Jared Ijams critiques Judith Butler’s recent espousal of a politics of non-violence, linking it to her support of neoliberal Kamala Harris in the recent Democratic Party primary. 

In December of 2019, it was revealed on Twitter by @thefouchoe that Judith Butler, the enormously influential and well-respected scion of critical theory and social justice, was among those providing financial support for the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, the former Attorney General of California who oversaw a brutal campaign of mass disenfranchisement and incarceration throughout the state. Does this surprise us? It shouldn’t. Butler has long been telling us who she is, we simply have not been listening. Because of her stalwart support for Palestinian rights and her principled critique of the Israeli state, her undeniably revolutionary and valuable contributions to gender theory, and her radical contributions to the fields of racial aesthetics and philosophy of race, we believed the hype: for us, Butler was a radical and an advocate for revolutionary change.

However, she puts the lie to these characterizations in much of her political work, most notably in her article “Protest, Violent and Nonviolent.” In this article, Butler unambiguously condemns the anti-fascist action taken against Yiannopolous’ speaking engagement at UC Berekely’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union. Yiannopolous is the former editor of the crypto-fascist publication Breitbart, as well as a self-described transphobe. He is undeniably a crypto-fascist himself, advocating white supremacy and sexism with only the thinnest veil of plausible deniability. In this article is Butler’s “measured, reasonable” denunciation of the left-wing, anti-fascist violence directed at this event. Her claims and arguments here put the lie to the characterization of her as a revolutionary, often evident in those places where her writing moves outside the theoretical-prognostic realm and into the field of social prescription.

Butler’s article is motivated by the question, “Is political violence justifiable?” Her answer takes the form of an anecdote: she discusses 

the question that was posed in my Saturday morning synagogue classes: if the Nazis were on the rise or in power, would you, or would you not, become part of a resistance movement that included tactics of violence against their institutions, infrastructures, and representatives?…[W]e all agreed to let our…principled views against [violence] cede to the exception: we would fight. 

She goes on to say, 

Fascism…seems to be the justifiable limit to nonviolence. And yet, the fascism we have in mind is Hitler’s or Mussolini’s. Those historical forms are not exactly the same as the present regime. Even if we can identify fascist strains in this government, does it count as fascism?

For Butler, political violence as a tactic is justifiable only against 20th-century fascism, which finds itself safely in the past—at least, the fascism she has in mind is in the past, safely relegated to the “historical forms” of “Hitler’s or Mussolini’s” fascism. Butler goes on to claim that the social and ideological circumstances Hitler and Mussolini came to symbolize in their time are fundamentally disconnected from our contemporary predicaments—yet what of the fascisms which have not been baptized by Hollywood productions and History Channel specials? The Integralistas, the Caudillos, the Hindutvas? Duterte and Bolsonaro? Does the subcontracted slaughter of Amazonian peoples for cattle-industry lebensraum seem to Butler too mild a perversion of good liberal democracy to justify a comparison to the Nazis? Does the Integralismo of Bolsonaro, a political movement literally bolstered by the presence of Nazi refugees following World War 2, not represent an explicit continuity from “Hitler’s or Mussolini’s” fascism? Sure, comes the counterargument, but Butler is speaking specifically to the question of American fascism– and no matter the U.S.’s complicity in these fascistic forms, notably the recent collaboration with Bolsonaro’s administration, surely America does not find itself in this fascistic state! In response to this we need only point to the U.S.’ militarization of the police force, the hundreds of thousands of predominantly poor black people in prison for nonviolent offenses, and the U.S.’ slaughter of civilians the world over. Are we to say that the napalmed Vietnamese civilians and the Iraqi citizens blown up by Predator missiles are grateful for what remains of the democratic process in America? Is there nothing of Triumph of the Will in American Sniper or Zero Dark Thirty? Butler’s answer is no. The current order is, for her, not as bad, and therefore not bad enough to warrant violent response. This is the liberal ideologue’s reactionary line: yes, of course there are those situations in which violence is necessary—however, those situations are not (and, in fact, never are) currently present. Political violence under dead regimes, safely mythologized, is retrospectively justified, never as complex or messy as political violence in the present, which history has not yet abstracted into its mythic story.

Butler targets the crudest arguments of her interlocutors: that what we have is “proto”-fascism, an argument which fails to apprehend the fascism of the present and to recognize that the present is characterized by fascism’s move to reformat itself in order to disguise itself. Moreover, this approach renders an optimistic and flawed prognosis: we are not quite at fascism proper (for it is not the same as Nazism), and therefore we might arrest the arrival of fascism itself. Butler is well aware of this weakness and repeatedly targets it.  She writes,

[A]nti-fascists…argue that there is a continuity between fascism then and now, and that we ought not…fail…to recognize its emergence. [T]hey argue a resistance movement must…include violent tactics, as it did in the righteous struggle against fascists in World War II. [This] presumes the continuity or analogy between the two…But has that been clearly established?

So Butler disarms the counterargument by defeating the crudest of its representatives. This is in bad faith: the question which many of us on the left ask is not, “Is 2000s America identical to apartheid America or Fascist Germany?” Rather, the questions we ask are, “Is the current regime of power one of racial cleansing, gendered violence, carceral retribution, radical exploitation, and unchecked state-sanctioned violence?” and, “Will those in power cede that power peacefully?” If we answer these questions in the affirmative and the negative, respectively, as we ought to, then violence has a place in our tactics. More than this—there is ample cause to argue for a continuity between modern America and fascist Germany! American practices of eugenics, race science, the sterilization of unwanted populations, the confinement of disabled people to camps, were all cited directly by Adolf Hitler as inspirational to his ideology. The practices of Manifest Destiny and the extermination of natives were also cited by Hitler as a precedent for the practices of Lebensraum (“The Volga will be our Mississippi”) and the Shoah itself. America was in so many ways a precedent for Nazi Germany that it would be comical if it were not so disturbing that Butler even asks whether this “continuity” has been “clearly established.” Butler condescends to her interlocutors even as she presents a revisionist history, turning violent, armed response into an overreaction. The world we want, in which the fascistic practices of the American regime have been defeated, will not be won through piecemeal legal reform or ameliorative compromise: rather, the world to be won lies down the path of mixed tactics, violence among these. Any abstraction from this truth is reactionary and ought to be treated as such.  

Butler, perhaps predicting something like the above argument for “tactical” violence, writes,

“For those who claim that violence is only a provisional tactic…one challenge…is this: do we not already know that tools can use their users? [V]iolence is already operating in the world before anyone takes it up; the tool presupposes a world, and builds (and unbuilds) a specific kind of world. When we commit acts of violence, we are, in and through the act, building a more violent world …[T]hrough making use of violence as a means, one makes the world into a more violent place, one brings more violence into the world.”

This rhetoric assumes that the violence inherent in our relations can be undone without resorting to violence ourselves, and moreover assumes that the use of political violence, rather than responding to the implicit violence of the state, in fact introduces new violence into the world. A good example of the failure of this view is provided in another statement from this article:

“It is of course ironic…that the members of the Black Bloc…decided to turn the police barricades into instruments of violence and destroyed part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union…Did they think in advance about how painful it would be for many people to witness an attack on the building on campus that symbolizes and honors the struggle for civil rights?”

This approach is once again almost comic in its depiction of protestors “turning” police barricades into instruments of violence: what this misses is that the construction of police barricades in order to protect fascist speech and the promulgation and normalization of fascist ideology itself protects the violence of fascism, and is thereby complicit in fascist violence itself. 

Butler then asks whether protestors considered the impact of the destruction of the MLK, Jr. Student Union. As if her retreat behind the cynical liberal appropriation of Martin Luther King, Jr. were not enough, she conveniently leaves out the key detail: Yiannopolous’ talk was to be held at that same Student Union. Instead, she vaguely correlates the damaging of the Student Union to a wanton and naïve destruction of property for its own sake. What Butler does not ask is whether the sight of a clear fascist delivering racist and sexist remarks in the building commemorated to the Reverend King might itself be a function of the varied institutional repression on college campuses, might itself do violence to students of color, female students, and trans students. Again, Butler’s view of violence excludes the implicit violence of, and the solicitation of violence by the university, Yiannopolous, and the police. She goes further: “[O]ne can question whether [the Black Bloc] was right to force the cancellation of…Yiannopolous’s campus speaking event by producing this scene of violence” (italics my own). Once again Butler views violence as created by counter-violence, rather than as already present in the situation to which the Bloc responded. What she further neglects to mention is that this violence succeeded in preventing the violence of the normalization of fascist ideology: the speaking event was cancelled, and the normalization of fascistic speech was successfully prevented here.

Butler is quick to identify violence latent in state institutions and the body-politic throughout her work, noting in a recent interview given to the New Yorker that our institutions have “a monopoly on violence,” and furthermore that we, in our racist mode of psychic investiture in the visual field, “understand potential violence to be something that black people carry…as part of their blackness.” But she is equally quick to claim that anti-racist and anti-capitalist violence is not a constructive response: “Some of my friends on the left believe that violent tactics are the way to produce the world they want…But they’ve just issued more violence into the world,” despite the long history and tradition of anti-racist self-defense in the United States, demonstrated in the principled self-armament of the Black Panthers, the wars of indigenous resistance to American westward imperialism, and a long history of slave rebellions, to give only a few examples.

Butler urges us to not fall victim to a misanthropic, reactionary “realism” which holds that a better world is not possible, saying, “To stay within [this] framework is…to accept a closing down of horizons…Sometimes you have to imagine in a radical way…in order to open up a possibility…closed down with…realism.” Yet at the same time, she moves to condemn those who aim to use violence in order to bring that radical vision into being, a violence necessary to the seizure of power from the oppressors. What else can be done when the horizon is obscured by police barricades? Non-violent protest failed to stop the Vietnam and Iraq wars, failed to eradicate structural racial injustice, and fails now to bring about the change it so strives for (look no further than the current commodification of protest as demonstrated by the Women’s March of 2017). Only a trans-racial, trans-national, trans-gendered movement to establish an uncompromisingly egalitarian society by any means necessary, and to employ force against those who oppose this movement, might claim victory in the war for the future.

Butler writes that “our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligation to one another. When we strike at one another, we strike at that very bond.” She is right to say that (a certain form of) violence undoes us, and that the world we aim to build must rely on bonds of interdependency and community: however, when the present is so violent to our communal vitality, when de facto violence strikes out at us, is it not right to strike back, to seize the means of our own protection and work to undo the very structures of violence which destroy our ability to live well, and live graciously? And furthermore, what is to be done when the very bonds that bind us together are the bonds between oppressor and oppressed? Butler is right here to the extent that Frantz Fanon is right when he says in “The Wretched of the Earth” that when we attack our oppressor we attack ourselves; however, Fanon does not take this to mean that political force ought to be forsworn. Rather, what Fanon means is that through this act of violence, we degrade our bond to the oppressor, and by so doing, the boundary between us and the oppressor becomes increasingly blurred in the sense that this process of liberation entails also a demystification of the motif of the pure enemy or the act of transcendent liberation in itself; nevertheless, Fanon’s point is decidedly not that one should not fight back, but that violence itself should not be mistakenly given the quality of a cleansing fire, nor should it be heedlessly romanticized. But neither of these is a reason to not fight back. Fighting back hurts, sometimes as much as not fighting back, but this does not mean that one should not do so, should not arm oneself and engage in a principled fight for liberation. Again, political counter-violence is not a means of bringing bloody justice to those who have wronged, but is rather a tactic which becomes necessary when violence is deployed against our attempts to bring a radically egalitarian world into being.

We the disappointed left, assumed, and with some justice, that the fact that Butler locates virulent racism and heterosexism in the very fabric of sense perception and evaluation—indeed, in the very fundament of epistemic apperception—would entail that her prescription would be deeply radical political change involving a forceful seizure of institutional power. However, as is so often the case with nominally radical postmodern thinkers, Butler instead concludes that, since these pre-conscious judgments are so embedded in our perception and symbolic order, no action upon the material, political regime alone might undo these symbolic determinations. These post-structuralist proponents of flux and chaos love to theorize the failure of regulatory structure and advocate for symbolic mayhem, while real structures of power get on with their work of domination and exploitation. Her abstract calls for ‘erotic havoc’ in Gender Trouble, her condemnations of extra-legal leftist violence, and her endorsement of non-violent, amelioratory protest, display the disappointing limits of her political project. It seems that for her, a black, female president who continues (and through the weaponization of her identity, further legitimizes) the punitive carceral practices of our racist regime is more valuable for the politics of emancipation than is the presidency of an old, white man who might make some headway in the improvement of the material and carceral oppressions of class antagonism (and whose grassroots support has the potential to be mobilized in strategic action beyond the electoral). For Butler this is the case because another white, male president would not with his being and body wage de facto symbolic war in the way of re-directing our psychic investiture by counteracting our assumptions about what type of person can and ought to hold executive power in parliamentary politics. 

Yet even so, such electoral support for Harris seems to fly in the face of so much of Butler’s own work. Harris once laughed off the suggestion that we ought to invest more in educational institutions and less on incarceration and law enforcement: “When protesters say, ‘Put money into education not prisons,’ there’s a fundamental problem with that approach…There should be broad consensus that there should be serious, and severe, and swift consequence to crime.” Under Harris’ tenure as attorney general of California, nearly 2,000 people were sentenced to prison for marijuana-related convictions. Harris also sponsored a 2010 law to make it a misdemeanor for parents whose children missed school. Considering Butler’s staunch opposition to the carceral state and the unchecked state-sanctioned violence of our political policies and of the police force, it should seem abundantly clear that Harris does not represent, and cannot bring into being, the change which Butler wishes to see, and which we so desperately need.

In Bodies That Matter, Butler reveals our problematic conceptions of embodiment as restricted and restrictive, as prohibiting certain morphologies and sexualities, and which constitute our ideas of what embodiment looks like in terms of restrictive prohibitions, all of which does physical and psychical violence to those excluded by this production of normativity. She writes: “If prohibitions in some sense constitute projected morphologies, then reworking the terms of those prohibitions suggests the possibility of variable projections [and] modes of delineating and theatricalizing body surfaces” (34). Here again we find the limits of Butler’s prescription: reimagine given categorization and performatively reconstitute morphological assignations, she urges. All very well and good, undoubtedly valuable strategies—yet this experimentation and reformaticization can only go so far within a political regime which functionally prohibits and punishes such diversion: how can the gender non-conforming 20-something reformat morphological investiture if they are forced to live with their transphobic parents because of a lack of affordable housing and a decent wage? How might a morphologically non-conforming worker experimentally perform a variation of theatricality if the workplace is not democratized, in which a managerial class is given free rein to fire or indeed refuse to hire someone based upon their gender presentation or sexuality? The world of workplace and worker autonomy, democratic control of the means of production, and the dismantling of the punitive carceral state, in which we might be able to achieve this radical sexual, gendered, and racial equality, can only be won by bringing the war to the doorsteps of power and the powerful, and political violence has clear tactical relevance here.

We see the failures of this political project which begins and terminates with symbolic warfare in a thousand places in the Post-Fordist, “progressive” arena—Lockheed Martin flies rainbow and pink and blue pride flags once a year while selling cybernetic apparatus to the U.S. military; Atlanta paints its downtown crosswalks rainbow even while it sanctions excessive, racist police violence; we cry out for trans people’s rights to join the genocidal and repressive armed forces, and celebrate when this concession is won; we call for gender and racial diversity in the ranks of the police force: “More women cops, more black cops, more trans cops!” we clamor. Representation is enough, we insist—and Capital is only too happy to make concessions here. But any liberatory, emancipatory politics must focus on a universal, material liberation even while it agitates and threatens the dominant, implicitly violent symbolic order. Of course, we should not compromise in our solidarity across racial, gendered, or sexual lines, but so too should we not compromise in our demands for workplace autonomy, housing, healthcare, food, clean water, and democratic control of the means of production—and for us, hopefully, these goals are to be realized together, as part of a singular movement for radical equality.

We do not here accuse Butler of some crude idealism or discursivism, for one need only turn to any of her work to find a far greater depth and wisdom than her accusers allow (see the introduction to Bodies That Matter, and pages 37-38, in which she decidedly rejects the characterization of her theory of performativity as a “voluntarism” of gender identity). Additionally, we do not here align ourselves with the larger body of her detractors who do not take seriously her relevant and crucial criticism, but rather dismiss her body of work and, indeed, all of post-structuralist philosophy as irreducibly liberal or even counterrevolutionary. Butler is no classical liberal who takes for granted the inviolability of representative democracy or the liberal democratic subject, and her work certainly does not constitute some vague post-gulag posturing or bleeding-heart idealism. However, Butler’s prescription of performative disruption, of abstract ‘reinvestiture’ of conceptual assignation, and an unclear wreaking of ‘erotic havoc’ do not quite constitute a political materialism either. 

The value of Butler’s work is not inconsiderable, and her work is undoubtedly imminently useful—her practice of delving deeply into the fundament of our conceptions of ourselves and of our modes of valuation and perception, into the ways in which our epistemological processes and speech acts do violence to others, and into the processes by which we read violence and wickedness into the being of marginalized populations, are indispensable to any project of critical deliberation about ourselves, our relationships, and the terms of our struggle for liberation. However, we must also be committed to our radicalism, and (as Butler herself urges us) we must not allow the false realism of hopeless, liberal pragmatism stand in the way of our demands for, and seizure of, a better world. We must be stalwart against the tendency toward the abstraction of what it means to struggle (look no further than the neutering of the concept of “decolonization” by Butler and her colleagues), and we must be tireless in our application of these critical methods to a liberatory politics that is not afraid of itself.

Ultimately, Butler asks us to wage war on appearances, on aesthetic normativity—certainly, she is concerned too with a material battle of physio-psychical reformatting and social reform, but rarely in her work do we find a prescription for a mode of political organization/mobilization which might bring the violence inherent in our social order to the doorsteps of the powerful. This we have, many of us, merely assumed was a part of her political project, and to be sure there is much of her thought which is compatible with an emancipatory economic politics—but so too is there little of her program for which class revolt and economic emancipation is necessary, or for which a reformist liberalism is excluded or foreclosed. Butler has provided a rich body of thoughtful and undeniably valuable critical work which demands serious engagement, but the result of this is that she can pass as sympathetic to political radicalism and counter-violence in those places where she can restrict this sympathy with a host of qualifications. But, ultimately, she does not, and cannot, endorse a political program in which the war for the world we want is uncompromisingly waged.

So, if we are honest with ourselves, and if we look to Butler’s more direct prescriptive thought, her political reformism and acquiescence to liberalism must come as no surprise.

References

Butler, Judith (2017). Protest, Violent and Nonviolent. PublicBooks.org.

Butler, Judith (2020). Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage. NewYorker.com

Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.

Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge.

Fanon, Frantz (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.