Judith Butler: The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind
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Judith Butler: The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico‑Political Bind Verso, London and New York, 2020, 224 pp, ISBN: 9781788732765 (HB), ISBN: 9781788732772 (PB), ISBN: 9781788732796 (eBook) Giuseppe Maglione1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Judith Butler’s latest book, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind, is a slender yet conceptually rich collection of essays animated by Butler’s distinctive intellectual intensity and political engagement. It is a creative inquiry into nonviolence as an ethical and political exigency—one inextricably linked to the pursuit of social equality. In addition, the book’s saliency rests on its ambition to contribute to ongoing struggles for social equality (including gender and racial equality). In the Introduction, Butler sets forth her major proposition: appreciating nonviolence depends on understanding violence. This “understanding” is not an innocent epistemic operation but an ethical and political gesture. This is because “violence” is a contested concept—one that is always at stake in political struggles. “Naming violence,” Buler claims (p. 5), is a political device which can enhance the power of those who control this practice. In fact, having the power to define certain behavior, person or group as “violent” means to condemn that behavior, person or group, possibly justifying their political oppression or elimination. According to Butler, a value-free definition of violence/nonviolence is not only untenable but also—and always—a political decision. In alignment with this epistemic-ethicopolitical perspective, Butler proposes to chart those “political frameworks” (p. 15), within which violence is elaborated and justified, in order to deconstruct their internal economy and social effects. This critical endeavor is then complemented by Butler’s constructive political effort—to put forth an ethico-political framework, predicated on interdependency, which legitimizes nonviolence as a never-exhausting tension toward equality. The first target of Butler’s critique is the Hobbesian social contract, assumed as the foundational source of a whole political imaginary, which hinges on violence as a pervasive pharmakon1—both problem (the bellum omnium contra omnes) and solution (the Leviathan’s sword and crosier). Butler conceptualizes this framework, drawing upon 1
In ancient Greek, this term means both “remedy” and “poison.”
* Giuseppe Maglione [email protected] 1
School of Applied Sciences, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK
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Melanie Klein, as a “phantasy” (p. 35)—a partly unconscious and socially shared mental representation that structures our modes of perceiving. In particular, Butler takes issue with the Hobbesian social contract and its individualistic and non-egalitarian nature. Hobbes, in fact, presupposes self-sufficient, always adult and gendered (male) individuals constituting the polity, endowing the Leviathan with the right to violence to prevent the pervasive (yet potential) violence of the state of nature.
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