Pleased to be in conversation today with my colleague, judith butler, discussing the new book the forc of nonviolence. Judith butler is a fundamental voice in our understanding of gender, sexuality, politics, theory and of the author of 13 books including like i said the force of nonviolence. Judiths a professor in the department of compative literature and prossor in the program and critical theory at uc berkeley. So, welcome, judith. Im pleed to be here and speang with you. Im excited to talk with you about your new book. I thought we might begin our conversati helping readers understand that intervenon of the book the sort of conceptual basis in your argumen for reimagining the conception for nonviolence. The book sort of encourages an understanding of nonviolence thats left rooted in a kind of individual morality and a more than concerted politic practice. I thought we would sort of bin by taking a minute to explain why thehift away from kindf indidual morality as you put it sometimes ones relation to the specific part of t soul and kind of moral philosophy and cial theory. Just a big move i the book. Give a context for why that a shift in our thinking of nonviolence. Guest to call for such a shift i think there are collective actions projects all over the place that are very much based on Community Practice and have implicitly or explicitly ideas of social relations as supportive and powerful, so im not sure im calling for a shift or making a shift that hasnt been made. Often the work restores the movements happening in society and gives them another kind of form so i think they will be late to the game. With that said, i am aware that people tend to he a narrow idea of nonviolence when you have a conversation with somebody and they say do you practice nonviolence and the answer is yes, the challenge that follows if a person is skepticals what do y do in the case you are being threatened by somebody o your dog is being threatened or a stranger is being threatened and you have the chance to intervene in the situation and that hypothetical doesnt just arrive in the dinner table conversations but also philosophy classics and we seem to be imagining it as what does the individual director situations of threat. What if we change that question would you or would you not intervene and are there ways that may be physically intervening that could stop the blow but wouldnt be the same as striking a blow so that is one issue we could talk about. But i would like to call attention to that hypothetical because it seems to me to assume that it is a question of individual morality and how do i communicate that to others. It seems to me its a potential that exists in our social relations that are fraught with all kinds of ambivalent attention, hostility and aggression and sometimes they convert into violent actions and sometimes they do not. The question we could ask is why is it in social settings we sometimes find ways to handle conflicts or cultivate aggression, to make our anger clear in ways that dont end up reproducing violence or introducing violence into the seam so that it strikes me as important and i will say briefly the reason why is our cells aree deeply connected to others and we strike that bomb that existss between the other and we miss conceive who we are as selves in society when you imagine the individual morality is separate from the way in which we negotiate the social tensions in our lives. Thats what you mean when you ask who is the self being defended. When you invoke selfdefense it raises the question of where you are cutting the border and if the self being defended is someone who shares your religion or is in some kind of social bond with you the grounds of individuality are understood as a sort of solitary morality that starts to crumble so that is the root of what you call kin the kd of critique of individualism in the book. Guest there are two points here. Maybe anyone self cannot exi without sustaining relationships and when we subribe to the doctrines of individuals we act as if we are not dependent on others so who we are for t persistence of our lives and i was making this case before the pandemichat i must say now many people have aed me about th and i think in some ways the pandemic brings that out. The pential to live depends upon how others act and our capacity to support the lives of others and it isnt just a question of the people ware clost to and we are dependent at a global level and we ar at sk globally. Ere is no pt of the globe that is by definition immune even though it can b achieved with certain kind of accidents in certain parts othe globe. But there isnother answer to the question. Me people get to claim selfdefense in the court of law all the time and some people never get to claim selfdefense. We dont have that self that is defensible. Endangered people and we can see that certain selves of the property and if they confirm with certain ideahey are consided to be worth defending and capable of self defense but if it isnt regarded as valuable or even as existing in a substantial way then what self are you defending and we see that i think in many of these trials where police claim they ot someone out of selfdefense and we have the narrative evidence that allows us to see why they might be irreverent and yet they can claim that because their selfhood derves to be suspended in the legal culture more broadly. Thewareness of the kind of mutualy to be concerned with the phrase like ihough it kind of unnamed other identity like you owe the other. I want to get back to that because i want to talk about the radical quality. What you just said about the self those that dont have or are not endowed with that capacity. I didnt wt to at some point in the conversation ask you in the book you talk about the critique into violence and you have examples le protesters in turkeynd palestine et cetera i want to ask a question about the long arc of your wk. In the argument that you make it is especially kind o around the practice it is so transformative and i wondered if you could talk about sort of what lengths that earlier work like hows that work been sitting with you and now found its form to talk about that long set of ideas in the book. The problem is sometimes you have an idea and then it comes back in another form and its like a refrain and im not sure i know how to give a narrative account. Like many people, im sure you included during the rodney king episode i was so angry and shocked when the legal case started to be made almost immediately somehow rodney king was a threat to the police. Howre the people being asked to see and trained to see the situation of physical subjugation still understood as an eminent threat and even though there are no gestures, there is no language and it must be because we know ty are shocked for no reason that there must be something about that which elicits a very intense racist projection, because after all it is the right to do the shooting they are acting as if they are threatened by those that are already subdued or are without guns were running in the opposite direction. People can accept that as a reasonable claim of selfdefense. It actually involves i think attributing it to the person whos under constraint those being addressed against it becomes plausible even in public discussionsven as a perpetual supremacy so somehow that selfdefense get mobilized as a plausible argument, and i thi we need to take that apart. Its also why when we argue about violence and nonviolence we have to k wait a minute, what determis violence and nonviolence wking in the scene, and do we accept the way in which they are working. We have to make judgments about whether its a proper way or absolutely serious way for them to work and to make arguments about why it should work certain ways and n others. Many people are afraid that its left with relativism or we look at how vionce is named oneway year and named another way there. But i think no, that is a call for the social analysis ofhe scene. They have the per to name, what are they doing with the naming when we speak that way. Weave to ask all these questions otherwise we will not be able to grasp the world we are livin in. You described that gnification that somehow its plausible in the sphere of law. Part of the call of the book the individual morality what do y mean by that phrase the radical quality it seems like the hinge and category if we conceptualize it as a social and political practice and not simply that its an issue for the individuality. When we talk about with the European Union is doing i was using they were using boats full of migrants to land on its soil or to elect the land but put them in Detention Centers which are radically inhumane and refusing to graft the rate of asylum. They are left on an island in greece and the Detention Center is considered not needed to be part of europe so they have not technically arrived. If they arrive, they could ask to be in a kind of limbo zone and they are very often pushed back at the sea in the cases of the some other pces they refused to let them land. Iteans that they would die. In that case i the diet does not matter because we have the obligation of the european nation touard the nation and charter of the nation which is where the racl discourse enters. So i think in that case we could see a distinction between people whare safeguarding and those that are not valued and safeguard. s the sense of whether or not our lives would be mard if theyere lost this question comes up not just in moments of existential english although certainly they are there also, but when it is clearhat if you have no access to housing or no access to food or access to healthcare there is no structural support for one life. If there is no health care for me that means i am the kind of person im being treated as the kind of person. We wouldnt miss that person if theyere gone. That is how it comes across. So, we are treated. They are not given the minimal, they a not provided with minimal conditions to live and that includes shelter and food and health care. And i would also include education because how does one negotiate the world . O i think they are distinctions that have a spectrum theres a part we havent come to grips with which is that some people are treated as more valuable and others are less valuable they would never lost or markednd i think ople live with that sense of whether or not. But that is aorm of social suffering and the social inequality. That sort of acknowledgment, i think you said at one one point there is a measu on whether or not one population i more agreeable than another but you say theres something disturbing about that. If its subject to calculation, you are already in the gray zo zone. How do we get to the radical equality without calculati or without this sort of system of trying to measure whether a life is agreeable or not. Does that make sense . Yes it is, thank you. I think first of all, there is something fundamentally incalculable about the value of a life so i, this is the paradox that i feel very strongly about this, that every life should be treated as if it had incalculable value and tt is a way to establish the value of the living and we can talk about human and animal life as well. The value of the living and outside of the metric of calculation. And with that said i would go further and claim a socl policy t be reviewed for asylu and treated with care and support and equal represeation that is treating everybody as if they are equally agreeable. I would say a policy to make sure the Global Distribution o food is radically equal and that the Ecological Systems required are radically protected those are also pocies of nonviolence because ty are accepting no life should die by virtue starvation or being abandoned at sea jt to use those two examples. So i do think w could ask that question and including prisons if prisons are vlent institutions as many abolitionists thinkers and activists ha told us that the in the social and political philosophy would acquire the dismtling of the prison system because that would be one way of opposing the systemic violence in that system. That would be maybe even a more radicavision but that is a huge political implication of nonvionce. No human being should be in prisonnder such conditions and no human creature i guess i would want to say. And that would be a way of serting the importance of creating conditions that make life livable for everyone and that is the vision of our philosophy and nonviolence that it would have to be based in the recognition that we a interconnected in ways that makes our obligation to one another and to the safeguarding ofach others lives. Onhat note we began with, the argument that many have been pursuing thatre flowing through the argument in the book i think o claim that woulde useful for you to address it we embraced these ideas and you obrve with many others including that claim toormal equality and fundamental problems wh how theategory is produced and constituted at the exclusion with a cateries of people so there cant be the ground for quality. Can you explain what you mean when you say theyannot be the grounds of analysis for the debate around nonviolence . It is a good question. The category for understanding so pushing it aside is something that would require the explanation from a lot of folks. I dont think im pushing aside its neither centered nor ground but it is definitely ere and i cant really do without it so, but theuestion we know how to think or we are trying to think as best we can about the social equality of human beings on this earth, and i am doing that and will continue to do that and then does it eend to animals but when we ask that qstion we act as if the human isnt a human animal s we produce a typology that misunderstas what the human is and we also see that we are connected to a distinct sort of create as a way of getting outside of the animalondition. We are human and thatives us the problem oftewardship but this notion at we deal with we imagine the human is radically distinct and usually what makes it distinct or certain types of cacities like thought and language but often this is where we can go back to gender theory and bring disability studies because usually theres a color and a form and a gender and certain ability and all of the folks thatont conform are exceptions and we are in a form of social inequality as wealk about the notion its something we think in the relation to other creates and its own complex ierdependence on other human beings and animal lif climate, eironment so we are in the midst of trying to rethink it but we cant assume we know what it is unless we make the argument because the assumption is toonstitute the human differentially. The tra theorist who wrote an wn enti book about being a monster. I am the monster that you fear and speak about a this doesnt really conform to the presupposition of whatt is to be a human we need to allowhe hun to be unsettled. We are in the midst of rethinking it. [inaudible] en the discussion of validation dlines and that chapter and to preserve the life of the other that is the question the chapter sets out to answer. What does melan teach us with regards to that question because of the example of genuine sympathy b also to put it to you this way, it brought together to explain what she says about genuineympathy but why dont i let you jus explain why menie klein is important to answering that qstion of what leads us to preserve the life of the other. Theres lots about the work that i dont really accept and the pieces of the internal world are not that interesting to me because i think that although she had things to say about the reparation and war and aggression and social depletions so she is a tricky character and if i had one psychoanalyst to bring with me, it wouldnt be Melanie Klein because its infinite. But she does offer me something and pretend that i think she offers many people this particular insight which is that the most approximate relations are those of love and are not free of hostility and that kind of ambivalence produces a problem that we may fear the aggression towards those that we are dependent on order that we need and the child that may have hostility and may continue to be angry. The parents, usually a mother and who doesnt have fantasies of doing harm or even murderous fantasies of some kind. What he basically suggests is when not just the child, but an adult or any amount when they do feel the overwhelming desire to act in a different way they can overcome precisely by understanding that the one they seek to destroy is also the one for whom they depend on their own life. That makes sense. Attributing the logic to the infant in that way what if we think about it as an adult dilemma if we decide to act on our aggression and become violent and i do make a distinction between aggression and violence, as does she, then we do strike and others that are part of the social world on whom we depend fundamentally for our own life. And if my action were repeated by others towards me or others outside of that then we would be destroying the bond that actually allow us to live so nobody lives by their chew withr own effort alone. It is for some that is a humiliating thought and i suppose if you have ideas of masculine individualism like i take care of my own life we see this i pandemic in order to breathe and to do well, we depend on institutions and the practices of others and those frontline workers. That is true outside of the pandemic. It even sometimes makes it buyer for those living in ground situations or who are without shelter at all he understood there was a relationship of dependency such that if i also jeopardize my life not because another might come until but its because my relationship to others is who i am. If i break that bond then i also destroy the condition for the persistence of life. So i think that one can derive on the understanding of nonviolence in relation to the dependency and interdependency and im not quite sure what the genuine sympathy is except i think that she does understand that people are frail in their relationship to one another and theres a way of acknowledging that mutual frailty that allows for some kind of forgiveness or recognition. Interesting. Okay, so i thought there was a moment where we talk about fulfilling the role of the good parent and what that sort of altruism but its not in her description. This is the sort of underside of the kind of nonviolence that i thought was sort of fascinating in that claim that you brought out in fulfilling the role of the good parent we may in fact be working out our past grievances. Its that connection that i thought was just i dont know what to make of it, but its just the contradiction, the paradox at the heart of altruism. I dont know if you could say holding on to the grievance, but its working through the grievance. Its like youre giving that which you didnt give enough of. She is saying that does happen a lot, that being the good parent may well be a way of embodying the parent you wish you had but did not have and seeking to repair that. But then of course you could get angry for getting the very thing you didnt get but its true that we seek to be for others that we ourselves never had and thereby produce a substitute satisfaction that theres also something irreparable because no matter ho