No One is To Blame: On Judith Butler's "The Force of Non-Violence"

Judith Butler | The Force of Non-Violence | Verso | February 2020 | 224 Pages

“Death is nothing other than to be separated from one's money. Those without money, are without Life, so how can they know what it is to die?” 

“No one really dies, if they possess nothing” 

-Leon Bloy (Last Bake) 

-“The soul refuses those who want war, because they confuse it with struggle, but also those who renounce struggle, because they confuse it with war” 

Gilles Deleuze (Essays Critical and Clinical) 

As we dive deeper into 2020, we are all already aware of the recurring terrors that have emerged, from the instigation of “WW3” provided by the hands of Trump as he approves orders for launching drone attacks on the US embassy in Baghdad, killing Iran’s top general Qassem Soleimani; the Australian bushfire spanning 18.6 million hectares, destroying thousands of homes, killing one billion animals, and at least 30 people; and as of now, the viral pandemic of Covid-19, a virus that began in Wuhan, China spreading across the globe infecting over 600’000 people with varying degrees in intensity across nations -- some taking the precaution necessary and others, like the UK, who sit back in idle passiveness, waiting for its people to brace impact. 

How is the violence inflicted among the millions of people either infected, made physiologically vulnerable, or economically displaced as young people are living precariously to be assessed and analyzed? Despite Judith Butler not prophesying its onset, her analysis of violence is nevertheless a helpful framework in considering a violence committed that is not easily traceable to a single agent but rather rests on the exploitative power of the economy and the systemic negligence for the safety of people's lives and the protection of health services. 

Titled A Force of Non-Violence, its aim can be better expressed if translated: A Violence of Non-Violence. Following Balibar, Butler stresses the ambiguous nature of violence that sees itself as both an expression of violence and an exercise in power and authority. Butler sees this “oscillation” between the two forms as part of the logic of violence itself, and it is this which the book makes its main case: “Stabilizing a definition of violence depends less on an enumeration of its instances than on a conceptualization that can take account of its oscillations within conflicting political frameworks”. 

Paradoxical at first, the concept of non-violence signals the attempt to disassociate itself from the more familial conceptions of political passivity, inactivity, and complicit pacifism from which early skeptical remarks first arise. Instead, what is offered is a non-violent ‘force’ which is not dissimilar from inevitable violent eruptions that can result from activism: “Nonviolence is less a failure of action than a physical assertion of the claims of life”. 

What is generally first demanded of any analysis of violence is who can be held accountable, made responsible for the production of violence and how such people can be punished. Such a neat distinction -- between punisher and punished -- is further interrogated by Butler when any analysis of violence also carries with it an implicit idea of self, person, or ‘Life’, i.e. who is deemed worthy of protecting is what constitutes a Life. Thus it becomes apparent that the many people who are made vulnerable by an oppressive system designates those who are unworthy of consideration -- without Life. 

Intuitively, force connotes a resistance against a violent other, thus placing itself firmly on the side of Good, while those who are ‘violent’ are without a doubt those who are morally reprehensible, responsible, and should be punished by any means necessary (as seen by the state). “Violence” is made ambiguous not only because what is considered a violence act inarticulate -- between physical blows and hate speech -- but, more abstractly, violence is seemingly diluted to a point of no traceable cause of a single agent. This fact brings Butler towards an analysis of how violence is distributed through economic exploitation. To be in a place of vulnerability is to be placed within a space of violence. 

Violence is further complicated in ways that political rhetoric and economic retaliation has power to shift the perspective through semantic appropriation to serve the state’s end. For instance, when an economy is threatened by an other who seeks to destabilize it, it will invariably impose this other as violently framed as an attack on the natural order of things by renaming these non-violent practices as violent, “conducting a political war”, in the name of self-preservation while maintaining national norms. 

Even in instances where an institution's justification for self-defense expressed as violence is not found -- because the victim is shown not to be dangerous -- then their being as such is violent. In other words, minorities and oppressed groups are figured as a violent kind of person. This only requires the interpretation of the state to validate this and the norms established around it to remain complicit with its outcomes. 

Violence done in the name of “self-defense” is, as Butler shows, the exception to the rule becoming its own Law that the State performs -- either against its own people or other nations. “The claim of self-defense on the part of those who wield power is too often a defense of power”. 

Self-preservation requires a sense of self that must be defended from an other who does not belong. Thus any self-defense from a state works also to devalue the status of minorities or oppressed people who live within its community. “The self who is defended is one who identifies with others who belong to whiteness, to a specific nation, to a party in border dispute”. 

Such logic of self-defense is also succinctly encapsulated by Mark Fisher, pointing out how describing disasters using theological vocabulary is itself dangerous because it renders subsequent analysis even more difficult. For instance, the logic of self-defense for a state is often portrayed as if there is a supernatural, transcendent Other Evil that must be dealt with. Framed this way, it manages to position itself, in defense, on the side of the inherent Good. Thereby, to merely acknowledge Evil and defend against it is adequate justification for our own omni-benevolence. No longer are their complexes of socio-political networks between two or more complicating countries but an Us vs Them mentality. When describing the reactions to the disaster of the 7/7 London bombings, in which emerged a “Hobbesian inferno” among commuters, Fisher locates the attitude of the “heroic-victim” whose logic is: “We’re under attack, we must be Good”. Such a logic is exemplified by the state to which defense is always a sign of innocence. 

What Butler refers to as the reductionist analysis of violence consisting in physical “blows” is what Zizek refers to as “subjective violence”: It is an “experience as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is a perturbation of the ‘normal’, peaceful state of things.” Such a background is of course a politico-economic one and any violence done here is “objective”, however, as Zizek continues, “objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things.” 

The value of Life, for Butler, is one marked by equality. A life considered equal is a life worthy of grievability such that any life is worth protecting and mourning in view of a systemic injustice that casts these lives aside without remorse. “The presumption of equal grievability would be not only a conviction or attitude [. . .], but a principle that organizes the social organization of health, food, shelter, employment, sexual life, civic life”. 

Among Butler's itinerary of invaluable concepts is vulnerability. It designates not only a subjective state but as a feature for our shared or interdependent lives. Along with her analysis and critique of violence, Butlers cares to show that non-violence practices are a question to what obligations we have to preserve the life of others. This entails not only ways to stop killing but ways to preserve life. 

Explicit in this is our fundamental interdependency of one another which strengthens the social bonds we have to one another. No longer are we individuals fending for ourselves but relational beings ready to protect each other: “To be dependent implies vulnerability”. As Butler says, we are vulnerable to the social structures that make our lives possible. And if they falter, we do too.