Judith Butler’s militant nonviolence

On the basis of Levinassian interpretation of the biblical commandment “You shall not kill”, Butler outlines a possible Jewish ethic of nonviolence (Precarious Life), by taking vulnerability as a condition of responsibility, whose ethical mandate is not to preserve the self, but to protect the other. Judith Butler, in dialogue with several women thinkers, tries to find a nonviolent solution to violence. Although it is not possible to give an unambiguous definition of violence, the fact remains that it is a way in which a human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying way. Human beings as embodied subjects are exposed to violence, which is exercised both physically, by injuring, consuming, annihilating the body, and through the performative power of norms, which serve to be recognised (as citizens first and foremost), but are also the main cause of disavowal (Hannah Arendt’s Death Sentences and J. Butler - G.C. Spivak, Who sings the Nation-State?). However, this same vulnerability can be mobilised, in her view, in order to derail or defuse violence (J. Butler - A. Athanasiou, Dispossesion). Butler, believing that no position against violence can afford to be naive, challenges some major presuppositions of nonviolence. First, she refutes the characterization of nonviolence as a weak and useless passivity (The force of nonviolence). Nonviolence, as Mahatma Gandhi suggested, is a soul force, which takes an embodied form. Butler points out that it is a force that emerges from a putative weakness, hinting at that Pauline teaching (2 Cor 12:9-10), of which Benjamin and Derrida are heirs in different ways. Second, nonviolence is not a principle, but a practice, fully fallible (Frames of war); it is a practice of resistance, both vigilant and hopeful. A nonviolent practice may well include a prohibition against killing, but it is not reducible to that prohibition. Nevertheless, nonviolence is an ideal that cannot always be fully honoured in the practice. Third, nonviolence has now to be understood less as a moral principle adopted by individuals in relation to a field of possible action than as a social and political practice undertaken in concert (J. Butler - D. Di Cesare, In lotta per la nonviolenza). And last, 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. Butler wonders how to cultivate aggression for nonviolent purposes? (J. Butler - A. Cavarero, Condizione umana contro ‘natura’); to answer this question, she rereads the correspondence between Freud and Einstein in 1931-32 (Why war?). Following Einstein’s militant pacifism, Butler introduces the notion of “aggressive nonviolence”. In her opinion, as peace is resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war, so nonviolence is a struggle against violence (Reply to Catherine Mills e Fiona Jenkins), whose condition of possibility is being mired in violence. Butler also learns from Freud that a critical resistance to violence introduces a vigorous “unrealism” or another reality, fostering the emergence of modes of solidarity that seek to dismantle violent regimes.