SubStance

Judith Butler's The Force of Nonviolence attempts a creative mapping of the forces of nonviolence. With leading thinkers of the world coming up with creative cartographies of violence, Butler's mapping of nonviolence doesn't stand as an exercise in altering or undermining such cartographies. While these thinkers work with what stands as a categorical understanding of violence while reconstructing it as a destructive force innate to every being in the world, Butler departs from reiterating such understandings. However, with her mapping, Butler doesn't seek to problematize the orientation of such understandings either—an orientation that lies in explaining the incurable fascist leaning of humans. Rather, she releases violence from its categorical entrapment only to capture it as a nomadic potential. She makes this evident as she registers violence as an integral feature of the dynamics of nonviolence. However, with her mapping of nonviolence, she shifts towards problematizing the archetypical Gandhian desire to establish the spiritual autonomy of nonviolence. Whereas Gandhi had seen nonviolence as the categorical other or the dialectical opposite of violence, Butler views it as a force that is always caught up in a dynamic relationship with the latter. For Butler, a revolutionary struggle doesn't merely spark off violence, but stands as the ground for producing assemblages of nonviolence by effecting new social relationalities among masses committed to bringing about ethico-political transformation in the society. Butler understands revolutions in terms of the interplay between violence and the nonviolence it generates rather than toeing the statist understanding of phenomenon that interpellates revolutions as purely negative phenomena, for they stand as mechanisms of resisting the state policies wedded to neoliberal capitalist agendas. However, Butler's book stands as the ground of breeding enlightening paradoxes. If, on the one hand, this study captures the intertwined state of violence and nonviolence, with one acting as the ground for breeding the other, then on the other hand, it goes on to map the exclusivity of revolutions. She distinguishes revolutions from protests and Maoist anarchy. If the latter [End Page 104] stands driven by multiple degrees of antagonism, the former brings into play acts of militant grieving that works by forming social relationalities based on ethics of nonviolence. While Gandhi stood as the architect of the nonviolent form of revolution that he called Satyagraha, Butler claims with her mapping of nonviolence that, in order to be a revolution, revolutions must form an alliance with ethics of nonviolence.

Butler's Introduction highlights the danger of accepting the ways in which institutions construe violence and nonviolence. She argues that our institutions view violence and nonviolence not as interrelated dynamic processes or problem fields, but as diametrically opposed phenomena. According to Butler, by working with the non-negotiable categorical divide between violence and nonviolence, government entraps the former and the latter in a binary field that fails to account for their divergent, overlapping and mutually affecting processes, thereby enabling their partisan manipulation and exploitation for "the purposes of concealing and extending violent aims and practices" (5).

In discussing the ways in which institutions manipulate the violence/nonviolence binary for partisan ends, Butler draws our attention to the familiar governmental strategy of calling peaceful protestors violent in order to justify state-sanctioned punitive actions against them. This defensive strategy also often involves the introduction of a divisive rhetoric pitting selfhood against otherness. Butler posits that governments always mark those who oppose or stage protests against state policies as violent "others" while projecting itself as a kind of embattled self that is vulnerable to the former. This understanding of itself as a vulnerable being creates moral grounds for the government to justify its use of violent othering strategies since the notion of self-care entails an ethical need to protect one's self from the aggression of others. The same can be said of ideologies. On the one hand, ideologies can make use of self-defense rhetoric only to place others as violent aggressors who threaten its very existence. So, when governmental ideological apparatuses deploy...