Gandhi, Butler & Devji

Feisalji writes in the LARB

NONVIOLENCE, CLAIMS JUDITH BUTLER, echoing the views of virtually all its theorists and practitioners, is neither a virtue born out of weakness nor an unrealistic ideal, but something that exists even in the exertion of force.

Similarly the act of scratching one's arse is neither a licking of your lips nor is it the passing of gas in a noisy fashion, but something which exists even in the exertion of will-power or other force to stop yourself incessantly scratching your arse.

As M. K. Gandhi put it in his commentary on the Mahabharata, evil depends on goodness, since even an army deployed for the most sinister purpose must rely upon the courage, friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice of its troops for one another more than on the war’s ostensible cause.

Similarly Mahatma Gandhi relied wholly on Violence because even a crackpot talking worthless shite must rely upon the allure of the word Violence to avoid  being considered a big silly billy.

Violence, then, arises from evil’s failure to master its own instruments, and therefore from virtue itself, which must withdraw from evil to enable its collapse in a process the Mahatma called “noncooperation.”

Evil's instruments are evil. They may not be mastered by anything and, in consequence, simply run amok. It is not the case that an evil gangster who falls out with his criminal associates and who decides to go it alone somehow turns into a virtuous man. There need be no connection between Evil and Virtue. We don't say that Cretinism derives from Genius. A bunch of cretins may fail to coordinate their actions. They may accidentally do something sensible.  But this does not mean they will suddenly start proving the Reimann Conjecture.

Gandhi could have forced substantial transfer of power from the British on two occasions, firstly when Britain was militarily over-stretched from 1920 to 1922 and had to concede Independence to Ireland and Egypt and to capitulate in Turkey, and secondly in 1930 when Britain was reeling from the Depression. On both occasions he showed the white feather. Non-cooperation collapsed. After that, the Brits dicated the pace and scope of the transfer of power. Congress became just a Hindu party in the service of the 'bania' trader castes. By the end of the Thirties, the Brits were viewed as virtuous. Congress was seen as a bunch of corrupt, casteist, anti-Muslim bigots. No doubt, Congress saw the Muslim League in the same way and Ambedkar saw both Congress and the League as evil and so on and so forth. Still, the fact is, when Mountbatten said he was leaving, Nehru begged him to stay a little longer.

Thus, what Gandhi presided over was the collapse of the notion that the Brits were evil and the collapse of the notion that the Indian National Congress was a truly National party representing the whole sub-continent. But people did not think Gandhi was Evil. They thought he was a crackpot.

Butler’s book addresses the problem posed by the intertwined character of violence and nonviolence.

Because Butler is a crackpot.

For Butler, however, violence is linked to nonviolence by the fact that they must both deploy force, which therefore needs to be appropriated in such a way as to ensure its dedication to nonviolence defined by a focus on the equality or “grievability” of all lives.

If non-violence deploys force it is not non-violent. The 'grievability' of all lives is a stupid lie. A rich guy who goes into a coma at the age of 120 and dies peacefully in his sleep at the age of 140 should not be grieved at all. His life may be celebrated. People may say they miss how he used to talk to them. They may express gratitude for his benefactions. But it would be absurd to grieve for him as your would for your young child killed by a drunk driver.

The importance of force as a morally ambiguous category is clear both from the way it appears as a paradox in her book’s title, The Force of Nonviolence, as well as in Butler’s references to Jacques Derrida’s essay on Walter Benjamin, “Force of Law,” and, indeed, the latter’s own essay on the “Critique of Violence,” to which this in turn refers. But the genealogy produced by this predictable play of cross-references, nicely described by the English phrase “going up one’s own arse,” should give us pause for thought. Why must it be force that joins violence to nonviolence?

I suppose the answer is because Derrida's essay was titled 'Force of Law- 'the mystical foundation of Authority' and it mentioned Benjamin's silly essay whose thesis- viz. that a General Strike could bring down the Government- had not yet been massively disproved. After 1926 it became obvious that labour unrest, violent or non-violent, could not bring down the system. Why? Labour starves if it doesn't work. Capital moves elsewhere though a few Entrepreneurs may go bust. Crippled beggars may go on strike demanding blowjobs from their benefactors. But whether their strike is violent or non-violent, it will not succeed. As a general rule, if your survival depends on doing something boring and badly paid, then not doing it won't magically change the world for the better. It is merely a matter of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Butler's big contribution to a worthless debate is to pretend that grieving for trillions of people nobody has ever heard off is a worthwhile type of virtue signalling.

An essay Butler does not cite is Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.” In it, Weil argues that force, which she uses as another word for violence, turns its victim into a thing frozen by fear, undone by humiliation, or dehumanized in death

Weil was brave but had poor eyesight and thus was a poor shot. Otherwise, she might have proved the falsity of her own dictum.

But force also turns its perpetrator into a thing made inhuman by refusing to recognize the humanity of others.

This too was nonsense. Properly trained and led soldiers retained psychological health after defeating the Nazis.

Like the touch of Midas, therefore, which by transforming everything into gold ends up destroying its own eager beneficiary in the process, the ambiguity of force is defined by the inner contradiction of its own desire.

No. Force may cause trauma of various sorts. This has nothing to do with anything internal to it. What matters is the constitution of the witness, victim or agent. An innocent bystander may experience PTSD. The gangsters and the SWAT team wounded during an exchange of fire may suffer no psychological ill effects. 'Inner contradictions' don't exist. It is pseudo Hegelian shite.

But this does not make it a participant in the work of nonviolence, for which Butler wants to enlist force in order to give it some political teeth in the struggle for justice.

To be fair, Butler's milieu is one where the term 'violence' is promiscuously applied to all sorts of innocuous things while the claim is also advanced that imbecilic terrorism is actually a sweet and gentle form of 'resistance' to the far greater terrorism involved in permitting the economy to function properly so you can buy cool stuff on Ebay.

Gandhi, by contrast, saw nonviolence in practices like withdrawal and noncooperation, acts as well as terms that were negative in form, which is to say dependent on their opposites, and so lacking any positive reality of their own.

Gandhi had a stupid belief- viz. if the other guy sees you are a true satyagrahi and you surrender unconditionally to him then...urm... everybody should go to jail for a bit and then spin some khaddar and then start up the same nonsense once again unless the Government jailed you immediately in which case you should beg off on the grounds of health or whatever excuse you could come up with.

It is true that Gandhi did once speak of setting up indigenous Courts on the Irish pattern. There was also a Congress Seva Dal which looked para-military. But nothing came of it. Still, Gandhi- as a Hindu- could look forward to being reborn in a better type of Society thanks to his staying away from sex, drugs and rock & roll.

Surprisingly, Butler does not consider the negative form nonviolence takes even as a name, whose refusal of autonomy and independence, perhaps even of being itself, meant that it could neither be described as a force in Butler’s sense nor derived from one.

This does not greatly matter.  Names are purely conventional. Conservatives in the UK aren't really Irish Jacobin 'Tories'.  Similarly 'Non Violence' is a rubric which subsumes a variety of self-righteous Religious or Ideological crackpot who likes virtue signalling in an antagonomic manner. Gandhi was inspired by Passive Resisters- i.e. Religious Groups which had a conscientious objection to War and swearing on the Bible in a Court of Law and their rates being used to fund Anglican Education and all sorts of other things.

Butler is moving into this territory so is to get onto the BLM and anti-Israel bandwagon.

Indeed, the fact that nonviolence relied even as a grammatical form on its opposite suggested to the Mahatma that, while it was capable of transmuting violence by the sacrificial practice of withdrawal or noncooperation to the point of death, it could never eradicate the latter as a positive force defining all life.

This is the bee in Facile's bonnet. Because he is not a Hindu, he doesn't get that Gandhi was playing the long game. In his next life he'd be in a 'Satya Yuga' type world. Anyway, that's why my grandparents supported him. Unlike Jihad, where you get your virgins in Paradise if you are martyred, Satyagraha is about getting a better next life which is by no means final.

Violence for Gandhi was linked to nonviolence not as the fatal necessity of Butler’s vision but in a relationship that allowed one to be converted into the other instead of each remaining a radically separate and so unchanging entity.

Fuck does this mean? Facile has elsewhere suggested that Gandhi wanted the Muslims and Hindus to fight things out. But not a single Muslim would have been left alive in India- unless Pakistan capitulated completely. I'm not kidding. Facile actually said the following- ' Gandhi preferred direct dealings even of a violent kind to the protracted, if sometimes intermittent and low-grade, conflicts that were the special gift of mediation. So he would have liked to see a real war between India and Pakistan, because it might make possible an equally real resolution of their dispute by honourable means'

Gandhi wanted to keep doing what he liked doing- which was to visit terrible places and then raise money, supposedly for the victims, while talking his usual bollocks and sleeping naked with his great nieces.  He was a deeply silly man. But he wasn't a Professor. Thus he didn't actually say anything quite as stupid as Devji.

This conversion was made possible, moreover, not by the moral deployment of force as with Butler, but rather by its abandonment.

Gandhi had no force to abandon.

This is why the Mahatma, like Tolstoy, understood nonviolent practices as being invariably sacrificial, and so renunciatory in nature, which did not mean that they were in any way passive or weak.

But neither died. Nor did their ardent disciples die. So there was no sacrifice or renunciation not commensurate with their reward for virtue signalling. It doesn't matter whether they were passive or weak. What matters is that they were silly and failed utterly.

This conclusion surely follows from Butler’s otherwise very Gandhian recognition that nonviolence cannot be part of some moral calculus, but must be a pure means that, by abandoning all ends, seeks to prevent the reproduction of violence as a form of instrumentality.

Why not simply say- 'Boo to Nastiness! Everybody should be Nice!' ? After all, it is only if everybody is nice that the 'reproduction of violence as a form of instrumentality' would cease. For Hindus, their may be some point in not killing ants and doing satyagraha coz, come the next life, you are in Satya Yuga where no violence exists. Everybody is very very nice and lives for 10 gazillion years in perfect health.

Relying upon an argument of the social contract theorists, among whom she cites Rousseau, Butler maintains that the mutual dependence of human beings on each other produces nonviolence as a necessity.

In the same sense that it produces Socioproctology and Yogic Levitation and the science of farting niceness into the atmosphere as a necessity.

Its betrayal results from the delusion of individual autonomy, whose psychic mechanism she traces to the “mirror stage,” made famous by Jacques Lacan.

But that shite was bogus. Nobody now thinks Lacan cured anybody. He was a charlatan.

Butler explores this dependency and its repudiation in the work of Melanie Klein,

again, this is obsolete shite.

while the intertwined relations of violence and nonviolence that result from its psychic economy are examined in Sigmund Freud’s theory of drives. By individualizing such relations in biographical terms, however, she turns them into the indirect causes or effects of social life.

But this could equally be done by any other type of charlatanry- Scientology, balancing Chakras, farting niceness into people, you name it.

Gandhi had sought to do the opposite, by playing out the relationship of violence and nonviolence in social and political terms.

For mainly Hindu and Jain people who believed in re-birth and wanted to book their seats at the top table for after the Brits left without giving up their wealth.

As the most celebrated thinker and practitioner of nonviolence, the Mahatma’s name is indelibly associated with this idea, whose short history has been dominated by non-Western or minoritized figures and struggles.

Other Religions don't have the same notion of rebirth in Satya Yuga or Vaikunta or Indralok or whatever. That's why Gandhi did well among his own sort in India- though delaying Independence- but no other country had as stupid a crackpot of a leader.

These are notable by their absence from Butler’s book, which relies on a small number of familiar European authorities instead. The casual manner in which she dismisses those outside this canon can be gauged from the careful way Butler cites Benjamin’s essay in English as well as the original German, whereas her few mentions of Gandhi are drawn either from a secondary source or a collection of his excerpted works. Martin Luther King Jr., meanwhile, is confined to an epigraph and a footnote. Nelson Mandela, to say nothing of Tolstoy, is altogether ignored.

Butler is of Jewish heritage and, quite naturally, is positioning herself alongside a Jewish availability cascade of virtue signalling shite. Since the West Bank settlements aren't going to go away, she gets a little salience for the next twenty years of her wasted life.

This is not a question of minority representation, as these obscured figures were at the forefront of developing nonviolence as a name as much as a practice. And it is Butler’s refusal to take them seriously that has resulted in her repeating many of their arguments without either attribution or engagement, while at the same time ignoring others. It is I who have had to put her in conversation with Gandhi on the ambiguous relations between violence and nonviolence in the paragraphs above. Yet Butler is always ready to acknowledge European authorities even for trite statements like, “The state monopolizes violence by calling its critics ‘violent’: we know this from Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, and from Benjamin.” A lengthy footnote is appended even to this banality.

Butler is very very old. She was always as stupid as shit. Give her a break, Devji.

Having lifted the idea of nonviolence from its own history, Butler impoverishes it in various ways. One of these is by ignoring what I have described as Gandhi’s understanding of nonviolence in terms of negation and even nonbeing. Another is to understand the relationship of violence and nonviolence as that between death and life. Doesn’t this reinstate both terms as alternative rather than interdependent realities, one negative and the other positive? Butler’s notion of “grievability,” where each life is given value from the perspective of its potential ending, is the closest she comes to recognizing the interdependence of life and death.

Let the crazy old bat sit shiva for the trillions of nameless or imaginary beings whose lives have been so cruelly lost to something of the other.

Perhaps she follows that line of thinking from Hegel to Heidegger, in which it is the consciousness of one’s own death that makes one human.

Which is why so many mentally retarded people are immortal.

Yet “grievability,” as the prospective consciousness of another’s death rather than one’s own, ends up becoming little more than a morbid vision of equality. Its most powerful example, in fact, might be the one offered not so long ago by Osama bin Laden when he argued that terrorist killings were necessary in order to address the unequal valuing of lives by an equalization of death that forced a recognition of human interdependency. Gandhi, for his part, neither saw life and death as alternatives nor identified them with nonviolence and violence. In a conversation he had in 1937 with Roland von Strunk, Hitler’s henchman in charge of supplying the fascists with arms during the Spanish Civil War, the Mahatma questioned precisely the value his interlocutor placed on life.

Von Strunk was a famous War Correspondent. He was not 'in charge' of supplying Franco. That was a big operation supervised by senior officers.

Von Strunk had come to see Gandhi because, as a good fascist, he was interested in issues of diet, health, and the enhancement of life.

He was a journalist. Many such turned up to interview Gandhi.

Upbraiding him about Germany’s antisemitism, itself justified for the protection of Aryan life, the Mahatma went on to dismiss his professed concern about the lives lost in Spain by saying that the problem of violence lay elsewhere. The ability of Europeans to recklessly throw their lives away in war, said Gandhi, was admirable because it showed that such forms of sacrifice remained possible even when their motives were wrong. It was not from the ability to die that violence emerged, but out of the desire for life. Made into the ultimate value only in modern times, life defined as the most fundamental of human rights could only result in more death.

Which is okay because ants and other insects will always be needed and someone has to be reborn as such lowly creatures and better it is the mleccha European or Jihadi Muslim than nice Hindus peeps.

On the one hand, suggested the Mahatma, medical research in the cause of prolonging human life depended upon the destruction of subhuman life; on the other, it was the value placed on one’s own life that justified the deaths of others. Only by displacing life as the ultimate value defining humanity might it paradoxically be protected, if only in the acceptance of voluntary death as a duty of greater value.

But this type of Jain 'sallekhana' means rebirth in a much better world with a shot at meeting a Tirthankar and gainking Kevalya.

It was not enough, in other words, to define life as a human right, which would, as Carl Schmitt might have said, end up dehumanizing one’s enemies. Instead, it was crucial to make life into a negative form, like nonviolence itself, and not least for its own sake. For Gandhi, life and death might constitute the subjects of nonviolence but could not define its purpose, which was truth.

Devji is Muslim. But surely, as a Professor, he must know Hindus and Jains believe in re-birth? The point about 'ahimsa' is that it prevents the aashrav of karma-binding particles so your next life may be in Satya Yuga or at a time when a Tirthankar is available- in which case the next stop is eternal kevalya.

Butler’s inability to move her analysis beyond life as an ultimate value ensures that she is trapped in what Michel Foucault would call the language of biopolitics.

Not now, he wouldn't. He's dead. He should have tried cryogenics instead of biopolitics.

She is left trying to divide one kind of life force from another in an impossible task.

But that's cool, coz she's Jewish and can pretend to sit shiva for gazillions of imaginary victims of Trump and Netanyahu and so forth.

Her description of how the violence of the ego, in Freud’s account, is surmounted by the superego in another kind of violence, against which Butler offers mania as a kind of tragic escape, provides a good example of this failure (which she calls an “ethico-political bind”). The political outcomes Butler wants to ensure by the appropriation of force at the beginning of her argument are vitiated by the argument’s inability to free itself from violence at the end. Is this the conclusion to which Butler’s brilliantly original and career-long focus on bodies has finally driven her?

Yup. The old bat gets that her body is going to give up on her grievability. Unlike Gandhi, but like Devji, she does not believe that she will be reborn in Satya Yuga where everybody is very very nice to stupid bores because in their last life those stupid bores didn't eat meat and engaged in useless satyagrahas.

The fact is Jews (including Reform Jews since 2007) and Muslims believe in bodily Resurrection. Jews who died elsewhere will be brought back to Israel through underground tunnels in the Messianic Age and will return to life in the clothes they were buried in. Muslims, depending on their Sect, too can expect a Resurrection and a final Battle and then another Death and a final Resurrection. So, yes, there is violence, or at least discomfort (being dragged through underground tunnels) involved in the after-life for those two Religions. But this is not the case for Hindus and Jains and Buddhists. This may be the last world they will see where violence and disease and scarcity and untimely death prevail. That's why non-violence is important to them. Similarly, there are some Christian sects who think they will get to Heaven because they stayed away from military service etc. This is not some abstruse philosophy. It is eschatology of a simple kind.

Facile doesn't get this. He writes elsewhere-

 Gandhi was clear that justifying war by means of the conventional link between taking life in order to save it could in no sense be considered rational.

This is not true. Gandhi did not reject the Vaishnav Religion. He affirmed that Lord Rama was right to kill Ravana.

What the Mahatma found disturbing, in other words, was not that an inordinate concern with preserving life stood opposed to its casual disposal in battle, but rather that one led to the other in such a way as to make the love of life itself guilty of the desire for death.

No. Gandhi was simply talking in the stupid way that genuine peasants were supposed to talk. They disapproved of great expense to prolong the life of their aged wife whom they no longer wanted to sleep with. Of course, for themselves they were perfectly happy to pay for any nostrum which might prolong their worthless life. They disapproved of War- because they were too old or too cowardly to win glory in it- but they heartily approved of lots of young idlers dying horribly. They themselves, old as they were, would gladly step up to service the sex-starved widows these young soldiers left behind.

Only by giving up the thirst for life that was represented in modern war and medicine alike, he suggested, could the urge to kill be tamed.

But the thirst for life is even more forcefully represented by thirst for water and hunger for food. Gandhi never claimed- unlike some bogus Godmen- to be able to do without food and water.

From the kind of “subhuman life” that modern medicine sacrificed in its vivisections, to men and women rendered “subhuman” and thus available for fascism’s killing machines, Gandhi blamed humanity, or at least its definition in terms of life as an absolute value, for the massive scale of modern violence.

Facile knows full well that Gandhi blamed science for modern violence. God had meant man to walk around his village on his two legs. Railways and steamboats and lawyers and Doctors had caused Man to forget God. Also some young people were having sex. This is very bad because if you have sex you may become impotent and thus not remain a real man at all. Don't do it. Just say no.

And this not only allowed him to put the Nazis in the same category as their enemies

which was the Indian point of view. Whites were welcome to massacre each other. Who gave a toss which side was in the Right?

as far as the espousal of such a value was concerned, but also to hold humanitarians and pacifists equally responsible for its violence.

Hilariously, Chesterton blamed the Quakers for the First World War. But Chesterton was drunk off his head most of the time. Gandhi was simply stupid.

Indeed in some ways those dedicated to the cause of peace and humanity were even more culpable than the rest, if only because they might value life in far greater measure than others who were at least willing to sacrifice it in war.

Indeed, in some ways those who are dead are even more alive than the living, if only because they might value being alive more. This is probably the reason why few dead people rush to join the Army.

For in the very recklessness of this sacrifice the Mahatma saw the possibility of going beyond and even destroying life as an absolute value.

But an even greater possibility would be opened up by getting people to stop breathing air.

The kind of violence that entailed risking one’s life, in other words, was capable of providing an opening for nonviolence, something that preventing war in the name of life’s sanctity never could.

Violence always provides an opening for nonviolence to surrender and co-operate in its own liquidation. Why? Because Violence is costly. It involves effort. Gandhi could keep his life by getting his satyagrahis to form an orderly line to get beaten on the head. But that's all he got. 

And this was why Gandhi wanted to learn the art of throwing one’s life away from those parts of European warfare that still involved such risk.

Nonsense! Gandhi knew full well that he could get killed if he went to Waziristan to fight the Faqir of Ipi. Europe had nothing to teach Hindu India about losing wars and getting massacred. It was something of a native specialty.

As if convinced by the Mahatma’s words, Roland von Strunk died in Germany a few months later, the casualty of an old-fashioned duel fought with pistols, which resulted in Hitler banning the custom altogether.

Strunk was challenged. He should have chosen sabers, not pistols. Still, only a Butler will grieve for that sack of shit.

It was only by refusing to treat life as an absolute value that Gandhi was able to accomplish his aim and spiritualize politics, for he thought that as long as life remained its basis, political action could never answer to moral principles.

The reverse is the case. Had Gandhi been a conscientious objector, he might have had some influence in the post-war climate. But he'd been recruiting soldiers for the War. Thus he was seen as a cunning hypocrite. He failed to spiritualize politics. He did succeed in alienating the Muslims and keeping the Brits in power.

After all the preservation of life was an aim that all political actors shared, and therefore no moral principles could be drawn from it, these having been reduced merely to second-order justifications for valuing some lives over others. The courage of a Nazi, for instance, would be deemed in this way to possess less value than that displayed by an American or Russian soldier fighting him, but only because it was dedicated to taking life for an immoral cause.

Justifications don't matter. Political actors are not Professors of worthless subjects.

The paradoxical thing about the Mahatma’s glorification of sacrifice in the name of an ideal rather than a gross reality such as life, however, is that its rejection of this reality as an absolute value also entailed protecting it.

How? By talking worthless shite?

Only by disdaining life could it be saved,

Not by Gandhi's own Congress-wallahs who, he himself said, massacred plenty of innocent Muslims.

while even politics in its most sacrificial forms, including the Cold War doctrine of “mutually assured destruction,” continued being devoted to life’s preservation.

Two World Wars could have been avoided if only France had developed an offensive military doctrine. Threat points matter. Worthless pi-jaw does not. At least in this life. In the next life, of course, a Hindu Gandhian gets to be reborn in Satya Yuga. If Devji likes Gandhi so much, why does he not convert? Oh. Right. If Devji became a Hindu, his ranting would be dismissed as that of a Modi-Bakht. That would draw the curtain on his academic career.