The Force of Nonviolence

The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political
Judith Butler
Verso, 2020
9781788732765

With its immediate recourse to nonviolence, the most notable thing about Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence is not its case for a particular philosophy either as an ethical or tactical choice but in revealing the impotence of liberalism to deal with contemporary politics. And as a failed philosophical attempt to articulate the fascism surrounding it within terms of liberalism, it is exemplary: we see in real time Marx’s dictum that the philosopher only ever comes too late, or Adorno’s when he writes that philosophy has missed the point of its realisation.

For Butler, violence is inextricably linked to individualism – an individualism that impresses its own ego on another, erasing the other’s agency and subjectivity. And so to consider nonviolence is to preserve the social; if nonviolence is forgone then it is tantamount to aiding in the destruction of what is social. Butler expounds the myriad claims to violence, whether they’re false-flags or legitimate, placing them side-by-side without looking at them any closer. ‘Many on the left argue that they believe in nonviolence but make an exception for self-defence. To understand their claim, we would need to know who the “self” is – its territorial limits and boundaries, its constitutive ties.’ But further, if this self-defence merely extends to the self in its expression in ‘others who belong to my community, nation, or religion, or those who share a language with me, then I am a closet communitarian who will, it seems, preserve the lives of those who are like me, but certainly not those who are unlike me.’ This point is stressed again and again and becomes the book’s thesis.

Keen to argue against the mystification of the individual and its assertion as a sovereign subject, Butler’s claim to universality is unable to distinguish between basic differences that are easily established elsewhere as the experience of oppression and solidarity becomes identical to the fascism that seeks to destroy them. Even in its inability to grasp economics that are central to understanding fascism, here we only ever begin from an ahistorical subject that is unable to distinguish what is truly self-defence and what is empty rhetoric. The solution to self-defence is then not to establish what can legitimately constitute self-defence, but instead positing another word that does not have the weight of this baggage. ‘“Safeguarding” seems to do something else’, Butler writes, ‘establishing the conditions for the possibility of a life to become liveable, perhaps even to flourish.’ When this is a basis for the deconstruction of gender it can be progressive against the weight of tradition and pseudoscience, but any mention of Black Lives Matter, the genocide of Palestinians, police repression in Turkey, detention camps, leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Every argument is one simultaneously informed and constrained by rhetoric. The deferential differance becomes jarring.

Deconstruction here reaches its limit. This (non)positioning of an ahistorical subject is one that we see again and again in deconstruction and contemporary continental philosophy, primarily through French philosophy’s inheritance of Heidegger and his work that reasserted the place of the individual against the ‘totality’ of Hegel’s philosophy. Butler’s doctoral dissertation was even an attempt to articulate this openness that French philosophy made into its raison d'être, as her Subjects of Desire tracks the development of Hegel’s philosophy in France as realised in desire – taking ‘the theme of desire as its point of critical departure’ from what is ostensibly a ‘Hegelian conceit of a totalizing impulse.’ (Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire, p. xxvi) It was, after all, Butler writes, ‘within the context of French theory ... that Hegel became synonymous with totality, teleology, conceptual domination, and the imperialist subject.’ (Subjects of Desire, p. xviii)

The subject in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is undoubtedly one that ‘wants to know itself, but wants to find within the confines of this self the entirety of the external world; indeed its desire is to discover the entire domain of alterity as a reflection of itself.’ (Subjects of Desire, p. xxvi) But in reducing the dialectical process to the machinations of an abstracted desiring subject, rather than one that too encompasses the development of history itself, we see a return to a philosophy that exists prior to even German Idealism. As an ahistorical subject that exists without any conception of the development of either philosophical or political categories, Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence becomes uncomfortably Spinozan; its monism becomes what is social; what is good becomes that which reaffirms the connectedness of the social, and what is evil is whatever deteriorates it. And this is not Spinozan in the sense of a development, like Hegel considering himself a Spinozan.

Spinoza crucially asserted the unity of opposites against a Cartesianism that posited thought and extension as separate and unrelated totalities, and in the late seventeenth century this was progressive in its ability to overcome the finitude of dualism. ‘What constitutes the grandeur of Spinoza’s manner of thought’, Hegel wrote, ‘is that he is able to renounce all that is determinate and particular, and restrict himself to the One, giving heed to this alone.’ (Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. III, p.258) If, for Spinoza, substance ‘is only the universal and consequently the abstract determination of mind’ (Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. III, p.257) then we can confidently say the same of Butler’s formation of the social. But for Butler, in 2020, after Hegel and Marx, positing the unity of opposites while wholly refusing to recognise negation as essential instead becomes a liberalism that is unable to understand not just the historical development of differences – the development of class, the development of race – but a liberalism that is unable to understand contradiction. The question of contradictions and antagonisms are wilfully obliterated in their entirety as Butler attempts to affirm the ‘problem of substitution’: the assertion that ‘genuine sympathy with other people involves putting ourselves in the place of other people’, or ‘in seeing how my life and the life of the other can be substituted for one another, they seem to be not so fully separable.’

Even after describing numerous executions of black people by police, Butler goes on to ask whether ‘the police officer who strengthens the hold to the point of death imagines that the person about to die is actually about to attack, or that their own life is endangered?’ Speculating, she writes: ‘Perhaps there, in a moment of decision or action that belongs to a race-war logic: the police person believes that it is their own life, rather than the other’s, that is endangered.’

Once Butler has achieved this same feat in universalising and making indeterminate anything within this concept of the social, the only recourse to attempt to account for agency, development, ‘race-war logic’, is psychoanalysis. And so when Butler writes that the book moves ‘between a psychoanalytic and a social understanding of interdependency’, we shouldn’t be surprised with its attempt to return to the individuation of the individual itself – in not just a return to Freud, which Adorno has been able to develop to articulate fascist tendencies in society and the individual, but to Klein. The threat of all psychoanalysis is its individuation, and here she gives over to it wholly; unable to mediate its subject with its surroundings and to recognise what is external to it, she returns to the problem of substitution in Klein to affirm the urgency of the social in recalling the relationship between an infant and their mother. ‘To do away with the mother would be to imperil the conditions of one’s own existence’, Butler writes, but not as an affirmation of one’s own existence over the mother – ‘rather, it is because we are already tied together in a social bond that precedes and makes possible both of her lives.’

In Butler’s recent essay ‘Genius or Suicide’ we see a far more explicit attempt to psychoanalyse the individual subject when she even goes so far as to psychoanalyse Trump. But when the president that preceded him had further cemented the ground for fascism, not only in exacerbating the contradictions of capitalism that liberalism itself cannot resolve but waging an unprecedented assault against minorities and militarising the police and immigration enforcement, what function does psychoanalysis play? Butler’s discussion beyond the individual subject is limited to questions of ‘legal obligations’ and ‘legal capture’ – treating the law as if it were a rubber band that, stretched, will rebound and strike Trump. ‘How odd’, Butler writes, ‘that Trump may well give us back the law as he is forced to submit to the law and go down: will he then become, even if only in demise, the lawgiver?’ In this essay, the legal institutions that plagued the (non)gendered body, that turns the subject into a Foucauldian body-horror, here become saving graces against the forces of fascism. Yet, in Forces of Nonviolence, we see the opposite. Law is not the possibility of the resolution of fascism but instead invariably a form of violence through the very factuality of its binding teleology, which the open nature of nonviolence necessarily overcomes.

It is necessary here to recall Herbert Marcuse, when he wrote that ‘The more the liberal bourgeoisie transforms itself and goes over to anti-liberal forms of domination, the more abstract becomes the theory of the state ... which still clings to its liberal foundations.’ (Marcuse, A Study on Authority, p. 101) Liberalism, without any concrete conception of the state, forced out of power as even its most reactionary elements are unable to contain the repressive forces of capital it unleashed in order to secure more profits – with the police, ICE, and even Amazon’s technology itself breaking unions and kneecapping the most class-conscious and organised workers – clings tighter and tighter to the institutions that legitimised fascism to begin with. And so it is no surprise that we still see liberals decrying Trump’s apparent despoiling of the state apparatus that has enabled and carried out his will.

The thermometer that dipped its critical faculties in the water every few years to speculate whether the US was fascist, as an exercise that has been repeated for years now, well before Trump’s election, has always been facile. Adorno fundamentally recognised that ‘fascism lives on ... due to the fact that the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism continues to exist’, and that even ‘Infiltration indicates something objective: ambiguous figures make the comeback and occupy positions of power for the sole reason that conditions favour them.’ (Adorno, Guilt and Defense, p. 214) And to what extent was the US government even infiltrated? When the police formed their own gangs to carry out their extrajudicial murders? When the US government released information that 1,488 children were ‘lost’ in its concentration camps? When protestors in Portland were kidnapped in unmarked cars? When US border agents became vigilantes, burying people in mass graves in the desert? Or when, under Obama’s administration, three-year olds facing deportation were forced to represent themselves in a court of law? Or was it with Bush’s creation of ICE in 2003, or the intervention of the electoral college in the 2000 election? There was no changing of the guard in the US; they didn’t have to, in the case of Italy in 1922 and Germany in 1933, consolidate power into a singular political entity.

The factor that determines the specific character and manifestation of every fascist state is the development of its bourgeoisie. For Italy, this was comparatively weak. Its bourgeoisie paled in comparison to its landowning class, military elites, and the Catholic Church. For Germany, this was significantly stronger to the extent that it could threaten the leading imperialist powers – but after the hyperinflation of the 1920s and withdrawal of American capital its bourgeoisie was unable to maintain even its tenuous position without the domination of its workers by sending communists and its Jewish population to concentration camps and restructuring the whole of its society through its militarisation. But nowhere else on the globe was the bourgeoisie developed as a class than in the US. As the most developed capitalist nation it had complete continuity between its businesses and government, and the question of infiltration was never one that could seriously address fascism’s fundamental character as capitalism’s final stand against its own destruction. After all, as Daniel Guerin recognised in 1939, ‘The bourgeoisie resorts to fascism less in response to disturbances on the street than in response to disturbances in their own economic system.’ (Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business, p. 26)

Though the prosperous ‘boom’ of the US economy in the 1920s saw new heights, this was also a period in which the seeds of fascism inherent in capitalism decisively revealed themselves. Even in 1919, as the First World War ended, ‘wartime contracts worth billions were cancelled immediately, sending industry and agriculture into an uncertain and threatening future.’ (Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth, p. 34) And throughout the decade, the concentration of capital became far more acute as businesses exponentially increased their output through new technological means as they dismantled organised labour – to the extent that profits in the financial centre increased by 177 percent between 1923 and 1929 as 2,832,000 million workers were displaced. It is no coincidence that the KKK as we know it today appeared here, reaching the height of its membership in 1924 with 30,000 people. And, unlike Italy and Germany, the bourgeoisie was so strong that no other class or military force ended their reign. The bipartisan support for the suppression of the organised working class in the US and the world was then able to live on and even outlast its more urgent crises to defer them long enough to pass through several subsequent boom and busts – developing all the time under its pretence of democracy and freedom, all while the lynching and extrajudicial executions continued as it had done in the 1920s. It is only after two of the worst crises capitalism has ever seen – in 2008 and in 2020, that now supersedes the crisis of the Great Depression – that the US now has a figure that personifies the rot of American fascism.

Fascism can only conceive of any relationships as antagonistic – one of domination and dominated. The fascist subject, that is so indeterminate that it is simultaneously the master race and under existential threat of domination, now takes up the violent zeal of capital and the state to do what it has always secretly thought but – in polite society – was deemed too excessive and worthy of psychological repression. And so Butler’s immediate recourse to nonviolence and her call for an ‘egalitarian imaginary’ that ‘offers us a glimpse into those forms of insurrectionary solidarity that turns against authoritarian and tyrannical rule’, that seeks to restore the bonds of the social, consistently comes up against the poverty of its own concept to the extent that she must reassert again and again that nonviolence does not equate to either a passivity or an acceptance. But any amount of empathic substitution cannot grasp what is central to fascism. As Adorno recognised, ‘Whatever humane values democracies can oppose [fascism] with, it can effortlessly refute by pointing out that they represent not the whole of humanity but a mere image that fascism has had the courage to discard.’ (Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, p. 108)

At least here Butler isn’t so bold as to ask, as she did in ‘Genius or Suicide’ on the eve of his impeachment, ‘Was the Trump regime always meant to end this way?’, recognising how much is truly at stake. But what can the call for extending the definition of grievability achieve here, invoking substitution to reaffirm the necessity of the social? Fascism thrives exactly on the inability of liberalism to resolve the contradictions of capitalism, and liberalism’s false universalisation cannot conceive of even basic contradiction central to it.