The Force of Non-Violence
Butler (2020:1-2): Notes that the distinction between violence and nonviolence is not always clear, with some people restricting violence to physical acts and others talking about violent systems and structures; states, meanwhile, can label any expressions of dissent or challenge to its authority as violence.
Butler (2020:3): “If a demonstration in support of freedom of expression, a demonstration that exercises that very freedom, is called ‘violent,’ that can only be because the power that misuses language that way seeks to secure its own monopoly on violence through maligning the opposition, justifying the use of police, army, or security forces against those who seek to exercise and defend freedom in that way.”
Butler (2020:4). “If the person was not doing anything demonstrably violent, then perhaps the person is simply figured as violent, as a violent kind of person, or as pure violence embodied in and by that person. The latter claim manifests racism more often than not.”
Butler (2020:4): A group is labelled a ‘mob’; it is therefore “potentially or actually violent”; violence is therefore justified in response to it, to protect society from that violence.
Butler (2020:5): “As much as it would make matters easier to be able to identify violence in a way that is clear and commands consensus, this proves impossible to do in a political situation where the power to attribute violence to the opposition itself becomes an instrument by which to enhance state power, to discredit the aims of the opposition, or even to justify their radical disenfrenchisement, imprisonment, and murder. At such moments, the attribution has to be countered on the grounds that it is untrue and unfair.”
Butler (2020:7-8): Violence is often defended by the left, which claims it is a necessity to achieve revolution, and also argues that it is not a choice: violence is already happening (e.g. against minorities) and therefore it is a luxury and privilege to presume that violence is a choice. Violence becomes a form of self-defence - though here the boundaries of the ‘self’ still require definition.
Butler (2020:12-13): Another common argument in favour of violence is that it is “tactically necessary in order to defeat structural or systemic violence, or to dismantle a violent regime.” However, challenges this not on grounds of efficacy, but by asking: “Can violence remain a mere instrument or means for taking down violence - its structures, its regime - without becoming an end in itself? The instrumentalist defense of violence depends quite critically on being able to show that violence can be restricted to the status of a tool, a means, without becoming an end itself.”
Butler (2020:14): “The fact that violence is used strategically to describe situations that are interpeted very differently suggests that violence is always interpreted.”
Butler (2020:27): Nonviolence isn’t merely the absence of violence; it is a sustained and conscious decision not to use violence, one that “becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious.”
Butler (2020:28): Argues that nonviolence requires a commitment to equality, because lost lives are only considered a loss if they are considered valuable. If we value lives equally, then we are opposed to their loss: if we are willing to lose them, it is because we do not value them.
Butler (2020:39): “if nonviolence is to make sense as an ethical and political position, it cannot simply repress aggression or do away with its reality; rather, nonviolence emerges as a meaningful concept precisely when destruction is most likely or seems most certain.”
Butler (2020:75): Talks about the idea of grievability; people are grievable if they “would be mourned if their lives were lost” (conditional). Argues that grievability is unequally distributed in society in the same way that foods or resources are.
Butler (2020:122): The idea” that conflicts should be handled through law rather than through violence presumes that law does not wield its own violence and that it does not redouble the violence of the crime.”
Butler (2020:136): Argues that we cannot simply start with a definition of violence and then move straight to engaging in moral debates about whether it is justified, because violence has already been defined and interpreted through particular frameworks and power structures before we get there. Thus, a critical approach requires that are interrogate “the very justificatory scheme at work in such a debate, its historical origins, its presuppositions and foreclosures.” She reminds us that we can’t really engage in a moral debate over violence when a moral judgement is embedded in the very definition, the very concept of violence.
Butler (2020:137-138): “Even physical violence belongs to broader structures of racial, gender, and sexual violence, and if we focus on the physical blow at the expense of the broader structure, we run the risk of failing to account for those kinds of violence that are linguistic, emotional, institutional, and economic - those that undermine and expose life to harm or death, but do not take the literal form of a blow. At the same time, if we immediately abstract from the physical blow, we fail to understand the embodied character of the threat, the harm, the injury.”
Butler (2020:139-140): Myriad forms of nonviolence are nevertheless highly destructive, because as acts of resistance they demand change to, and the dismantling of, the status quo.
Butler (2020: 190): “impunity is all too often built into the legal structure […], meaning that the refusal to receive the repart, the threats against those who make the report, and the failure to recognize the crime all perpetuate this violence and give license to murder. […] Violence occurs in the series of legal refusals and failures to recognize it as such [and not just in the act itself]: no report mecens no crime, no punishment, and no reparation.”