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The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind Kindle Edition

by Judith Butler (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 209 ratings
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“The most creative and courageous social theorist working today” examines the ethical binds that emerge within the force field of violence (Cornel West).

“ . . . nonviolence is often seen as passive and resolutely individual. Butler’s philosophical inquiry argues that it is in fact a shrewd and even aggressive collective political tactic.” —New York Times

Judith Butler shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. While many think of nonviolence as passive or individualist, Butler argues nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. She champions an ‘aggressive’ nonviolence, which accepts hostility as part of our psychic constitution—but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. Some challengers say a politics of nonviolence is subjective: What qualifies as violence versus nonviolence? This distinction is often mobilized in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence.  

Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires two things: a critique of individualism and an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ‘ungrievable’. By considering how “racial phantasms” inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. Ultimately, the struggle for nonviolence is found in modes of resistance and social movements that separate aggression from its destructive aims to affirm the living potentials of radical egalitarian politics.
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  5. Publication date
    February 4, 2020
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“As a strategy of resistance and protest, nonviolence is often seen as passive and resolutely individual. Butler’s philosophical inquiry argues that it is in fact a shrewd and even aggressive collective political tactic.”
—New York Times

“Perhaps the most influential and widely travelled feminist in the Western academy … [Butler] carefully, with assertive toughness, combats the hatred, fear and rage of those who respond violently to her continuous commitment to confronting normative patterns of coercion with calls for concerted actions of resistance.”
—Lynne Segal, Times Higher Education

“Judith Butler lucidly enumerates the obstacles nonviolence faces in a time when it is sorely needed. Drawing on works from Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud, she makes a fresh new case for what destructive obstacle our pervasive individualism is to nonviolent action—and the change possible with it.”
—John Freeman, Boston Globe

“[The Force of Nonviolence] walks us through a route of emancipation that has not been approached previously, but which seems, once pursued, recognisable and familiar.”
—LSE Review of Books

“Drawing on thinkers from Sigmund Freud to Frantz Fanon, Butler untangles deep-seated misunderstandings about what constitutes violence and nonviolence, to suggest new paths forward.”
—Jewish Currents

“Vital, and chillingly timely.”
—Hettie Judah, i newspaper

“Judith Butler has achieved a status that few other living academics have acquired: For each published work that she issues, reams of discussion and critique are produced in response, so much so that they have engendered microdisciplines in the many fields in which she is an expert: gender, politics, literary studies, and more.”
—Francis Wade, Nation

“[The Force of Nonviolence] avoids rehashing tired moral and strategic condemnations of violence. Butler reminds us that what is deemed violence or nonviolence is a matter of interpretation and that the state maintains a monopoly on deciding which forms of violence are legitimate, and which acts are understood to constitute violence at all.”
—Natasha Lennard, Bookforum

“A text with a vision for another kind of world, one that refuses to take refuge in the comfort of moral platitudes.”
—Australian Book Review

“Presents a hopeful philosophical position for evolving architecture competent in responding to society’s issues, all the while being intertwined within it.”
—Architectural Review

“Invaluable.”
—Henrietta Cullinan, Peace News

“Butler’s argument both builds on and contributes to a wider feminist literature concerned with developing ways of social and political living that stem from a relational understanding of the self.”
—Alister Wedderburn, Radical Philosophy

About the Author

Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory and the University of California, Berkeley,  and holds the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School/EGS. She is the author of Gender Trouble; Precarious Life; Frames of War; and Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07RM96H4S
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Verso (February 4, 2020)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 4, 2020
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 417 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 225 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 209 ratings

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Judith Butler

Judith Butler

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Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of Subjects of Desire, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies that Matter, Undoing Gender, The Psychic Life of Power, Precarious Life, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Frames of War, Senses of the Subject, The Force of Nonviolence, What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, and Who's Afraid of Gender? Co-edited volumes include: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality with Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau; Vulnerability in Resistance, with Leticia Sabsay and Zeynep Gambetti. Co-authored books include: Who Sings the Nation-State? with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dispossession, with Athena Athanasiou, and The Livable and the Unlivable, with Frederic Worms.

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
209 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Jeremy Garber
5.0 out of 5 stars How to Live in a Violent World - Without Making It Worse
Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2020
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Judith Butler provides a keen analysis of the nonviolent counter-culture necessary for humans to survive in our current political climate. Butler, a seasoned philosopher of culture, gender and violence, observes that the nation-state too often gets to decide what is violence and what is not, viewing anything that threatens its own power base as “violent” and its own racist and violent enforcement as “justice.” Butler rejects a premise that we live in a field of violence and therefore can only evaluate violence as a means toward an end. Instead, she suggests, we need to view nonviolence as a social and political commitment to the grievability of all life. That is, we need to consider the reality of the world is that all life is precious and worthy of grief if it is to be lost, and when we inhabit that reality, we will practice and live within a nonviolent world. If we use violent means to attain our ends of justice are peace, we are really contributing to a more violent world.

Butler’s strength is that her approach is based on ethical theory and moral reasoning rather than blind faith or an absolute commitment not to harm. She recognizes the necessity of the “force of nonviolence” in conflict resolution, labor disputes, creative resistance to government oppression, and radical democracy. In her words, “The institutional life of violence will not be brought down by a prohibition, but only by a counter-institutional ethos and practice.” (61) We need not focus on our own guilt or the sins of the past, but be motivated by our obvious interconnectedness to look toward a world ruled by the politics of equity.

Drawing on Kierkegaard, Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin (among others), Butler provides us a guiding line toward moving beyond the violence of our national id – and even the violence of the superego – toward an interdependent life that causes flourishing for all. As a theologian, I find Butler’s observations to be right in line with the Anabaptist understanding of the gospel. As a philosopher, I find her arguments readable, cogent, and persuasive. And as a human being and a father of an adolescent woman, I find her proposal for how we need to live together utterly necessary in a fragmented and violent time on all sides of the political spectrum.
22 people found this helpful
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Shana M
5.0 out of 5 stars Buy two, read one, give the other away.
Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2021
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Should be required reading in 2021. I loved the book. I got a little bogged down in the Freudian analysis, but as a casual reader it was excellent!!
4 people found this helpful
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reader
5.0 out of 5 stars Rich
Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2022
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So rich in content
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Matthew C.
5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant intellectual
Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2020
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Always challenged and engaged reading Judith Butler
3 people found this helpful
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Isherwood
1.0 out of 5 stars Not Original, not Worthwhile
Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2023
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I have no idea what book those who have given this work 5 stars actually read, but the glowing reviews do not jibe with my experience. Butler's argument, such as it is, is buried in reams of run-on sentences and tons of turgid prose. I think her thesis is simple: in order for nonviolence to be effective on a mass scale all people must be equally "grievable," meaning that the current power hierarchy devalues millions of people and thus makes them expendable in war and other forms of violence. I agree. Why she must couch this simple point in her loop de loop style of argumentation is a mystery to me. I wish I had read the useful footnotes first because reading the main body of the text is truly painful. According to Butler one must incur a five Advil headache in order to comprehend the true meaning of nonviolence. There are many other sources that are much more accessible than this pile of gobbledygook. Start with Mark Kurlansky's "Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea," then check out Swarthmore College's Global Nonviolent Action Database, which provides documentation on the practical applications of nonviolence in real world circumstances. Skip Butler because she writes as if political action equals the antics of amoebas, not the actions of human individuals.
4 people found this helpful
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lee
1.0 out of 5 stars Not as expected
Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2021
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The whole book could be summarized in an article. There is nothing new or inspirational. More of a rant from an author with a name so it sells. But her overuse of the word "that" is extremely distracting. The vocabulary is rich but often gets in the way of the message. Really disappointing text on an important topic. It will sell copies but only so people can put them on tables -- the cover is quite attractive and the title speaks volumes, even if the book doesn't.
7 people found this helpful
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Jessi Holler
1.0 out of 5 stars damaged book bought new
Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2021
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received book today, cover was damaged and covered in something sticky
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Lectura fundamental
Reviewed in Mexico on August 19, 2020
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Siempre un gusto leer a JB, este en especial brinda nuevas luces a estos tiempos e invita a repensarse, es una edición muy especial muy bien hecha.
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maik-arnold
5.0 out of 5 stars A very insightful and complex seminal work about the forces of nonviolence
Reviewed in Germany on February 20, 2020
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Once again, Judith Butler surprised me with a very insightful and complex seminal work about the forces of nonviolence. This book is more than philosophical reasoning, as it presents theoretical and pragmatic thinking linked to a passionate engagement with pressing political and moral matters of our time, e.g. violence done to vulnerable groups (which should get rid of its paternalist aspects) such as migrants, people with various sexual orientations, groups suppressed by dictators, etc. Butler's main argument is grounded on the fact that ambivalence and aggression is part of human nature. She argues that this relationship is the foundation on which the necessity of a commitment to non-violence can be built. Such a commitment arises when we begin to recognise our social bond which is, on the one hand, rooted in violence and, on the other, in the vulnerability and interdependence of all living beings. This thesis brings Butler to the notion that neither non-violence nor vulnerability equates with passivity; on the contrary, these two moments of a continuum can help foster resistance against systemic violence, destruction, war, and all other "death driving" (Freud) forces. This book is a reminder not only to the ongoing discussions about an open society (Popper) but also to the human condition that is a characterised by ambivalence between both love and hate on an individual level and a wish for a peaceful world on a global level.
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Amazon Kunde
1.0 out of 5 stars Great book itself, but what's wrong with the quality?
Reviewed in Germany on May 28, 2020
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I received this book with a BIG KNIFE SCRATCH on the cover which is I don't know why.
What I can make sure is that this scratch is definitely NOT a cover art design.
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Amazon Kunde
1.0 out of 5 stars Great book itself, but what's wrong with the quality?
Reviewed in Germany on May 28, 2020
I received this book with a BIG KNIFE SCRATCH on the cover which is I don't know why.
What I can make sure is that this scratch is definitely NOT a cover art design.
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