The Force of Nonviolence Quotes

“The fact that political efforts of dissent and critique are often labeled as “violent” by the very state authorities that are threatened by those efforts is not a reason to despair of language use. It means only that we have to expand and refine the political vocabulary for thinking about violence and the resistance to violence, taking account of how that vocabulary is twisted and used to shield violent authorities against critique and opposition. When the critique of continuing colonial violence is deemed violent (Palestine), when a petition for peace is recast as an act of war (Turkey), when struggles for equality and freedom are construed as violent threats to state security (Black Lives Matter), or when “gender” is portrayed as a nuclear arsenal directed against the family (anti-gender ideology), then we are operating in the midst of politically consequential forms of phantasmagoria.”
― Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“Although I do not fully follow Benjamin to his anarchist conclusion, I do agree with his contention that we cannot simply assume a definition of violence and then begin our moral debates about justification without first critically examining how violence has been circumscribed, and which version is presumed in the debate in question. A critical procedure would ask as well about the very justificatory scheme at work in such a debate, its historical origins, its presuppositions and foreclosures. The reason we cannot start by stating what kind of violence is justified and what is not is that “violence” is from the start defined within certain frameworks and comes to us always already interpreted, “worked over” by its frame. We can hardly be for or against something whose very definition eludes us, or that appears in contradictory ways for which we have no account.”
― Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“There is no way to name something as either violence or nonviolence without at once invoking
the framework in which that designation makes sense. That may seem like a form of relativism—what you call violence, I do not call violence, and so on—but it is something quite different. In Benjamin’s view, legal violence regularly renames its own violent character as justifiable coercion or legitimate force, thereby sanitizing the violence at stake. Benjamin documents what happens to terms such as “violence” and “nonviolence” once we understand that the frameworks within which these definitions are secured are oscillating. He remarks that a legal regime that seeks to monopolize violence must call every threat or challenge to that regime a “violent” one. Hence, it can rename its own violence as necessary or obligatory force, even as justifiable coercion, and because it works through the law, as the law, it is legal and hence justified.”
― Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“Why is a petition for peace called a “violent” act? Why is a human barricade thwarting the police called an act of “violent” aggression? Under which conditions and within which frameworks does the inversion of violence and nonviolence occur? There is no way to practice nonviolence without first interpreting violence and nonviolence, especially in a world in which violence is increasingly justified in the name of security, nationalism, and neofascism. The state monopolizes violence by calling its critics “violent”: we know this from Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, and from Benjamin. Hence, we should be wary about those who claim that violence is necessary to curb or check violence; those who praise the forces of law, including the police and the prisons, as the final arbiters. To oppose violence is to understand that violence does not always take the form of the blow”
― Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“The task thus becomes to track the patterned ways that violence seeks to name as violent that which resists it, and how the violent character of a legal regime is exposed as it forcibly quells dissent, punishes workers who refuse the exploitative terms of contracts, sequesters minorities, imprisons its critics, and expels its potential rivals.”
― Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political

“The point would be to rethink the relationality of life regularly covered over by typologies that distinguish forms of life. In such a relationality, I would include concepts of interdependency, and not only those among living human creatures—for human creatures living somewhere, requiring soil and water for the continuation of life, are also living in a world where non-human creatures’ claim to life clearly overlaps with the human claim, and where non-humans and humans are also sometimes quite dependent on one another for life. Those overlapping zones of life (or living) have to be thought as both relational and processual, but also, each of them, as requiring conditions for the safeguarding of life.”
― Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“[T]here is, as well, sometimes a contagious sense of the uninhibited satisfactions of sadism, as we have seen in police actions against black communities in the United States in which unarmed black men running away from police are shot down with ease, and with moral impunity and satisfaction, as if those killed were hunted prey. Or, again, in the stubborn arguments against climate change by those who understand that by admitting to its reality, they would be obliged to limit the expansion of industry and the market economy. They know that destruction is happening, but prefer not to know, and in this way they arrange not to give a damn whether or not it happens as long as they make a profit during their time. In such a case, destructiveness happens by default; even if it is never said or thought, there is an “I don’t give a damn about destruction” that gives license to destruction and perhaps even a sense of satisfactory liberation in opposing checks on industrial pollution and market expansion.”
― Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“[A]s we know from the increasingly urgent issue of climate change, the environment changes as a result of human intervention, bearing the effects of our own powers to destroy the conditions of livability for human and non-human life-forms. This is yet another reason why a critique of anthropocentric individualism will turn out to be important to the development of an ethos of nonviolence in the context of an egalitarian imaginary.”
― Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“If the interdiction against killing rests on the presumption that all lives are valuable—that they bear value as lives, in
their status as living beings—then the universality of the claim only holds on the condition that value extends equally to all living beings. This means that we have to think not only about persons, but animals; and not only about living creatures, but living processes, the systems and forms of life.”
― Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind