The Force of Nonviolence Panel Discussion Contribution

Anabaptists and Philosophy Roundtable Lecture Series: April 11^th 2024.

Maxwell Kennel

Judith Butler begins The Force of Non-Violence by suggesting that before any public debate about ethical and political uses of violence there must be some general agreement on what qualifies something as violent or nonviolent.[1] This task of defining violence is one that I sympathize with, but one that is difficult to approach, and certainly impossible to achieve total consensus on. But the point remains, that if the term “violence” is not clarified in some way, then there is no way to really debate whether violence can be justified.

The question of defining the term “violence” and exploring what work the term does is one that I took up during my doctoral studies and that I refined in my recent book Ontologies of Violence where I try to chart a path between and beyond a number of tensions.[2] First, I’ll frame some of the tensions I see in our public and scholarly approaches to violence (and which appear in Butler’s work), and then I’ll play out and contribute to a few contrasts between Butler and Elsa Dorlin.

In short, I see violence as a key concept that reflects the values and priorities of its users and critics, in ways that expose the breakage of social bonds of public trust. Violence – as a term, names the violation of value-laden boundaries. This definition attempts to do some work for users of the term, while remaining flexible enough to treat the term interpretively. In short, I think that examining how the term is used allows us to interpret the values of its users. Every use of the term “violence” implies that specific boundaries around certain values have been violated, meaning that the term violence points to the core values both of its users and critics.

I observe that many people are highly invested in conserving and preserving the concept of violence against its misuse. Those who want to retain the ability to name and condemn visible, physical, and corporeal acts of aggression tend to respond with resistance and derision to those who use the term “violence” to name ways of thinking, knowing, and speaking (like hate speech or a violent epistemology, for example). By contrast, some philosophers who are invested in resisting the violence that words and ideas can do, can forget that it is images of physical violence that give the term its power in the first place. There are contrasting dangers of forgetting that violent acts are always mediated through language (like the verbal command to drop a bomb), and forgetting that not all conflict-laden language is on the same level as the violence of war, for example.

There are further tensions as well, that my proposed definition approaches. On one hand, there are voices – both scholarly and popular – who argue that violence is a radically subjective term that anyone can use and define without accountability, which leaves the field open to those who would use it as a weapon (by using the term to condemn whatever they do not like). On the other hand, there are those who defend a singular definition of the term at the expense of all others (for example, the idea that words cannot be called violent), which ironically violates the contextual character of the term’s use. In Ontologies of Violence I chart a path between reducing violence to physicality (at the expense of all other uses), and dissociating the term into abstraction (in ways that unground it from experience); while also moving beyond the bad options of abandoning violence to subjectivity, and consigning it to a violently singular definition at the expense of all others.

At the conclusion of the book, I argue against those who see the world through a violent ontology of displacement where differences necessarily displace each other in competitive and zero-sum terms. My framing of the concept, and my desire to chart a path between these tensions owes a lot to Butler, and I agree with them that: (1) nonviolence is anything but passive, (2) that what counts as violence is political and politicized, and (3) that when we engage in violence, we are making the impossible necropolitical decision about who should live and who should die. I especially appreciate Butler’s suggestion that we should not be resigned to a nihilistic fatalism that would concede that “violence and nonviolence are whatever those in power decide they should be.”[3]  Instead, we must defend a serious and flexible approach to the problem of violence without lapsing into the poles of subjective diffusion or objective singularization, or the trap of thinking that physical and epistemological violence exist at the expense of each other.

It is doubtless a meaningful thing to Mennonites and Anabaptists that someone with the stature and reach of Butler would defend nonviolence, but it is worth looking closely at the other side of the coin. For example, Elsa Dorlin argues in her book Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence, that violent self-defense is defensible in the name of survival for the oppressed (i.e., those who have been forced into defensive positions by violent forces of domination).[4] The rejoinder from Butler and others is the question: does this not require a violent decision between who is worthy of living and who is not? Surely it is a matter of privilege and safety to suggest that those who are attacked should not defend themselves, and surely it cannot be so simple as to refuse all defensive actions and allow the lives of the oppressed to be taken by the violent. But Dorlin’s justification of self-defensive violence prompts the question of when trading one violation for another is justified, and it requires a distinction between those upon whom it is incumbent to break the cycle violence, and those whose counterviolence is defensible because of the violence that has been done to them.

I agree with Dorlin that it is indefensible to suggest that those who are under violent attack give up their inclination to defend themselves in ways that will violate, especially because the one who attacks often “invokes the principle of defense of self to legitimize its right to violence and colonization.”[5] However, in another sense, Dorlin’s justification of counter-violence risks rendering violence normative beyond the realm of response. In this way, Dorlin is right to say that a key question concerns the boundary line between “where legitimate defense ends and paranoid murder begins.”[6]

Returning to Butler, I appreciate their critique of justifications of violence against those who do violence.[7] Even more so, I appreciate their subtle perspective on how “nonviolence requires a critique of what counts as reality” and that “violence is always interpreted.”[8] In contrast to Dorlin’s approach,[9] Butler argues that “if we make exceptions to the principle of nonviolence, it shows that we are ready to fight and to harm, possibly even to murder, and that we are prepared to give moral reasons for doing so…” and furthermore that the distinction between those who are worth defending and those who are not will be reducible to demography and proximity.[10] For Butler, in order to be egalitarian in our approach to the preservation of life, there can be “no difference between lives worth preserving and lives that are potentially grievable.”[11]

Here, the question is whether the boundaries that surround life are justifiably violated by some in response to their violation by others. Whereas for Dorlin, violent self-defense is justifiable in the interests of self-preservation, for Butler the cause of justice is lost in the decision between who should be violently defended and who should not be. But perhaps it is not whether we should condone violent self-defense against violent attackers, but whether we can hold the question of nonviolence open in such a way that allows for de-escalation, creative and emancipatory forms of direct action that may or may not involve moral compromise, and critical forms of judgment about what kinds of violation are being traded for justification by those who begin from the standpoint of the defensibility of violence.

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[1] Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso, 2020), 1.

[2] Maxwell Kennel, Ontologies of Violence: Deconstruction, Pacifism, and Displacement (Leiden: Brill, 2023).

[3] Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind (London: Verso, 2020), 1, 6.

[4] Elsa Dorlin, Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence. Trans. Kieran Aarons (London: Verso, 2022), xvi.

[5] Ibid, 71.

[6] Ibid, 178.

[7] Ibid, 5, 8.

[8] Butler, The Force of Non-Violence, 10, 14.

[9] Ibid, 19, 53.

[10] Ibid, 55.

[11] Ibid, 56. Cf. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 2-3, 134-135, 165-166.