is we are automatically closing off that possibility, such that the person who believes Bernie can actually be president is then, in our view, unrealistic or deluded. To this person, Butler would say, “Please, be unrealistic!”. So too, to the persons like Ono and Lennon who hold on to the hope of a nonviolent world, Butler would say, “They may deride us and mock us, call us silly or childish, but we refuse to be unimaginative. We accept their mockery”.
Butler’s ideas in the book provide a refreshing discussion that the political left ought to have, regarding, not just the goals they seek to achieve, but also, perhaps equally as important, the necessity for a positive vision of what the world would look like if those goals were achieved. There may, however, be some concerns from some people on the left concerning Butler's actual commitment to the practical goals that the left seeks to achieve. Butler seems to be all hazy vision and no practical undertakings. She,for instance, has said relatively little about, and does not seem to particularly support, the movements led by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders - she did in fact donate to Kamala Harris' campaign - Harris, whose track record as a prosecutor is not looked upon favourably among some leftists, and in some cycles, whose work as a prosecutor - incarcerating mostly people of colour - is viewed as decidedly violent. What, these leftists therefore ask, is the practical bearing of Butler's hope for a nonviolent world if she not only doesn't support left mass movements that seek to create this world, but also supports candidates who have rendered violent acts against marginalised communities, thereby clearly compromising the attainment of this vision?
These disagreements stem partly from the traditional calls for left purity, such that, because Butler does not explicitly endorse some platforms or some ideas on the left, she is not viewed as leftist enough. That is a long debate to be had some other time. On the other (more interesting) hand, these leftist contentions are also a manifestation of something Butler has been accused of for a long time (Since at least 1998, when Martha Nussbaum published a piece in the New Republic that was critical of Butler): that Butler's politics are nothing more than performative; meant to elucidate the supposed shortcomings of the liberal world to itself, but never to actually overcome them or do anything meaningful about them. When Butler, for example, says that we should abandon Realpolitik, these leftists disagree. To them, an acknowledgement of reality is not the same as a restriction of the imagination - and is a necessary step towards changing that reality. When, for example, Butler speaks about radical leftist positions not being taken seriously, the radical leftists ask: "By whom?" - for they indeed take these positions very seriously, and work to transform them into actual real policies - even as they recognise the difficulty of their undertaking.
In the minds of these people on the left therefore, Butler's writing is always aimed at liberals, or at comfortable people, who supposedly have a "moral conscience", but not much actual experience living in the trenches, so to speak. It is certainly easy to issue proclamations such as the ones Butler does when you are a tenured professor whose books have sold millions of copies, and it is easy for the readers of Butler's work, such as myself, to say, "she makes a fair point; we really ought to imagine a nonviolent world". But what does it mean to be on the ground, actively fighting for that possible world, as Bernie Sanders does? And therefore, what does it mean for someone like Butler not to actively support the efforts of people like Bernie Sanders, and the lived experiences of those marginalised people who support him?
These are valid criticisms, and it does not seem like Butler makes any serious effort to answer them. Her project, as she’s stated from the beginning, is a different one - it is simply to get us, firstly, to imagine. Movements of solidarity can take off from there.
It is important to therefore question what then is original about Butler's project here: she is neither offering us a viable political project, nor saying anything particularly new about what a utopian world may look like. But I think Butler's project, despite its unoriginality, is important nonetheless. It aims to refocus us; to remind us, self-professed practically minded leftists, of the virtues of the imagination. It's point is not to give us a new dream, but to tell us that the old dream of a utopian peaceful world, that Tolstoy had, should still be vivid in our minds even as we pursue our practical projects.
Is there space on the left for such people? I certainly hope so. The left needs both the dreamers and the doers. This is thus, in my view, a timely and necessary yet, again, wholly unoriginal book. Despite its shortcomings, it makes a valiant attempt at reminding us of the wonders of being free from the unimaginative strictures of “realness”, and in doing so, it gives us a political hope that is remarkably trenchant. It says, “A better world is possible, do let us imagine it". Perhaps this, imagining, might not be enough for some people on the left, but to this, Butler would say, "Why don't you take it from here?"
Nevertheless, for some reason, the song always left me hopeful. It insisted, despite my most ardent attempts, to free my frame of thinking from the actual, and to relocate it to the possible. It said that to construct a utopian vision of the world - to abandon the “real” or the “realistic”, so to speak- while seemingly a practically useless endeavour, was nonetheless an unfurling of horizons; a necessary precondition to creating a better world. The entire song was an acknowledgment of the idea that sometimes vision (or the lack of it), and the language we use to speak of it thereof, shapes and even entrenches reality. It maintained that sometimes, some things are impossible precisely because we refuse to think of them as possible.
Recently, reading Judith Butler’s new book, “The Force of Nonviolence”, gave me a new vocabulary for thinking about my conflicted feelings about “Imagine”, and made me much less of a skeptic regarding the political uselessness of songs like “Imagine”, and of stances that might be termed “naïve idealism”.
Butler’s main argument in the book is that we need to entirely reimagine a whole new way for human beings to coexist with each other. She calls this world a world of ‘radical equality’. In this world, our realization that human beings are inextricably bound with each other would lead us to view violence, in all its manifestations, not just as an affront on the other, but on our very selves, and on the bond that binds us. In this world, we would have abandoned the individuation of liberalism; the view that our lives, our projects, our goals, are entirely our own. By so doing, and thereby understanding that we do not have Selbstständigkeit, Butler thinks that we would then recognize the interdependence of our lives, which would lead to us treating each other - and our environment -nonviolently.
To be clear, Butler’s call for nonviolence is not instrumentalist; not in the way that Martin Luther King’s or Mohandas Gandhi’s was. Her argument is not that nonviolence is the best way to achieve the political goals we would like to see - though I doubt she disagrees with this. Rather, she is arguing more in line with what supposed “realists” would deridingly call “Kumbaya”; something in the mould of Ono and Lennon. She’s articulating a possible world, not making arguments about the real one; and that possible world may perhaps not seem to many people, well, realistic. But she doesn’t care.
Butler points out, quite accurately, that the liberal idea of the free-standing individual has always assumed as its subject the adult male; ideally (but not necessarily) well-off, and in the prime of his life. This adult male seems to have no needs he cannot find satisfaction for by himself - or by doing violence on another; no external dependencies he need concern himself with. He does not see himself, like the adult woman, as being tied to overpowering social expectation- sometimes to provide care, sometimes to look and act in certain ways etc. He does not see himself, like the child, as materially, developmentally and emotionally wholly dependent on others. And he does not see himself, like the old person or the infirm person or the disabled person, as physically dependent on another. Unable to recognize his interdependence to others in the various ways that supersede his narrow conception of individuality (for example, he never thinks of himself as dependent on the Bangladeshi sweatshop workers who make his clothes, or the Mexican farmers who grow his food, or the doctors who heal his body etc), this male does violence to others and to the environment, not realizing that, in doing so, he is also doing violence not just to himself, but also to the very bond of interrelationality that unites him with these others.
This male, because of his perceived independence, Butler also notes, is the one whose life is seen as most "grievable", thus more important than the female life, or the queer life, or the disabled life. In creating this distinction, violence against those whose lives are seen as not worth grieving is legitimized. Thus, starting from President Reagan himself, the AIDS crisis was not considered particularly important when it mostly ravaged the gay community, precisely because those lives were deemed not worthy grieving; and our tolerance towards gender violence, and attacks on trans people (mostly of colour) are also rationalized through similar thought processes.
Sometimes, Butler argues, group bonds are themselves the outcomes of processes of violence, both to the self and to others. University fraternities, for example, haze so that, by subjecting their pledges to acts of violence, they supposedly strengthen the bond between these pledges - and put these pledges in line to themselves do future violence. Racism and sexism and homophobia, too, are grounded on the dehumanization of the other as deserving of violence, such that, were racists or nationalists or homophobes to think of themselves as a group, the supposed unity they would have between them would only be a product of their view of themselves as doers of violence to others - even if they failed to recognize their acts as particularly violent.
Butler argues that the key to getting rid of this violence - what leads us to the ideal world of nonviolent radical equality, exists in our imagination. She therefore cites an ethical obligation to be unrealistic, to be imaginative, in the face of this violence, just like Ono and Lennon similarly did. She wants us to avoid Realpolitik, arguing convincingly that when “reality” is invoked, it is often as a dismissing of more imaginative possibilities; sometimes, as an outright mockery of the people who hold out hope for these radical possibilities as “naive” or “silly” - like I once did with Ono and Lennon. When we say, “Bernie Sanders will never be president”, for example, what we are doing is we are automatically closing off that possibility, such that the person who believes Bernie can actually be president is then, in our view, unrealistic or deluded. To this person, Butler would say, “Please, be unrealistic!”. So too, to the persons like Ono and Lennon who hold on to the hope of a nonviolent world, Butler would say, “They may deride us and mock us, call us silly or childish, but we refuse to be unimaginative. We accept their mockery”.
Butler’s ideas in the book provide a refreshing discussion that the political left ought to have, regarding, not just the goals they seek to achieve, but also, perhaps equally as important, the necessity for a positive vision of what the world would look like if those goals were achieved. There may, however, be some concerns from some people on the left concerning Butler's actual commitment to the practical goals that the left seeks to achieve. Butler seems to be all hazy vision and no practical undertakings. She,for instance, has said relatively little about, and does not seem to particularly support, the movements led by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders - she did in fact donate to Kamala Harris' campaign - Harris, whose track record as a prosecutor is not looked upon favourably among some leftists, and in some cycles, whose work as a prosecutor - incarcerating mostly people of colour - is viewed as decidedly violent. What, these leftists therefore ask, is the practical bearing of Butler's hope for a nonviolent world if she not only doesn't support left mass movements that seek to create this world, but also supports candidates who have rendered violent acts against marginalised communities, thereby clearly compromising the attainment of this vision?
These disagreements stem partly from the traditional calls for left purity, such that, because Butler does not explicitly endorse some platforms or some ideas on the left, she is not viewed as leftist enough. That is a long debate to be had some other time. On the other (more interesting) hand, these leftist contentions are also a manifestation of something Butler has been accused of for a long time (Since at least 1998, when Martha Nussbaum published a piece in the New Republic that was critical of Butler): that Butler's politics are nothing more than performative; meant to elucidate the supposed shortcomings of the liberal world to itself, but never to actually overcome them or do anything meaningful about them. When Butler, for example, says that we should abandon Realpolitik, these leftists disagree. To them, an acknowledgement of reality is not the same as a restriction of the imagination - and is a necessary step towards changing that reality. When, for example, Butler speaks about radical leftist positions not being taken seriously, the radical leftists ask: "By whom?" - for they indeed take these positions very seriously, and work to transform them into actual real policies - even as they recognise the difficulty of their undertaking.
In the minds of these people on the left therefore, Butler's writing is always aimed at liberals, or at comfortable people, who supposedly have a "moral conscience", but not much actual experience living in the trenches, so to speak. It is certainly easy to issue proclamations such as the ones Butler does when you are a tenured professor whose books have sold millions of copies, and it is easy for the readers of Butler's work, such as myself, to say, "she makes a fair point; we really ought to imagine a nonviolent world". But what does it mean to be on the ground, actively fighting for that possible world, as Bernie Sanders does? And therefore, what does it mean for someone like Butler not to actively support the efforts of people like Bernie Sanders, and the lived experiences of those marginalised people who support him?
These are valid criticisms, and it does not seem like Butler makes any serious effort to answer them. Her project, as she’s stated from the beginning, is a different one - it is simply to get us, firstly, to imagine. Movements of solidarity can take off from there.
It is important to therefore question what then is original about Butler's project here: she is neither offering us a viable political project, nor saying anything particularly new about what a utopian world may look like. But I think Butler's project, despite its unoriginality, is important nonetheless. It aims to refocus us; to remind us, self-professed practically minded leftists, of the virtues of the imagination. It's point is not to give us a new dream, but to tell us that the old dream of a utopian peaceful world, that Tolstoy had, should still be vivid in our minds even as we pursue our practical projects.
Is there space on the left for such people? I certainly hope so. The left needs both the dreamers and the doers. This is thus, in my view, a timely and necessary yet, again, wholly unoriginal book. Despite its shortcomings, it makes a valiant attempt at reminding us of the wonders of being free from the unimaginative strictures of “realness”, and in doing so, it gives us a political hope that is remarkably trenchant. It says, “A better world is possible, do let us imagine it". Perhaps this, imagining, might not be enough for some people on the left, but to this, Butler would say, "Why don't you take it from here?"
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