The Force of Nonviolence : An Ethico-Political Bind - Judith Butler

The Force of Nonviolence

An Ethico-Political Bind

Author: Judith Butler

Narrated by: Coleen Marlo

At a Glance

Published: 4th February 2020

Digital Audiobook


$33.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.50 with

 or 

OR

Free With 30 Day Trial

Audiobook subscription $12.99/mo after 30 day trial. Cancel anytime.

Instant Digital Delivery to your Booktopia Reader App

Listen on
IOS
Android

Towards a form of aggressive nonviolence

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence.

Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

About the Author

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of Frames of War, Precarious Life, The Psychic Life of Power, Excitable Speech, Bodies that Matter, Gender Trouble, and with Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.
Listen on
IOS
Android

Other Editions and Formats

Paperback

Published: 9th February 2021

More in Philosophy

The Virtue of Nationalism - Yoram Hazony

DIGITAL AUDIO

Digital Audiobook

$41.99

Things in Nature Merely Grow - Yiyun Li

DIGITAL AUDIO

$26.99

Authority : Essays on Being Right - Andrea Long Chu

DIGITAL AUDIO

$27.99

The Meaning of Life - The School of Life

DIGITAL AUDIO

Digital Audiobook

$33.99