The interviewer, perhaps somewhat cruelly, presents herself as in sympathy with Butler's views. Does she over egg the cake? I'm not sure. To say 'our times call for x' is to say 'x is important right now.' But to say 'our times, perhaps all times, call for x' is to introduce Captain Obvious to an audience already alerted to her fatuity.
Thus the interviewer writes of Butler's Book-
It is a slim volume that makes an outsized argument: that our times, or perhaps all times, call for imagining an entirely new way for humans to live together in the world—a world of what Butler calls “radical equality.”People who like equality and think 'radical' doesn't mean 'stupid' can make any sized arguments about imaginary 'calls' they alone can hear.
Some people may make a little money out of providing such arguments and that's a good thing because if people can't buy stupid shite on Amazon they'll end up biting off their own arms and sticking them up their butts.
However, arguments have a role in advocacy and the problem with very rich people who like being advocates for all sorts of causes is that they invariably pick the stupidest arguments on offer. As for poor people with shite advocates- well, that's how come the prison's are so full of non-violent offenders.
In this new book, you propose not just an argument for nonviolence as a tactic but as an entirely different way of thinking about who we are.Thinking is itself strategic and instrumental. It uses up scarce resources and thus has to confer survival value. This means some types of thinking are increasingly confined to cretins.
We are used to thinking strategically and instrumentally about questions of violence and nonviolence.
I think there is a difference between acting as an individual or a group, deciding, “Nonviolence is the best way to achieve our goal,” and seeking to make a nonviolent world—or a less violent world, which is probably more practical.There is no real difference in the long run between doing different types of stupid shit whether as an individual or a member of a group
I’m not a completely crazy idealist who would say, “There’s no situation in which I would commit an act of violence.” I’m trying to shift the question to “What kind of world is it that we seek to build together?”In so far as we 'build a world' it has to be one we can inhabit. Building a world we can't inhabit ends abruptly.
Some of my friends on the left believe that violent tactics are the way to produce the world they want.They don't really believe that. That's why they aren't going around blowing shit up. Well, some might but they tend to get shot or are locked up.
They think that the violence falls away when the results they want are realized. But they’ve just issued more violence into the world.Violence is not a commodity. If the threat of it can't be countered then it is effective even without any violence actually occurring.
You begin with a critique of individualism “as the basis of ethics and politics alike.” Why is that the starting point?Right! Coz guys who beat the shit out of kids saying 'this hurts me more than it hurts you' are such wonderful spiritual beings! There have been plenty of Religions based on the notion that God or Karma or whatever will really fuck you up big time if get violent. This didn't stop violence. It increased it.
In my experience, the most powerful argument against violence has been grounded in the notion that, when I do violence to another human being, I also do violence to myself, because my life is bound up with this other life.
Most people who are formed within the liberal individualist tradition really understand themselves as bounded creatures who are radically separate from other lives.But most people formed within this tradition know they will die. This worries them. They find that behaving as though karma exists makes death less frightening.
There are relational perspectives that would challenge that point of departure, and ecological perspectives as well.But, in the market place for ideas, these other 'perspectives' are produced for individuals by other individuals. If you believe 'tradition' matters then the bad news is you can't get outside your own tradition no matter how evil you believe it to be.
And you point out that in the liberal individualist way of thinking, the individual is always an adult male in his prime, who, just at this particular moment when we encounter him, happens to have no needs and dependencies that would bind him to others.Does Judith Butler think so because that is the tradition she was brought up in? Or is it rather the case that her needs and dependencies bind her to making this claim?
That model of the individual is comic, in a way, but also lethal. The goal is to overcome the formative and dependent stages of life to emerge, separate, and individuate—and then you become this self-standing individual. That’s a translation from German. They say selbstständig, implying that you stand on your own. But who actually stands on their own?Those who support themselves.
We are all, if we stand, supported by any number of things.None of us are supported by anything when we die. If other people aren't actively doing stuff to keep you alive, you are self-supporting.
Even coming to see you today—the pavement allowed me to move, and so did my shoes, my orthotics, and the long hours spent by my physical therapist.The pavement was paid for out of taxes- which Butler presumably pays. She bought her shoes and paid for the services of her physical therapist. Individuals, standing on their own feet, may choose to cooperate or coordinate their actions through the market or a voluntary or government organization.
His labor is in my walk, as it were.But he got paid. There is no 'externality'. There was free exchange through the market. Butler may as well have said ' It was the market which allowed me to come to see you today. People earned money through the market and then chose to elect Governments which would tax them to pay for 'club goods'. This meant a pavement existed which I could use. As for my shoes and my therapy- I paid using the money I earn on the market for meretricious shite masquerading as political philosophy'.
I wouldn’t have been able to get here without any of those wonderful technologies and supporting relations.All of which ultimately derive from the Market and its 'invisible hand'.
Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough.It is difficult for Butler to acknowledge that she is dependent on the Market which in turn depends on self-supporting individuals acting in their own rational self-interest.
Without markets there would be no division of labor- you make your own shoes- no tax revenue- so no pavements- no higher education- so no physical therapists- and very little technology- so no 'orthotics'.
Indeed, in a world of mutuality and collective values, Butler is unlikely to have survived into her Sixties.
But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well.The problem is that Societies that 'affirm social and ecological interdependence' tend to get conquered. Look at Tibet.
If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest.Perhaps. But who would do the boring jobs? Why be an Accountant or an Actuary or fix broken toilets when you could be one with the Universe and spend your time helping young inner city kids from the large breasted community explore their sexuality.
You have written before about the concept of grievability, and it is an important idea in this book. Can you talk about it?Grievability is directly linked to Productivity. You can get a day off for the funeral of a grandparent but you get fired if you don't show up to work because of your devastating grief at the death of an insect in Paraguay.
You know when I think it started for me? Here in the United States, during the aids crisis, when it became clear that many people were losing their lovers and not receiving adequate recognition for that loss. In many cases, people would go home to their families and try to explain their loss, or be unable to go home to their families or workplaces and try to explain their loss. The loss was not recognized, and it was not marked, which means that it was treated as if it were no loss. Of course, that follows from the fact that the love they lived was also treated as if it were no love. That puts you into what Freud called melancholia. In contemporary terms, it is a version of depression, even as it admits of manic forms—but not just individual depression but shared melancholia.The Gay community responded very well to the Aids Scare. They recognized that this was not a disease of homosexuals and that those most at risk were heterosexuals in Developing countries. The tremendous work that they did completely changed attitudes in countries like India. The Clergy and the more puritanical type of Gandhian Socialist saw that Gay Love was Love- nothing more, nothing less.
It enraged me then, as it does now, that some lives were considered to be more worthy of grieving publicly than others, depending on the status and recognizability of those persons and their relations.The problem here was not 'grievability'. It was ignorance and prejudice and plain old fashioned nastiness and meanness of spirit.
And that came home to me in a different way in the aftermath of 9/11, when it was very clear that certain lives could be highly memorialized in the newspapers and others could not.9/11 was about crazy jihadis killing innocent Americans. Memorializing the victims was one way of signalling America's determination to exterminate a great evil.
Butler thinks it was about sexuality.
Those who were openly mourned tended to lead lives whose value was measured by whether they had property, education, whether they were married and had a dog and some children. The traditional heterosexual frame became the condition of possibility for public mourning.Homophobia is a real thing. It may be that the Media would have paid less attention if the jihadis had bombed a Gay Night Club. However, if the US decided to go to war over such a bombing then it would have been publicly mourned. Maybe the Media would have 'framed' the victims in a hetero-normative way. Maybe not. But grievability is linked to the strength of the response one is going to make. It has a signalling function.
You are referring to the twenty-five hundred mini-obituaries in the Times, right?It is perfectly fair for LGBT activists to bring up the fate of same-sex partners who faced extra difficulties which heterosexual partners did not. Why? Because the discrimination against that community is based on ignorance and hatred. By changing bad laws and procedures in the aftermath of a national tragedy, good can come of bad.
Yes. It was rather amazing the way that the undocumented were not really openly and publicly mourned through those obituaries, and a lot of gay and lesbian people were mourned in a shadowy way or not at all. They fell into the dustbin of the unmournable or the ungrievable.
But this is not a problem of 'grievability'. It is a problem of irrational, evil, historical prejudice and injustice.
We can also see this in broader public policies. There are those for whom health insurance is so precious that it is publicly assumed that it can never be taken away, and others who remain without coverage, who cannot afford the premiums that would increase their chances of living—their lives are of no consequence to those who oppose health care for all.This is an economic problem. It has nothing to do with grief or any other emotion.
Certain lives are considered more grievable.Because certain people are more lovable. One can't imagine people mourning for Princess Anne the way they mourned for Princess Di.
We have to get beyond the idea of calculating the value of lives, in order to arrive at a different, more radical idea of social equality.Actuaries do calculate the value of lives. Judges do take such considerations into account when awarding damages. Without such calculation how are we to know whether inequality exists? Getting 'beyond' such ideas won't get us anywhere. Why? It involves talking stupid shite.
A Billionaire may say that his terrible grief at dying insects means that he is actually worse off than a starving beggar. 'Radical Equality' may mean that the nomenklatura get to live in Palaces while trafficking in proletarian kids.
You write about the militant potential of mourning.The Nazis kept going on about how bad they felt at the death of Horst Wessel. But that's not what gave them their 'militant potential'. Rather, it was their ability to beat and kill their rivals. Once they lost this ability, they became a joke.
It’s something that can happen, though it doesn’t always happen. Black Lives Matter emerged from mourning.Really? I thought it emerged from people not wanting to get shot by cops. But it is not clear that it has achieved anything.
Douglas Crimp, the great art historian and theorist, reflected on mourning and militancy in an important essay by that name.Crimp was important for people like Butler but people like Butler were and are of no importance whatsoever. Still, at least his 'Mourning and Militancy' was heart-felt.
He wrote- For many AIDS activists, however, mourning s not respected; it is suspect:
I look at faces at countless memorial services and cannot comprehend why the connection isn't made between these deaths and going out to fight so that more of these deaths, including possibly one's own, can be staved off. Huge numbers regularly how up in cities for Candlelight Marches, all duly recorded for the television cameras. Where are these same numbers when it comes to joining political organizations . .. or plugging in to the incipient civil disobedience movement represented in ACT UP?These sentences re taken from recent essay by Larry Kramer, against whose sense of the quietism represented by AIDS candlelight marches I want to juxta- pose the words of the organizer of this year's candlelight vigil on Christopher Street, addressed from the speaker's platform to the assembled mourners: Look around " he said, "This is the gay community, not ACT UP "
Kramer's ACT UP did have some good effects- like 'Health GAP'- but there was a lunatic fringe which wanted to ban experimentation on animals and which denied a link between HIV and AIDs. Did the 'militants' overplay their hand and did this cause a backlash? Perhaps. But the impression ordinary people like me came away with was that the American- and soon the British and other- Gay Communities reacted to the crisis in a very productive, sensible and compassionate way. Militancy on the part of some may have helped others to commit to the cause and thus it may be that it was a good thing on balance. After all, in many neighborhoods, it simply wasn't safe to be known as a Gay man. From childhood, people had been intimidated into hiding and keeping silent.
Where there is a genuine evil to be combated, it makes sense to speak of a fight. Where people are suffering avoidable death, it makes sense to link public expressions of grief to a well organized and funded program to combat the danger.
Neither Violence nor Non Violence are relevant. What matters is whether actions are proportionate and reasonable.
In “The Force of Nonviolence,” you repeatedly stress the importance of counter-realism, even an “ethical obligation” to be unrealistic. Can you explain that?In other words, saying stupid shit is stooopid. Keep your mouth shut. Don't listen to the stupid shit others say. If you really care about an issue, try to find the correct 'Structural Causal Model' such that you, acting with 'Muth Rationality' (i.e. in accordance with the correct economic theory), can be part of the solution.
Take the example of electability. If one takes the view that it is simply not realistic that a woman can be elected President, one speaks in a way that seems both practical and knowing. As a prediction, it may be true, or it may be shifting as we speak. But the claim that it is not realistic confirms that very idea of reality and gives it further power over our beliefs and expectations. If “that is just the way the world is,” even though we wish it were different, then we concede the intractability of that version of reality. We’ve said such “realistic” things about gay marriage before it became a reality. We said it years ago about a black President. We’ve said it about many things in this world, about tyrannical or authoritarian regimes we never thought would come down. To stay within the framework of Realpolitik is, I think, to accept a closing down of horizons, a way to seem “cool” and skeptical at the expense of radical hope and aspiration.
Sometimes you have to imagine in a radical way that makes you seem a little crazy, that puts you in an embarrassing light, in order to open up a possibility that others have already closed down with their knowing realism.You should only do this if you are smarter than other people and aren't doing a shit job. Butler probably didn't know that the type of Education she was going in for would end up being shit. But we do.
I’m prepared to be mocked and dismissed for defending nonviolence in the way that I do.Butler is mocked and dismissed for being stupid. Nonviolence needs no defense. Nobody is arrested and put on trial for not knocking seven bells out of her spouse.
It might be understood as one of the most profoundly unrealistic positions you could hold in this life. But when I ask people whether they would want to live in a world in which no one takes that position, they say that that would be terrible.Who the fuck is this woman talking to? How batshit crazy are they?
I want to challenge your examples a little bit. The electability issue can be argued not from the point of view of counter-realism but by saying, “Your view of reality is limited. It doesn’t take into account the number of women voters, or the number of women who were elected in the midterms.” Same with gay marriage: people who didn’t believe it was possible simply didn’t realize what a huge shift in social attitudes had occurred between generations. In a sense, those are easier arguments than the one I think you are making, which is, “You might be right about reality, but this is not a reality we should be willing to accept.”But Butler exiled herself from real social-political discourse long ago.
I am talking about how the term “reality” functions in social-political discourse.
Sometimes “reality” is used to debunk as childish or unknowledgeable points of view that actually are holding out a more radical possibility of equality or freedom or democracy or justice, which means stepping out of a settled understanding.Not if the guy holding that p.o.v has a superior Structural Causal Model and is able to use it to gain much more power or money or reputation than anybody else.
Look at the work done by 'Health-GAP'. It is based on science and rationality. It does not restrict itself only to Gay victims of a terrible disease. It recognizes that an epidemic must be tackled wherever it rears its head. Having a good Structural Causal Model and being able to mobilize smart people or those with resources is what turned the tragedy of AIDS into an affirmation of Human Love and Compassion and its manner of triumphing over Despair.
We see how socialist ideals, for instance, are dismissed as “fanciful” in the current election.I don't think it is 'ideals' that are being dismissed. Rather it is specific policy proposals which will leave the median voter worse off.
I find that the dismissive form of realism is guarding those borders and shutting down those horizons of possibility.It is also guarding the border against the belief that your own shit is actually chocolate cake and other people will want to eat it. No doubt, Butler is right to resent the narrowing of the horizons of possibility represented by those who tell her that she can't jump out of the window and fly off into the empyrean. She genuinely has the ability to turn into a bird.
It reminds me of parents who say, “Oh, you’re gay . . .” or “Oh, you’re trans—well, of course I accept you, but it’s going to be a very hard life.” Instead of saying, “This is a new world, and we are going to build it together, and you’re going to have my full support.”Sadly, most parents have no power to build a new world. Even if they did, kids have to move out and make a life for themselves.
On the other hand, I have been accused by my kids of not understanding how the world works—for rejecting what’s broadly understood to be the way things are.Tell the little shits to get a fucking job and move out already. It's the kindest thing you can do for them- more particularly if Roe vs Wade is struck down and abortion is off the table.
Don’t we also have a responsibility to acknowledge the hardships kids face?If you are responsible for a kid, its hardships are your hardships. Since this responsibility of yours might be the hardship they face, your being the sort of shithead you are, it makes sense to find someone else to take responsibility for them such that their hardship is diminished.
If the terms of their struggle and their suffering are the ones that they bring to you from their experience, then, yes, of course. But if you impose it on them before they even had a chance to live, that’s not so good.So don't impose your values on your kids- if your values are those of Judith Butler- says Judith Butler.
Let’s talk about your approach to nonviolence as a matter not of individual morality but of a social philosophy of living.What about what we owe to neutrinos and the Higgs boson? If we frame Laws and Duties in terms of 'social relationality' then nobody is to blame for anything nor does anyone have a right of redress against an identifiable individual. So nothing can be done till everything is done. Society must first transform itself before I stop taking a dump on your doorstep.
Most of the time, when we ask moral questions—like “What would you do?” or “How would you conduct yourself, and how would you justify your actions?” if such-and-such were the case—it’s framed as a hypothetical in which one person is offering a justification to another person, with the aim of taking individual responsibility for a potential action. That way of thinking rests on the notion that individual deliberation is at the core of moral action. Of course, to some degree it is, but we do not think critically about the individual. I am seeking to shift the question of nonviolence into a question of social obligations but also to suggest that probing social relationality will give us some clues about what a different ethical framework would be. What do we owe those with whom we inhabit the earth? And what do we owe the earth, as well, while we’re at it? And why do we owe people or other living creatures that concern? Why do we owe them regard for life or a commitment to a nonviolent relationship? Our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligations to one another. When we strike at one another, we strike at that very bond.
Many social psychologists will tell us that certain social bonds are consolidated through violence, and those tend to be group bonds, including nationalism and racism.And Feminism and the Modern Language Association. Butler has apologized for supporting the sexual harassment of a student by a faculty member but the fact remains that she supported that type of violence perpetrated by an older lesbian upon a young Gay man. It seems that the power wielded by 'Theory Stars' involved the sexual assault of Graduate Students. I do not know whether 'fisting' was involved but have no hesitation in saying that many social psychologists, of the imaginary persuasion, will tell us that the social bonds between Theory Stars and their students involves incessant fisting. Butler may think such fisting is non-violent but her victims may not agree.
If you’re part of a group that engages in violence and feels that the bonds of your connection to one another are fortified through that violence, that presumes that the group you’re targeting is destroyable and dispensable, and who you are is only negatively related to who they are.This is exactly the sort of thing for which this hag has made a mealy mouthed apology.
That’s also a way of saying that certain lives are more valuable than others. But what would it mean to live in a world of radical equality?
My argument is that then we cannot kill one another, we cannot do violence to one another, we cannot abandon each other’s lives.But that's argument runs counter to what Butler actually did. She used her clout to attack the victim of a sexual assault conducted by a chum of hers. She accused him of 'malicious intent' and tried to destroy his career. Three months later she distanced herself from this and made a sort of apology. But, it is evident, she 'abandoned' another's life because it was that of a student, not a colleague, and thus was less valuable.
And this is where your critique of self-defense comes in.Butler & Co don't like it when their student/victims defend themselves and manage to drag a sort of confession out of them.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been trained in self-defense. I’m very grateful for that early training. But I’ve always wondered what that self is that we’re defending.It's the self which is attached to the body which is doing the defending.
Many people have pointed out that only certain people, in courts of law, are permitted to argue self-defense, and others very rarely are.Rubbish! Anyone is permitted to argue self-defense. It is up to the Jury to decide whether the facts of the case are such that the argument can provide a defense in law.
Who the fuck has Butler been talking to?
We know that white men can protect themselves and their property and wield force in self-defense much more easily than black and brown people can.Which is why we see little old Grannies mugging athletic young men of a darker complexion. The fact is, those who have a high physical 'threat point' don't get mugged or stolen from. Why? They aren't going to call the cops. They will kill you and the police won't bother investigating the matter in any great detail.
Who has the kind of self that is recognized by the law and the public as worthy of self-defense?A guy who can beat the shit out of you is recognized by the law and the public as the kind of guy you should give a wide berth. You take a swing at one such and end up stomped to death.
If I think of myself not just as this bounded individual but as fundamentally related to others, then I locate this self in those relations. In that case, the self I am trying to defend is not just me but all those relations that define and sustain me, and those relations can, and should be, extended indefinitely beyond local units like family and community. If the self I’m trying to defend is also in some sense related to the person I’m tempted to kill, I have to make sure not to do violence to that relation, because that’s also me. One could go further: I’m also attacking myself by attacking that person, since I am breaking a social bond that we have between us. The problem of nonviolence looks different if you see it that way.Very true. So is the problem of hunger. I am not this body but the set of my relations with all sentient beings. Thus, if I eat up all the chocolate cake that was ordered for your birthday, I have satisfied the hunger of all our work colleagues.
You are a shithead in relation to others. To understand that relationship would make you less of a shithead. It would make it possible for you to do sensible things.
In a couple of places in the book, you say that nonviolence is not an absolute principle, or that you’re not arguing that no one has the right to self-defense—you are just suggesting a new set of guiding principles. I found myself a little disappointed every time you make that caveat. Does it not weaken your argument when you say, “I’m arguing against self-defense, but I’m not saying that no one has a right to self-defense”?
If I were giving a rational justification for nonviolence as a position, which would make me into a much more proper philosopher than I am—or wish to be—then it would make sense to rule out all exceptions. But we don’t need a new rational justification for nonviolence. We actually need to pose the question of violence and nonviolence within a different framework, where the question is not “What ought I to do?” but “Who am I in relation to others, and how do I understand that relationship?”
Once social equality becomes the framework, I’m not sure we are deliberating as individuals trying to come up with a fully rational position, consistent and complete and comprehensive for all circumstances.The problem with the deliberations of shitheads is that they are shite.
We might then approach the world in a way that would make violence less likely, that would allow us to think about how to live together given our anger and our aggression, our murderous wishes—how to live together and to make a commitment to that, outside of the boundaries of community or the boundaries of the nation.Was Butler a homicidal maniac? Do the people who read her tend to chop the heads of infidels? If not, who gives a fart as to how she 'approaches the world'? Only a person with a long history of acting upon their 'murderous wishes' has salience in a conversation about how changing the way one views the world can reduce violence.
I think that that’s a way of thinking, an ethos—I guess I would use that word, “ethos,” as something that would be more important to me than a fully rational system that is constantly confounded by exceptions.A fully rational system would be based on the correct Structural Causal Model. It would feature 'Muth Rationality'. It would not be 'confounded by expectations'.
And would it be correct to say that you are also asking us not to adopt this new framework individually but actually to rethink together with others—that adopting this frame requires doing it in an interdependent way?But what big contribution to this has Butler actually made? None at all.
I think so. We would need to develop political practices to make decisions about how to live together less violently.
We have to be able to identify institutional modes of violence, including prisons and the carceral state, that are too often taken for granted and not recognized as violent.Really? People in America don't think they will suffer beating and sexual assault in jail? Has Butler never watched 'Orange is the New Black'?
It’s a question of bringing out in clear terms those institutions and sets of policies that regularly make these kinds of distinctions between valuable and non-valuable lives.In other words, it is a question of repeating the same old stupid lies about like how rapists are innocent victims of the system and terrorists need to be released into the community lest they be 'radicalized' in prison.
You talk about nonviolence, rather unexpectedly, as a force, and even use words like “militant” and “aggressive.” Can you explain how they go together?This is what the villain in a Bond movie does. He doesn't beat people. He is refined and strokes a pussy cat. But this makes him more, not less, menacing. Knowing the guy talking politely to you is deciding whether to feed you to his piranhas rather than throw you into the shark tank is very effective in making you docile and compliant.
I think many positions assume that nonviolence involves inhabiting the peaceful region of the soul, where you are supposed to rid yourself of violent feelings or wishes or fantasy. But what interests me is cultivating aggression into forms of conduct that can be effective without being destructive.
How do you define the boundary of what is violence?Thus the shite Butler teaches is an example of institutional, systemic, violence because it jeopardizes the lives of its students by making them as stupid as shit. As a result, they endanger themselves and the Society they live in by making bad choices.
The physical blow cannot be the only model for thinking about what violence is. Anything that jeopardizes the lives of others through explicit policy or through negligence—and that would include all kinds of public policies or state policies—are practices of institutional or systemic violence.
Prisons are the most persistent form of systemic violence regularly accepted as a necessary reality.They are not necessary. Old Testament type punishments would be even more effective.
We can think about contemporary borders and detention centers as clear institutions of violence.And about Universities and Restaurants and Offices and Factories as clear institutions of violence. If you try to invade the premises of any such place so as to conduct a Satanic orgy, you are removed by force- unless you are on the faculty in which case the thing may be compulsory.
These violent institutions claim that they are seeking to make society less violent, or that borders keep violent people out.& Exam results keep potential students out of elite Colleges. As Mao said, Exams are a bourgeois tool of repression.
We have to be careful in thinking about how “violence” is used in these kinds of justifications. Once those targeted with violence are identified with violence, then violent institutions can say, “The violence is over there, not here,” and inflict injury as they wish.Who gives a shit what they say? The whole point of violence is that the guy who does it better doesn't have to say anything at all.
People in the world have every reason to be in a state of total rage. What we do with that rage together is important. Rage can be crafted—it’s sort of an art form of politics.But that 'art form' fails when it gets stomped. Origami aint no match for Ninjas armed with Uzis.
The significance of nonviolence is not to be found in our most pacific moments but precisely when revenge makes perfect sense.But, since you'd get stomped if you tried it, the better course is to pretend to be Mahatma Gandhi.
What kinds of situations are those?If you don't take revenge, it means you can't take revenge. There is a demonstration effect. Other families similar to yours understand their fate. Other communities, similar to yours, quietly leave their homes before the violence starts.
If you’re someone whose family has been murdered, or if you’re part of a community that has been violently uprooted from your homes.
In the midst of feeling that rage, one can also work with others to find that other way, and I see that happening in nonviolent movements. I see it happening in Black Lives Matter. I think the feminist movement is very strongly nonviolent—it very rarely gets put in that category, but most of its activities are nonviolent, especially the struggle against sexual violence.In which, it seems, elderly 'Theory Star' Lesbians prey upon young Gay men.
There are nonviolent groups in Palestine fighting colonization, and anticolonial struggles have offered many of the most important nonviolent movements, including Gandhi’s resistance to British colonialism. Antiwar protests are almost by definition nonviolent.But all these movements failed precisely because the were, as Gandhi said, 'weapons of the weak', which advertised an impotence advantageous only to the strong.
One of the most striking passages in the book is about what you call “the contagious sense of the uninhibited satisfactions of sadism.” You write about the appeal of blatant and indifferent destructiveness. What did you have in mind when you wrote those phrases?What we have in mind is Butler's supporting her chum against her victim. Academics certainly display a 'contagious sense of the uninhibited satisfactions of sadism'- which is why utterly worthless availability cascades are used to bugger the brains of a serf class of Graduate Students.
It’s unclear whether Trump is watching Netanyahu and Erdoğan, whether anyone is watching Bolsonaro, whether Bolsonaro is watching Putin, but I think there are some contagious effects.Perhaps Avital Ronnel was watching Butler. 'Contagious effects' are more likely in that closeted, incestuous, lazaretto they both inhabit.
A leader can defy the laws of his own country and test to see how much power he can take.No she can't. The power she takes is precisely what the laws allow. If it is too much, the laws must be changed. If it is too little, she is not a good leader.
He can imprison dissenters and inflict violence on neighboring regions.Can Trump imprison dissenters?
He can block migrants from certain countries or religions.Can he though? What about the Courts?
He can kill them at a moment’s notice.And he can rape them and force them to have his babies. Also he can skin them alive to make dainty pairs of gloves for his tiny little hands.
Many people are excited by this kind of exercise of power,Many social psychologists are of the view that Butler was probably drooling and fisting herself as she said this.
its unchecked quality, and they want in their own lives to free up their aggressive speech and action without any checks: no shame, no legal repercussions. They have this leader who models that freedom. The sadism intensifies and accelerates.So Butler's sadism against Avital Ronnel's victim was not her own fault. She succumbed to the contagion of Trump's evil.
I think, as many people do, that Trump has licensed the overt violence of white supremacyand that of 'Theory Star' lesbians who sexually assault Gay Graduate students
and also unleashed police violence by suspending any sense of constraint.Not to speak of the violence of the Modern Language Association
Many people thrill to see embodied in their government leader a will to destruction that is uninhibited, invoking a kind of moral sadism as its perverse justification.Just such a thrill did the members of the M.L.A experience when their new Fuhrer, Judith Butler, denounced the hapless victim of a sexual assault by one of her colleague.
It’s going to be up to us to see if people can thrill to something else.Like what? OMG, Butler is gonna challenge Spivak to a twerking competition!
That goes back to my question about where the boundary of violence lies. For example, can you describe Trump’s speech acts as violence? He hasn’t himself stopped anybody at the border or shot anyone in a mosque.Butler is a professor. Her speech acts do stop people from getting Credentials which may be of economic importance to them. Thus Butler is guilty of ruining the lives of billions of potential 'Theory Stars'. She is a sadist of a viciously racist, misogynistic, anti-semitic, Iyengar loving, type.
Executive speech acts have the power to stop people, so his speech acts do stop people at the border.
The executive order is a weird speech act, but he does position himself as a quasi king or sovereign who can make policy through simply uttering certain words.This remark re. executive orders is a weird speech act. Butler is positioning herself as a quasi Demiurge or Pantocrator who can remake the fabric of Reality through simply uttering certain words.
This statements acts as an incitation to chopping off your own head and shoving it so far up your arse that it reappears above your neck and starts talking like Judith Butler.
The tweet acts as an incitation but also as a virtual attack with consequences; it gives public license to violence.
He models a kind of entitlement that positions him above the law.She models a kind of stupidity that positions her above the laws of physics.
Those who support him, even love him, want to live in that zone with him. He is a sovereign unchecked by the rule of law he represents, and many think that is the most free and courageous kind of liberation. But it is liberation from all social obligation, a self-aggrandizing sovereignty of the individual.But still not so bad as the 'zone' of the 'Theory Star' where elderly lezzas sexually harass young Gay grad students.
Coz she doesn't like Trump. Or maybe she does and is trying to sexually harass him. Who can tell? Phantasmagoria have no fixed meaning.
You describe this current moment rather beautifully in the book as a “politically consequential form of phantasmagoria.”
If we think about the cases of police violence against black women, men, and children who are unarmed, or are actually running away, or sleeping on the couch, or completely constrained and saying that they cannot breathe, we would reasonably suppose that the manifest violence and injustice of these killings is evident.It is indeed reasonable to suppose that something which is manifest is also evident. The thing is a tautology.
Yet there are ways of seeing those very videos that document police violence where the black person is identified as the one who is about to commit some terribly violent act. How could anyone be persuaded of that?The answer is that there are other videos which show that terribly violent acts have been committed by suspects under identical circumstances. Indeed, the thing happens at least once or twice in every cop show I've ever watched.
What are the conditions of persuasion such that a lawyer could make that argument, on the basis of video documentation, and have a jury or judge accept that view?This is a question which lawyers are pondering. Butler is too stupid to enter this particular debate.
The only way we can imagine that is if we understand potential violence to be something that black people carry in them as part of their blackness.Yup! Them Black Panthers & Angela Davis & all those blaxploitation movies sure did a swell job there. The fact is violence is a learned skill. Different communities may use different types of learned skills to establish pecking orders. Over all, having a potential for violence is a good thing. But, guns do change the equation.
It has been shocking to see juries and judges and police investigators exonerate police time and again, when it would seem—to many of us, at least—that these were cases of unprovoked, deadly violence. So I understand it as a kind of racial phantasmagoria.Why not understand it in economic terms? We could have better police if we paid more in taxes. We certainly don't want the police to gun down people who pay more in tax than they receive in benefits. At the margin, this means if poorly trained cops shoot more poor people then Law & Order is fiscally sustainable. To get more equality in this area we would need Economic Growth of a knowledge based sort. Butlerite blather can help nobody.
Just to be clear, you’re not saying that these juries saw violence being perpetrated against somebody nonviolent and decided to let the perpetrator off. You’re saying that they actually perceived violence—
—in the radically subjugated black body, or the radically constrained black body, or the black body that’s running with fear away from some officer who is threatening them with violence. And if you’re a jury—especially a white jury that thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine that a black person, even under extreme restraint, could leap up and kill you in a flash—that’s phantasmagoria. It’s not individual psychopathology but a shared phantasmatic scene.If 'shared phantasmatic scenes' matter then people should study how to manufacture them at Uni. But they don't matter because they don't exist. What does exist is a choice between having a badly trained police force which shoots people, some of whom are guilty, and a badly trained police force which does nothing.
So, Butler is saying 'hey! If you think I'm stupid, you should meet my friends. The fact is I'm the least insane person in my particular Academic lazaretto. Surely that entitles me to a prize of some sort. '
How did this book come about?
I have been working on this topic for a while. It’s linked to the problem of grievability, to human rights, to boycott politics, to thinking about nonviolent modes of resistance. But, also, some of my allies on the left were pretty sure that, when Trump was elected, we were living in a time of fascism that required a violent overthrow or a violent set of resistance tactics, citing the resistance to Nazism in Europe and Fascism in Italy and Spain.
Some groups were affirming destruction rather than trying to build new alliances based on a new analysis of our times, one that would eventually be strong enough to oppose this dangerous current trend of authoritarian, neo-Fascist rule.But David Icke's approach is so much more effective. All dem Bosses be like lizard people from Planet X. Also I was anally probed.
Can you give some examples of what you see as affirming destruction?Social movements which get behind alethic Structural Causal Models stop fighting and start driving change.
At a very simple level: getting into physical fights with fascists who come to provoke you. Or destruction of storefronts because capitalism has to be brought to its knees, as has happened during Occupy and anti-fascist protests in the Bay Area, even if those storefronts belong to black people who struggled to establish those businesses. When I was in Chile last April, I was struck by the fact that the feminist movement was at the forefront of the left, and it made a huge difference in thinking about tactics, strategies, and aims. In the U.S., I think that some men who always saw feminism as a secondary issue feel much freer to voice their anti-feminism in the context of a renewed interest in socialism. Of course, it does not have to go that way, but I worry about a return to the framework of primary and secondary impressions. Many social movements fought against that for decades.
You have faced violence, and I know there are some countries you no longer feel safe travelling to. What has happened?So Butler is a prophet without honor who is nevertheless a devil to people in far off places.
There are usually two issues, Palestine or gender. I have come to understand in what places which issue is controversial. The anti-“gender ideology” movement has spread throughout Latin America, affecting national elections and targeting sexual and gender minorities. Those who work on gender are often maligned as “diabolical” or “demons.” The image of the devil is used a lot, which is very hard on me for many reasons, partly because it feels anti-Semitic. Sometimes they treat me as trans, or they can’t decide whether I’m trans or lesbian or whatever, and they credit my work from thirty years ago as introducing this idea of gender, when even cursory research will show that the category has been operative since the nineteen-fifties.
How do you know that they see you as trans?I could be trans- coz of my jiggly man boobs- how come nobody gives me a pink bra? This is the sort of social inequality Butler should be protesting.
In Brazil, they put a pink bra on the effigy that they made of me.
There was an effigy?So, non-violence is great- provided you have a really good bodyguard.
Yes, and they burned that effigy.
“Pink bra” wouldn’t seem to be the headline of that story?
But the idea was that the bra would be incongruent with who I am, so they were assuming a more masculine core, and the pink bra would have been a way to portray me in drag. That was kind of interesting. It was kind of horrible, too.
Did you witness it physically?
I was protected inside a cultural center, and there were crowds outside. I am glad to say that the crowd opposing the right-wing Christians was much larger.
Are you scared?
I was scared. I had a really good bodyguard, who remains my friend. But I wasn’t allowed to walk the streets on my own.
Let’s review this “gender ideology” idea, because not everyone is familiar with this phenomenon.Sadly this 'active resistance' took the form of launching a malicious attack upon a Gay Graduate Student who had brought charges of sexual assault against an elderly Lesbian 'Theory Star' Professor.
It’s huge.
It’s the idea, promoted by groups affiliated with Catholic, evangelical, and Eastern Orthodox churches, that a Jewish Marxist–Frankfurt School–Judith Butler conspiracy has hatched a plot to destroy the family by questioning the immutability of sex roles, and this will lead white people to extinction.
They are taking the idea of the performativity of gender to mean that we’re all free to choose our gender as we wish and that there is no natural sex. They see it as an attack on both the God-given character of male and female and the ostensibly natural social form in which they join each other—heterosexual marriage. But, sometimes, by “gender” they simply mean gender equality, which, for them, is destroying the family, which presumes that the family has a necessary hierarchy in which men hold power. They also understand “gender” as trans rights, gay rights, and as gay equality under the law. Gay marriage is particularly terrifying to them and seen as a threat to “the family,” and gay and lesbian adoption is understood to involve the molestation of children. They imagine that those of us who belong to this “gender movement,” as they put it, have no restrictions on what we will do, that we represent and promote unchecked sexual freedom, which leads to pedophilia. It is all very frightening, and it has been successful in threatening scholars and, in some cases, shutting down programs. There is also an active resistance against them, and I am now part of that.
It appears that Butler is one type of hateful lunatic and has been discovered as the mirror image of another bunch of hateful lunatics. But, that other bunch- at least in Brazil- can do more for 'social equality' and thus gets elected while Butler is forced to apologize for attacking a Gay Grad Student.
How long has this been going on, this particular stage of your existence in the world?The problem with attacks on people like Judith Butler is that one can't say 'she is a scholar'. One has to say 'she has shit for brains'. But, obviously, the thing works the other way as well. We can't say 'Christians are against Butler'. We have to admit 'shitheads want to smash her face in.'
The Pontifical Council for the Family, led by Pope Francis before his elevation, published papers against “gender” in 2000. I wrote briefly about that but could not imagine then that it would become a well-financed campaign throughout the world. It started to affect my life in 2012 or ’13.
And, aside from finding it, as I can tell, sometimes a little bit amusing—
Oh, no, it’s terrifying. I have feared for my life a few times, and scholars in Bahia and other parts of the world have been threatened with violence. Even the clip you saw online was incomplete—they, the gender-ideology people, made it and circulated it because they were apparently proud of themselves. What they didn’t show is the woman who came after me, running with a cart, as I went to the security checkpoint. She was about to shove me with that metal cart when some young man with a backpack came out of a store and actually interposed his body between the cart and me, and he ended up on the floor, in a physical fight with her, which I saw as I was going up the elevator. I looked back, and I thought, This guy has sacrificed his physical well-being for me. I don’t know who he is to this day. I would like to find this person and thank him.
Is that the only time you have faced physical violence?
Some people in Switzerland, too, were up in arms about Biblical authority on the sexes. This was probably about four or five years ago.
Do you see this at all as an indication of your influence?
It seems like a terrible indication of my influence, in the sense that they don’t actually know my work or what I was trying to say. I see that they’re very frightened, for many reasons, but I don’t think this shows my influence.
And, other than that, how are you feeling about your work in the world?and fatal to them
I’m working collaboratively with people, and I like that more than being an individual author or public figure who goes around and proclaims things. My connection with the women’s movement in Latin America has been important to me,
and I work with a number of people in gender studies throughout Europe.with the result that the thing will soon disappear- or at least get no public funding.
Leaving this country allows me to get a new perspective, to see what is local and limited about U.S. political discourse, and I suppose my work tends to be more transnational now than it used to be.The Mellon Foundation! Critical-theory programs! International Consortiums! Why not simply say 'I am a paid agent of Globalized Finanzkapital which is seeking to avert its final crisis by atomizing the family by the commodification of gender in such a manner that the proletariat ceases to be child bearing and so babies are consumer products to be imported from Asia or Africa?'
What is the work in Latin America?
I have been part of a grant from the Mellon Foundation to organize an international consortium of critical-theory programs.
Critical theory is understood not only in the Frankfurt School sense but as theoretical reflection that’s trying to grasp the world we live in, to think about and transform that world in ways that overcome a range of oppressions and inequalities.But the thing failed. It is useless.
We often connect with academic and activist movements and reflect on social movements together. The Ni Una Menos—“Not One Less”—grassroots movement fighting violence against women, in particular, has been really impressive to me. Sometimes the movement can bring one [million] to three million people out into the streets. They work very deliberatively and collectively, through public assemblies and strikes. They’re very fierce and smart, and they are also hopeful in the midst of grim realities.So these guys are protesting against a horrible evil. Good for them.
I am also working with friends in Europe and elsewhere who are trying to defend gender-studies programs against closure—we call ourselves the Gender International.Because closing gender-studies programs is the moral equivalent of raping and killing children.
Are you still involved in Palestine work?So Butler's nonviolence is about having 'a really good bodyguard'. She has no influence in Israel or Latin America or Eastern Europe. Indeed, she subtracts value from any nonviolent movement in such places because of the utter shite she peddles. Still, there are parts of Europe where she is still welcome to protest cuts to 'gender-studies' departments. That is her great contribution to the 'international consortium' which represents the dead intellectual capital of the Frankfurt School.
It’s not as central in my life as it was, but all my commitments are still there. Israel has banned me from entry, because of my support for B.D.S. [the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement], so it is hard to sustain alliances in Palestine—Israel controls all those borders. I work with Jewish Voice for Peace. I’m particularly worried about Trump’s new anti-Semitism doctrine, which seems to suggest that every Jew truly or ultimately is a citizen of the state of Israel. And that means that any critique of Israel can be called anti-Semitic, since Trump—and Netanyahu—want to say that the state of Israel represents all Jewish people. This is a terrible reduction of what Jewish life has been, historically and in the present, but, most frighteningly, the new anti-Semitism policy will license the suppression of Palestinian student organizations on campus as well as research in Middle East studies. I have some deep fears about that, as should anyone who cares about state involvement in the suppression of knowledge and the importance of nonviolent forms of advocacy for those who have suffered dispossession, violence, and injustice.
There was a time, some thirty years ago, when it was not obvious that Benhabib, Butler, Spivak etc. weren't cretins. But now it is. Why? Wikipedia. We can immediately look up stuff they refer to and quickly discover for ourselves that they are stupid liars. Spivak is championed by Mamta Di, Benhabib by the Germans who have a large Turkish origin population. But neither have any salience for either Bengal or Germany or Turkey.
Butler is all American. Her trajectory is part of the wider, and very valuable, story of American Feminism. Unlike Spivak and Benhabib, Butler has- or had- a constituency. She is too stupid to be commemorated in the History of Ideas but she is more than a footnote in the herstory of Academically licensed Lunacy.
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