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A review by schmidtmark56
The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political by Judith Butler
4.0
Before even reviewing this book, I need to remark that the reader of the audiobook pronounced the word "violence" strangely, like they had too much saliva in their mouth as they were talking.
Trivialities aside this was a good but not earth-shattering book by Judith Butler. Her "Gender Troubles" book was much weightier and broke more ground; I would agree with other reviewers that this book felt like it wasn't as cohesive, it felt too short to do the damage it needed to.
She started off the book interestingly enough, pointing out how the Left often justifies violence as a means to an end (i.e. revolution, etc.), and this makes her somewhat unique among many progressives/leftists nowadays who have this undercurrent of implicit violence in all their rhetoric.
In classic Butler fashion, she pointed out some really hard-hitting difficulties we often take for granted. The first was the difficulty of defining violence (this is complicated by state-sanctioned misuse of the word, i.e. when action begins which is contrary to the state's goals, they call it terrorism or riots, but when it supports their goals they call it military action or peaceful protests).
There were some interesting ramifications of [racism = violent] + [racism = systemic] = [violence is systemic] (the same formula can be used with sexism, any other leftist -ism really).
The second major complication she brings up is the shattering of self defense, namely “Who is this 'self' defended in the name of self-defense? How is that self delineated from other selves? ...Is the one to whom violence is done not also in some sense part of the “self” who defends itself through an act of violence? There is a sense in which violence done to another is violence to one’s self…”
Butler really pushes hard on this point, that except for a nonviolent stance, all other stances are violent, just essentially choosing when to justify the violence, which begs the question: can violence remain a means and not become an end? Butler thinks not. She makes an argument that nonviolence is tied together with an idea of the self which is relational instead of individualistic. This is one of the first times I've ever seen an explicit argument for the group over the individual, and it's an interesting one. Essentially, everyone is dependent on others to some degree. No one is truly independent. Even the colonial powers back in the day were dependent on natives for cheap labor to live their posh lives back in the homeland. Thus Butler argues that violence as an attack on interdependency, on bonds and on relationships themselves. In such a view violence against the other is violence against the self. This interdependency also then ties her views on equality into the equation, since she claims nonviolence doesn't make sense without equality as a goal.
Butler notices how hobbes et al. theorize with and use an adult male as the standard human (as if it was never a dependent child, but was always a self-sufficient adult man). She states "The social form of the individual is masculine" who lives in "A natural world pre-emptively void of other people". Both of these are fictions, ones which she would reject. “No one is an individual, but becomes one over time through individuation”. She makes a very interesting argument that we aren’t altogether separable from the conditions which make our lives possible, thus we are never fully individuated. This is somewhat of a radical view, but one can see the utility in it.
Anti-discrimination argumentation is usually formulated from an individualistic point of view, as are most earlier ideas of equality; but she argues that equality is something undertaken between people, not just an individual doing better or worse (The "inequality among individuals" formulation doesn’t tell us about wider social relations). Ultimately, she sees the individualist view as separating one from the social obligations we bear toward one another, whereas the social (group) approach has a wider take on society, focusing on the interdependance she values so highly. Even when it's admitted, globalized dependency is often exploited (by nationalism) for what are often violent ends.
Because the way the discussion is formulated often causes lots of problems (“Worthy of a violent protection against others, in other words ‘A violence done to others, so it is not done to one’s own’”), Butler proposes an "equality of grievability". She goes on to state "A prohibition on killing only applies to those who are grievable".
This framework was a very interesting one, and was one which the news brought to my attention when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started. I always would notice how the few americans who died would get their faces put up on the screen and sometimes their names read out, while the myriad civilian collateral damage (not to mention terrorist) deaths were brushed over like stats in a video game. The realization of the wrongness of this only very gradually came to my attention.
I would like to sometime return to how she defined grievability, because she made a total non-argument concerning abortion (simply a partisan assertion, not possible to be supported by her own argumentation thus far). Specifically she argued against the pro life position, because "it's committed to gender inequality": the rights of an embryo [or rather a baby, to live,] trump the [derivative right, not the foundational] right of a woman to freedom and equality. Without life as the most fundamental right, one cannot have other rights. One cannot have freedom or equality if one is dead. I could go into the medical science around embryology but I won't. Butler didn't because she can't go that route, she had to very suspiciously keep the discussion concerning the topic vague. I noticed it and re-read these sections several times each time it came up, but she never said anything substantial. The unfortunate irony is that she and others who hold her stance hold to an ancient practice of defacing one's enemy (literally killing them before they have a recognizable face, or labelling the face inhuman, such as with the black slaves of yore). Despite all this, she is able to flip the victim game: "Once again, women become the ungrievable".
"In the same way we talk about the unequal distribution of goods or services, we can also talk about the unequal distribution of grievability." Thus in Butler’s formulation we could re-word “Black Lives Matter” as “Black lives are grievable”.
Butler applies kantian categorical imperative logic to violence (would you want to live in a world where everyone lives by x violent maxim?). “It is my own aggression which comes toward me in the form of another’s action” & “What I can do can be done to me”
I think the real reason Nietzsche hated christianity so much was that it was anti-reciprocity. He could at least understand the old testament. But the new testament, which places forgiveness as the highest virtue, is absolutely antithetical to reciprocity, as forgiveness is the very undermining and delegitimization of reciprocity. It equals the sum out of it's own pocket, rather than out of the pocket (or blood) of the offender. This leads us to an interesting observation.
Contemporary leftist american politics is anti-christian in an important sense, since it flips the judge/judged, creator/created paradigm and seeks reparations from others instead of looking for ways to apologize to whom it has hurt. Instead of remaining humbled before God and forgiving as God has forgiven, this moral and theological regicide causes this new religion’s adherents to operate at a frantic pace, demanding the world be “perfect” (absolutely reciprocal) when it never will be. The fact that the world cannot and will not ever be perfectly fair, equitable, etc. means that this ideology could outlast everything else (or more likely end everything in its hubris). For hubris it certainly is, when today’s secular leftists are so utterly oblivious to Nietzsche’s Antichrist.
“Could it be that even now, in destroying another, we are also destroying ourselves? If so, it is because this “I” that I am has only ever been ambiguously differentiated and is one for whom differentiation is a perpetual struggle or problem”
“Indeed we all live more or less with a rage over a dependency from which we cannot free ourselves without freeing the conditions of social and psychic life itself”
“I first become thinkable in the mind of the other as “you” or as a gendered pronoun, and that phantasmatic ideation gives birth to me as a social creature...I depend on the ones whose definition of me gives me form”
“Lives that do not count as potentially grievable stand very little chance of being safeguarded”
"A political commitment to nonviolence does not make sense outside of a commitment to equality"
All of these are interesting quotes on our journey into her argument. She sets up a dichotomy of "What stops us from killing?" (old way of discussing) vs "What motivates us to find moral or political pathways that actively seek everything possible to preserve life?" (new way that butler is proposing). Thankfully, she abjectly rejects a utilitarian calculus of grievability, pointing out that oftentimes some have an uncalculable value, while others have a calculable value. However she fell into the same old trap as all her intellectual kith and kin:
"Those whose grieveability we do not assume are those who suffer inequality" (this assumes the tautology of victimhood, i.e. that if there are any quantifiable discrepancies, then those are necessarily a result of systems, not of personal choice, culture, etc. The real issue at hand here is that of victim culpability. Even discussing this topic has been roundly rejected and as such the current conversation regarding leftist egalitarian politics can never truly progress. If we never deal with the extent of victim culpability (i.e. claim against all common sense that no victims are ever in any way even partially culpable for their victimhood), this conversation is dead in the water. What I'm proposing here must seem insane to most leftists who have already bought in to a tautological view of racism, whereby any qantifiable discrepancies between races are necessarily due to racism. This is self evidently untrue in other contexts, thus we should be able go question it here in this context as well.
Closer to the end, Butler says that european efforts to prevent migrants is “in part due” to “wanting to keep europe white”, which is true, but there’s massive religious and cultural tensions which can't be merely brushed aside. The progressivist hyperfocus on (mostly nonexistent) racial issues takes the focus away from that which conservatives consistently claim, i.e. that they are concerned about cultural differences (whether justly or unjustly) in terms of muslim or latin american immigrants. This is either outright ignored, or, if taken into consideration, it is instantly lumped in with racism (cultural relativism as the requirement for antiracism, and not being explicitly "antiracist" implies one's necessary racism).
After that she summarized some of her main points, and then launched into some psychoanalytical psychobable, something about eros and thanatos, idk I've never been able to make it through a single freud book.... She makes a few more interesting points/claims though:
- The law is only preserved by being asserted time and time again (coerced through violence)
- (Social) Contracts as the beginning of legal violence (quoting someone, not her own)
- Interdependency as the reason for supporting equality (also reason for nonviolence, as stated earlier)
- The concept of self-defense is often used by racism and other systemic violence to justify itself (unsanctioned violence = inherently unjustified; sanctioned violence = inherently justified)
- “What war destroys first are those very restrictions on destructive license”
- Pitting hatred's aggression against war itself
Near the end she brings up Einstein and Freud's correspondance in the interwar period concerning nonviolence… Einstein seemed to beleive it (world peace) couldn't happen unless there was an international organization which could check other countries and hold them accountable. The league of nations failed at this, the UN fails at this, NATO... need I go on? I'm not sure that there is an easy answer. It seems like we're stuck in this gray twilight zone of imperialistic war being wrong but also inaction being wrong. I'm surprised that Butler didn't speak more about the common complaints against nonviolence, namely that it may require one to restrain themselves from defending those who are being oppressed. I'm a little disappointed that she never brought that up, but this was an incredibly dense little book for the length.
Trivialities aside this was a good but not earth-shattering book by Judith Butler. Her "Gender Troubles" book was much weightier and broke more ground; I would agree with other reviewers that this book felt like it wasn't as cohesive, it felt too short to do the damage it needed to.
She started off the book interestingly enough, pointing out how the Left often justifies violence as a means to an end (i.e. revolution, etc.), and this makes her somewhat unique among many progressives/leftists nowadays who have this undercurrent of implicit violence in all their rhetoric.
In classic Butler fashion, she pointed out some really hard-hitting difficulties we often take for granted. The first was the difficulty of defining violence (this is complicated by state-sanctioned misuse of the word, i.e. when action begins which is contrary to the state's goals, they call it terrorism or riots, but when it supports their goals they call it military action or peaceful protests).
There were some interesting ramifications of [racism = violent] + [racism = systemic] = [violence is systemic] (the same formula can be used with sexism, any other leftist -ism really).
The second major complication she brings up is the shattering of self defense, namely “Who is this 'self' defended in the name of self-defense? How is that self delineated from other selves? ...Is the one to whom violence is done not also in some sense part of the “self” who defends itself through an act of violence? There is a sense in which violence done to another is violence to one’s self…”
Butler really pushes hard on this point, that except for a nonviolent stance, all other stances are violent, just essentially choosing when to justify the violence, which begs the question: can violence remain a means and not become an end? Butler thinks not. She makes an argument that nonviolence is tied together with an idea of the self which is relational instead of individualistic. This is one of the first times I've ever seen an explicit argument for the group over the individual, and it's an interesting one. Essentially, everyone is dependent on others to some degree. No one is truly independent. Even the colonial powers back in the day were dependent on natives for cheap labor to live their posh lives back in the homeland. Thus Butler argues that violence as an attack on interdependency, on bonds and on relationships themselves. In such a view violence against the other is violence against the self. This interdependency also then ties her views on equality into the equation, since she claims nonviolence doesn't make sense without equality as a goal.
Butler notices how hobbes et al. theorize with and use an adult male as the standard human (as if it was never a dependent child, but was always a self-sufficient adult man). She states "The social form of the individual is masculine" who lives in "A natural world pre-emptively void of other people". Both of these are fictions, ones which she would reject. “No one is an individual, but becomes one over time through individuation”. She makes a very interesting argument that we aren’t altogether separable from the conditions which make our lives possible, thus we are never fully individuated. This is somewhat of a radical view, but one can see the utility in it.
Anti-discrimination argumentation is usually formulated from an individualistic point of view, as are most earlier ideas of equality; but she argues that equality is something undertaken between people, not just an individual doing better or worse (The "inequality among individuals" formulation doesn’t tell us about wider social relations). Ultimately, she sees the individualist view as separating one from the social obligations we bear toward one another, whereas the social (group) approach has a wider take on society, focusing on the interdependance she values so highly. Even when it's admitted, globalized dependency is often exploited (by nationalism) for what are often violent ends.
Because the way the discussion is formulated often causes lots of problems (“Worthy of a violent protection against others, in other words ‘A violence done to others, so it is not done to one’s own’”), Butler proposes an "equality of grievability". She goes on to state "A prohibition on killing only applies to those who are grievable".
This framework was a very interesting one, and was one which the news brought to my attention when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started. I always would notice how the few americans who died would get their faces put up on the screen and sometimes their names read out, while the myriad civilian collateral damage (not to mention terrorist) deaths were brushed over like stats in a video game. The realization of the wrongness of this only very gradually came to my attention.
I would like to sometime return to how she defined grievability, because she made a total non-argument concerning abortion (simply a partisan assertion, not possible to be supported by her own argumentation thus far). Specifically she argued against the pro life position, because "it's committed to gender inequality": the rights of an embryo [or rather a baby, to live,] trump the [derivative right, not the foundational] right of a woman to freedom and equality. Without life as the most fundamental right, one cannot have other rights. One cannot have freedom or equality if one is dead. I could go into the medical science around embryology but I won't. Butler didn't because she can't go that route, she had to very suspiciously keep the discussion concerning the topic vague. I noticed it and re-read these sections several times each time it came up, but she never said anything substantial. The unfortunate irony is that she and others who hold her stance hold to an ancient practice of defacing one's enemy (literally killing them before they have a recognizable face, or labelling the face inhuman, such as with the black slaves of yore). Despite all this, she is able to flip the victim game: "Once again, women become the ungrievable".
"In the same way we talk about the unequal distribution of goods or services, we can also talk about the unequal distribution of grievability." Thus in Butler’s formulation we could re-word “Black Lives Matter” as “Black lives are grievable”.
Butler applies kantian categorical imperative logic to violence (would you want to live in a world where everyone lives by x violent maxim?). “It is my own aggression which comes toward me in the form of another’s action” & “What I can do can be done to me”
I think the real reason Nietzsche hated christianity so much was that it was anti-reciprocity. He could at least understand the old testament. But the new testament, which places forgiveness as the highest virtue, is absolutely antithetical to reciprocity, as forgiveness is the very undermining and delegitimization of reciprocity. It equals the sum out of it's own pocket, rather than out of the pocket (or blood) of the offender. This leads us to an interesting observation.
Contemporary leftist american politics is anti-christian in an important sense, since it flips the judge/judged, creator/created paradigm and seeks reparations from others instead of looking for ways to apologize to whom it has hurt. Instead of remaining humbled before God and forgiving as God has forgiven, this moral and theological regicide causes this new religion’s adherents to operate at a frantic pace, demanding the world be “perfect” (absolutely reciprocal) when it never will be. The fact that the world cannot and will not ever be perfectly fair, equitable, etc. means that this ideology could outlast everything else (or more likely end everything in its hubris). For hubris it certainly is, when today’s secular leftists are so utterly oblivious to Nietzsche’s Antichrist.
“Could it be that even now, in destroying another, we are also destroying ourselves? If so, it is because this “I” that I am has only ever been ambiguously differentiated and is one for whom differentiation is a perpetual struggle or problem”
“Indeed we all live more or less with a rage over a dependency from which we cannot free ourselves without freeing the conditions of social and psychic life itself”
“I first become thinkable in the mind of the other as “you” or as a gendered pronoun, and that phantasmatic ideation gives birth to me as a social creature...I depend on the ones whose definition of me gives me form”
“Lives that do not count as potentially grievable stand very little chance of being safeguarded”
"A political commitment to nonviolence does not make sense outside of a commitment to equality"
All of these are interesting quotes on our journey into her argument. She sets up a dichotomy of "What stops us from killing?" (old way of discussing) vs "What motivates us to find moral or political pathways that actively seek everything possible to preserve life?" (new way that butler is proposing). Thankfully, she abjectly rejects a utilitarian calculus of grievability, pointing out that oftentimes some have an uncalculable value, while others have a calculable value. However she fell into the same old trap as all her intellectual kith and kin:
"Those whose grieveability we do not assume are those who suffer inequality" (this assumes the tautology of victimhood, i.e. that if there are any quantifiable discrepancies, then those are necessarily a result of systems, not of personal choice, culture, etc. The real issue at hand here is that of victim culpability. Even discussing this topic has been roundly rejected and as such the current conversation regarding leftist egalitarian politics can never truly progress. If we never deal with the extent of victim culpability (i.e. claim against all common sense that no victims are ever in any way even partially culpable for their victimhood), this conversation is dead in the water. What I'm proposing here must seem insane to most leftists who have already bought in to a tautological view of racism, whereby any qantifiable discrepancies between races are necessarily due to racism. This is self evidently untrue in other contexts, thus we should be able go question it here in this context as well.
Closer to the end, Butler says that european efforts to prevent migrants is “in part due” to “wanting to keep europe white”, which is true, but there’s massive religious and cultural tensions which can't be merely brushed aside. The progressivist hyperfocus on (mostly nonexistent) racial issues takes the focus away from that which conservatives consistently claim, i.e. that they are concerned about cultural differences (whether justly or unjustly) in terms of muslim or latin american immigrants. This is either outright ignored, or, if taken into consideration, it is instantly lumped in with racism (cultural relativism as the requirement for antiracism, and not being explicitly "antiracist" implies one's necessary racism).
After that she summarized some of her main points, and then launched into some psychoanalytical psychobable, something about eros and thanatos, idk I've never been able to make it through a single freud book.... She makes a few more interesting points/claims though:
- The law is only preserved by being asserted time and time again (coerced through violence)
- (Social) Contracts as the beginning of legal violence (quoting someone, not her own)
- Interdependency as the reason for supporting equality (also reason for nonviolence, as stated earlier)
- The concept of self-defense is often used by racism and other systemic violence to justify itself (unsanctioned violence = inherently unjustified; sanctioned violence = inherently justified)
- “What war destroys first are those very restrictions on destructive license”
- Pitting hatred's aggression against war itself
Near the end she brings up Einstein and Freud's correspondance in the interwar period concerning nonviolence… Einstein seemed to beleive it (world peace) couldn't happen unless there was an international organization which could check other countries and hold them accountable. The league of nations failed at this, the UN fails at this, NATO... need I go on? I'm not sure that there is an easy answer. It seems like we're stuck in this gray twilight zone of imperialistic war being wrong but also inaction being wrong. I'm surprised that Butler didn't speak more about the common complaints against nonviolence, namely that it may require one to restrain themselves from defending those who are being oppressed. I'm a little disappointed that she never brought that up, but this was an incredibly dense little book for the length.