The Force of Nonviolence. Judith Butler

happiness or self-sufficiency that depended on a natural world preemptively void of other people. Shall we then concede that an annihilation has taken place prior to the narrated scene, that an annihilation inaugurates the scene: everyone else is excluded, negated, and from the start? Is this perhaps an inaugural violence? It is not a tabula rasa, but a slate wiped clean. But so too is the prehistory of the so-called state of nature. Since the state of nature is supposed to be, in one of its most influential variants, a prehistory of social and economic life, the annihilation of alterity constitutes the prehistory of this prehistory, suggesting that we are not only elaborating a fantasy, but giving a history of that very fantasy—arguably, a murder that leaves no trace.

      The social contract, as many feminist theorists have argued, is already a sexual contract.⁸ But, even before women enter the picture, there is only this individual man. There is somewhere a woman in the scene, but she does not take form as a figure. We cannot even fault the representation of women in the scene, because she is unrepresentable. An expulsion of some sort has taken place, and within that vacated place is erected the adult man. He is assumed to desire women in the course of things, but even this postulated heterosexuality is free of dependency and rests on a cultivated amnesia regarding its formation. He is understood to encounter others first in a conflictual way.

      Why bother with this influential phantasmatic scene in political theory? After all, my topic is the ethics and politics of nonviolence. I am not actually going to argue against the primary character of conflictual relations. In fact, I will insist that conflict is a potential part of every social bond, and that Hobbes is not altogether wrong. Indeed, Freud harbors a Hobbesian thesis when he challenges the biblical commandment to honor thy neighbor and not covet his wife; for why, Freud asks, should we not assume that enmity and hostility are more fundamental than love? My thesis, which will arrive a bit later, is that if nonviolence is to make sense as an ethical and political position, it cannot simply repress aggression or do away with its reality; rather, nonviolence emerges as a meaningful concept precisely when destruction is most likely or seems most certain. When destruction becomes the ardent aim of desire but is nevertheless checked, what accounts for that check, that imposition of a limit and displacement? From where does it come, and what lets it take hold and be maintained? Some would say that the check is always a form of self-checking—that it is the superego that checks the externalization of aggression, even as “the super-ego” is the name we have for the process of absorbing aggression into the architecture of the psyche. The economy of the super-ego is a moralism whereby aggression unleashes itself against itself in an intensifying double bind that weighs down upon the psychic life that bears this recursive structure of self-negation. It denounces violence, and that denunciation becomes a new form of violence in the course of things. Others would say that this check on violence can only be applied from the outside, by law, by government, even the police; that is the more properly Hobbesian view. In this view, the coercive power of the state is necessary to contain the potentially murderous rage of its unruly subjects. Others claim that there is a calm or pacific region of the soul, and that we must cultivate the capacity to dwell always there, subduing aggression and destructiveness through religious or ethical practices or rituals. But, as I noted, Einstein argued in favor of a “militant pacifism,” and perhaps now we can ourselves talk about an aggressive form of nonviolence. To understand this, I propose that we think first about an ethics of nonviolence that presupposes forms of dependency, and interdependency, that are unmanageable or that become the source of conflict and aggression. Second, I propose that we consider how our understanding of equality relates to the ethics and politics of nonviolence. For that connection to make sense, we would have to admit into our idea of political equality the equal grievability of lives. For only a departure from a presumptive individualism will let us understand the possibility of an aggressive nonviolence: one that emerges in the midst of conflict, one that takes hold in the force field of violence itself. That means such an equality is not simply the equality of individuals with one another, but a concept that first becomes thinkable once a critique of individualism is waged.

       Dependency and Obligation

      Let us, then, try a different story. It begins this way: every individual emerges in the course of the process of individuation. No one is born an individual; if someone becomes an individual over time, he or she does not escape the fundamental conditions of dependency in the course of that process. That condition cannot be escaped by way of time. We were all, regardless of our political viewpoints in the present, born into a condition of radical dependency. As we reflect back on that condition as adults, perhaps we are slightly insulted or alarmed, or perhaps we dismiss the thought. Perhaps someone with a strong sense of individual self-sufficiency will indeed be offended by the fact that there was a time when one could not feed oneself or could not stand on one’s own. I want to suggest, however, that no one actually stands on one’s own; strictly speaking, no one feeds oneself. Disability studies has shown us that in order to move along the street, there must be pavement that allows for movement, especially if one only moves with a chair or with an instrument for support.⁹ But the pavement is also an instrument for support, as are the traffic lights and the curb stops. It is not only those who are disabled who require support in order to move, to be fed, or indeed, to breathe. All of these basic human capacities are supported in one way or another. No one moves or breathes or finds food who is not supported by a world that provides an environment built for passage, that prepares and distributes food so that it makes its way to our mouths, a world that sustains the environment that makes possible air of a quality that we can breathe.

      Dependency can be defined partly as a reliance on social and material structures and on the environment, for the latter, too, makes life possible. But regardless of our quarrels with psychoanalysis—and what is psychoanalysis but a theory and practice with which people quarrel—perhaps we can say that we do not overcome the dependency of infancy when we become adults. That does not mean that the adult is dependent in the exact same way that the infant is, but only that we have become creatures who constantly imagine a self-sufficiency, only to find that image of ourselves undermined repeatedly in the course of life. This is, of course, a Lacanian position, articulated most famously by the “mirror stage”—the jubilant boy who thinks he stands on his own as he looks in the mirror, and yet, watching him, we know that the mother, or some obscured object-support (trotte-bébé), holds him in front of the mirror as he rejoices in his radical self-sufficiency.¹⁰ Perhaps we can say that the founding conceits of liberal individualism are a kind of mirror stage, that they take place within an imaginary of this kind. What support, what dependency, has to be disavowed for the fantasy of self-sufficiency to take hold, for the story to start with a timeless adult masculinity?

      The implication of this scene, of course, is that it would seem that masculinity is identified with a phantasmatic self-sufficiency, while femininity is identified with the support she provides, a support regularly disavowed. This picture and story lock us into an economy of gender relations that hardly serves us. Heterosexuality becomes the presumptive frame, and it is derived from the theory of mother and child, which is but one way of imagining the relations of support for the child. The gendered structure of the family is taken for granted, including, of course, the obscuring of the mother’s labor of care and the full absence of the father. And if we accept all this as the symbolic structure of things rather than merely a specific imaginary, we accept the operation of a law that can only be changed in incremental fashion and over a very long time. The theory that describes this fantasy, this asymmetry, and this gendered division of labor can end up reproducing and validating its terms, unless it shows us another way out, unless it asks about the scene prior to, or outside of, the scene—the moment, as it were, before the beginning.

      Let us now move from dependency to interdependency, and ask how that alters our understanding of vulnerability, of conflict, adulthood, sociality, violence, and politics. I ask this question because, at both a political and an economic level, the facts of global interdependency are denied. Or they are exploited. Of course, advertisements for corporations celebrate a globalized world, but that idea of corporate expansion captures only one sense of globalization. National sovereignty may be waning, and yet new nationalisms insist upon the frame.¹¹ So one reason it is so difficult to convince governments such as that of the United States that global warming is a real threat to the future of the livable world is that their rights to expand