book{butler2021force,
title={The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind},
author={Butler, J.},
isbn={9781788732772},
lccn={2019038460},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=9ycZEAAAQBAJ},
year={2021},
publisher={Verso Books}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
To understand structural or systemic violence one needs to find frameworks more encompassing than those that rely on two figures, one striking and the other struck. States or institutions rename nonviolent practices as violent, conducting a political war at the level of public semantics. The power that misuses language that way seeks to secure its own monopoly on violence.
Liberal modernity in the United States posits the state as a guarantee of a freedom from violence that fundamentally depends on unleashing violence against racial minorities, and against all peoples characterized as irrational and outside the national norm. Racial violence is understood to serve the state’s self defense. The target has to be figured as a threat, a vessel of real or actual violence, in order for lethal police action to appear as self-defense. If the person was not doing anything demonstrably violent, then perhaps the person is simply figured as violent, as a violent kind of person, or as pure violence embodied in and by that person.
An ethics of nonviolence cannot be predicated on individualism. Nonviolence pertains to all living and inter-constitutive relations.
When the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated.
The objection that a position in favor of nonviolence is simply unrealistic requires a critique of what counts as reality.
Many believe in nonviolence but make an exception for self-defense. Who the “self” is? Preserve the lives of those who are like me, but not those who are unlike me. Certain selves are considered worth defending while others are not. Racial schemes make such grotesque distinctions between which lives are valuable (and potentially grievable if lost) and those which are not.
The claim of self-defense on the part of those who wield the power is too often a defense of power, of its prerogatives, and of the inequalities it presupposes and produces. The terms of self-defense augment the purposes of war.
We think of self-defense as a response to a blow initiated from the outside, the privileged self requires no such instigation to draw its boundaries and police its exclusions. “Any possible threat”, any imagined threat, is enough to unleash its self-entitled violence.
The instrumentalist defense of violence depends quite crucially on being able to show that violence can be restricted to the status of a tool, a means, without becoming an end itself.
Violence is always interpreted.
Nonviolence directly implies a critique of individualism and require that we rethink the social bonds that constitute us as living creatures. A social philosophy of living and sustainable bonds.
Interdependency implies social equality. What each depends upon, and what depends upon each one, is varied, since it is not just other human lives, but other sensate creatures, environments, and infrastructures: we depend upon them and they depend on us, in turn, to sustain a livable world. Without that overarching sense of the interrelational, we take the bodily boundary to be the end rather than the threshold of the person, the site of passage and porosity, the evidence of an openness to alterity that is definitional of the body itself.
When any of us commit acts of violence, we are, in and through those acts, building a more violent world. Violence does not exhaust itself in the realization of a just end; rather, it renews itself in directions that exceed both deliberate intention and instrumental schemes.
Nonviolence has now to be understood less as a moral position adopted by individuals in relation to a field of possible action than as a social and political practice undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction coupled with a commitment to world building that honors global interdependency of the kind that embodies ideals of economic, social, and political freedom and equality. Nonviolence does not necessarily emerge from a pacific or calm part of the soul. Very often it is an expression of rage, indignation, and aggression.
Mahatma Gandhi insisted that satyagraha, or “soul force”, his name for a practice and policits of nonviolence, is a nonviolent force, one that consists at once of an “insistence on truth … that arms the votary with matchless power.”
Nonviolence is an ideal that cannot always be fully honored in practice. Nonviolence does not imply the absence of force or of aggression. It is an ethical stylization of embodiment, replete with gestures and modes of non-action, ways of becoming an obstacle, of using the solidity of the body and its proprioceptive object field to block or derail a further exercise of violence.
Bodily acts of resistance involve a mindfulness of the tipping point, the site where the force of resistance can become the violent act or practice that commits a fresh injustice. There is no practice of nonviolence that does not negotiate fundamental ethical and political ambiguities. Nonviolence is the name of an ongoing struggle.
We have to expand and refine the political vocabulary for thinking about violence and the resistance to violence, taking account of how that vocabulary is twisted and used to shield violent authorities against critique and opposition.
Nonviolence is a physical assertion of the claims of life, a living assertion, a claim that is made by speech, gesture, and action, through networks, encampments and assemblies.