Judith Butler dismantles the forces that unleash violence

Judith Butler is an internationally recognized feminist philosopher whose work is incredibly difficult to summarize. The author of more than twenty books of groundbreaking critical theory, she has indelibly shaped our ability to understand the body politic, the politics of the body, and the unbelievable complexity of our relationships to one another. Because it's so challenging to adequately capture the extent of Butler’s influence, we focus on her most recent writing, in part because she admits that her thinking has significantly changed over the years. So, while she has been concerned with the question of grieving, and in particular, of the politics of grievability, for almost two decades, her most recent work is differently centered on the problem of how life in the now deeply nihilistic stages of neoliberal capitalism might be safeguarded against increasingly normalized destruction. In our conversation, Butler explores the implications of Arundhati Roy’s plea for the coronavirus pandemic to be seen as a portal. She stresses that the outcomes of the virus, the effects that it will have on society, are not yet decided. The way she puts it is that “the pandemic is a disease of the interconnected world;” but, seen from this perspective, the virus exposes the profound inequalities that characterize and corrupt our interconnection and interdependence. Rather than creating more alienation and apathy, Butler hopes that this might serve as the potential basis for a radically global politics of equality, but explains that this will likely only become possible if we can learn to conceptualize our interconnection in new ways, to actually perceive the relationship between untimely death, inequality and structures of oppression. I was especially struck, in this interview, by Butler’s explanation of the meaning of outrage. For her, outrage means that we refuse the intolerable nature of our circumstances, but it also means that, when we’re faced with unending violence, there is an “unrealism” or utopian power that emerges, making a seemingly impossible politics of nonviolence conceivable. If it is true that, as a form of life, human beings are intrinsically prone to aggression, we are nonetheless not doomed to violence. Violence is a “practice, an action, a way of living,” as Butler puts it. What it manifests, in her view, is not only the destruction of life and of social bonds, but also the authorizing and unleashing of violence, even when the goal of violent action is to end violence. One gets the sense that Butler knows that this is a difficult proposition when we consider a situation like the one faced by Palestinians, who live daily with the specter of death and destruction. But Butler speaks explicitly here to the ways that Israel’s invocation of a “non-reciprocal right” to self-defense “legitimates in advance” any and all of its campaigns of bombardment, its wars on Palestinian life. Self-defense, in this context, constitutes what she calls a “tactical… instrumentalization of a right,” one that strategically ignores the fact that Palestine does not, in fact, have a national self that can be defended under the dictates of international law. Its people cannot claim an equal right to self-defense when attacked. This produces a situation in which Israel, it’s increasingly clear, seeks what she terms the “genocidal... liquidation” of the Palestinian population. And the only check on the Israeli’s state’s drift toward greater and greater genocidal violence is, in her estimation, a fairly weak international community. And yet, she notes, the Palestinian people persist, they persist through daily practices of resistance: through humor, a specific sort of steadfastness, and through militant grieving and community support. They persist in spite of the inability of the international news media and the international community to register in vivid ways the reality of Palestinian lifeworlds.