THE FORCE OF NONVIOLENCE: JUDITH BUTLER AND SIMON CRITCHLEY
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- čas přidán 25. 08. 2024
- Join Judith Butler and Simon Critchley in conversation around Butler’s new book, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political.
The Force of Nonviolence 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.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is 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.
Simon Critchley is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His work engages in many areas: continental philosophy, philosophy and literature, psychoanalysis, ethics, and political theory, among others. His most recent books include The Problem with Levinas and ABC of Impossibility, though he has written on topics as diverse as David Bowie, religion, and suicide. As moderator of The Stone at The New York Times, Critchley asks philosophers to weigh in on contemporary issues in art, literature, politics, and popular culture.
In love with her philosophy! Judith's way of thinking is light on our days.
got to 5:00 to skip intro
Wishing she mentioned Kurdistan after Palastine too.
+1
Ever since she signed that awful document supporting Ronell - and using her fame to demean the voices of students whose lives Ronell screwed up - I will never look at her the same way again. It breaks my heart. I am deeply disappointed.
she apologized for that shortly after the letter leaked. I was very disappointed, too, but she retracted her support and just recently mentioned that she wrongfully supported a sexual abuser and was glad that she was called out on that so that she could see her wrong.
Force is usually associated with violence. To force non-violence onto others is an act of violence.
I wish Ms. Butler had not used the word "selbstständig" implying that it means you stand on your own. In fact, the word means more like "automatic" like a machine that turns itself off automatically. The word seems unfortunate in its resonance although the connection is not completely false. If you act automatically, I suppose that means you act without thought and without power. Verbal precision would have been better IMO. Still, I appreciate the ideas about non-violence, in any form.
German native speaker here. JB is in fact using the word correctly.
интеллектуальная импотенция
New depth of New age & Self help. :(