Will Barnes

Perhaps Butler is too dismissive of the emancipatory potential of the liberal tradition and could do more to show how mania and the “fiction” of a relational self can be mobilized to turn violent self-preservation into nonviolent, collective-self-preservation. Nevertheless, her call to build a radically egalitarian world—based on the commitment to a daily practice of deidentifying with even our deepest convictions if they problematize viewing any life as anything less than incalculably valuable—invokes the sublime, nonviolent force of Mandela, King, and Gandhi. Butler does all this in a manner capable of grappling with the multiple, competing streams in popular discourse that have led to such voices losing status as the wisest, most radical, and pragmatic life affirmations in the history of our species. The ability to hold up the nonviolent beacon of humanity to the best postmodern scrutiny marks Butler’s latest book as an essential message for our shared human community, standing, as we do, at the precipice where boundless life-affirmation meets unimaginable destructiveness.

In The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler argues that nonviolent movements must replace a dominant neurotic identitarianism with a commitment to preserving relational life. However, Butler also argues that because relationality is volatile, freedom and equality cannot be accomplished through a simple negation of separation. Instead, nonviolence must be directed at moments of relational volatility precisely when violence is compelled. Drawing on Klein’s theory of subjectivity—in which imagining ourselves as other is a precondition for imagining ourselves independent—and on Benjamin’s vision of conflict resolution in encountering the other without instrumentality, Butler asks that we meet such moments by honoring interdependence. While affirming much in Butler’s analysis, this article locates (1) a tension between Butler’s poststructuralist and psychoanalytic commitments, (2) the reification of a non-relational liberal subject as hegemonic, and (3) a tendency towards theoretical exclusivity. Through addressing these weaknesses, we can retain more of a positive role than Butler affords to traditional elements of the nonviolent toolkit such as love, morality, and upholding human rights prefaced on the integrity and dignity of the individual, to augment their theory as one among many resources for a diverse and multicultural nonviolent pursuit of social and political progress.

Polarization simplifies and deforms language, ideas, and people and reduces social life into an oppositional binary based on harmful “us versus them” narratives. What can we do to bring about a transformation away from polarity to peace? What are the polarities obscuring the path to peace? Is it a question of belief versus belief? Does it make sense to appeal to reason, discourse, and compromise in a polarized climate? What is the difference between harmful and helpful polarities? In the pursuit of peace and justice, the authors in this volume answer these and other questions relating to polarity and politics.