Judith Butler holds a peculiar place in contemporary Western culture. Like very few men and perhaps no other woman, Butler is an international celebrity academic. This means that many more people know her name than have read her work—and most of them have an opinion about Butler and her ideas. One might argue that Butler’s influence is immense because some key phrases of hers have become linguistic staples; take, for example, “gender performativity.” On their way into the mainstream, however, these ideas have been simplified and transformed, often beyond recognition.
Butler, who is sixty-three, is best known for her work in gender theory, especially her book “Gender Trouble,” published thirty years ago. Butler has written extensively on other questions of culture, politics, and the psyche, such as hate speech (“Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative,” 1997), the fundamental unknowability of the self (“Giving an Account of Oneself,” 2005), and Jewish ethics and Palestine (“Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” 2012). Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has taught since 1993. She lives in the Bay Area with her partner, the political theorist Wendy Brown.
This month, Verso is publishing Butler’s latest book, “The Force of Nonviolence.” 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.” Butler sat down for a conversation with me during a recent visit to New York. The interview has been edited and condensed.
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.
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.
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?” Some of my friends on the left believe that violent tactics are the way to produce the world they want. They think that the violence falls away when the results they want are realized. But they’ve just issued more violence into the world.
You begin with a critique of individualism “as the basis of ethics and politics alike.” Why is that the starting point?
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. There are relational perspectives that would challenge that point of departure, and ecological perspectives as well.
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.
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? We are all, if we stand, supported by any number of things. 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. His labor is in my walk, as it were. I wouldn’t have been able to get here without any of those wonderful technologies and supporting relations.
Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. 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.
You have written before about the concept of grievability, and it is an important idea in this book. Can you talk about it?
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.
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. 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. 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.
You are referring to the twenty-five hundred mini-obituaries in the Times, right?
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.
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. Certain lives are considered more grievable. 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.
