Judith Butler's 'The Force of Nonviolence' Analyzes Violence and Grievability

Judith Butler's 2020 book 'The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political' examines how societies legitimize violence and devalue certain lives. Published by Verso, the work critiques the 'metric of grievability' that determines which deaths are mourned, highlighting systemic racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny. Butler, renowned for 'Gender Trouble' (1990), employs deconstruction and psychoanalysis to argue that state violence often masks itself as legitimate force while blaming the powerless. She references Michel Foucault's biopolitics, contrasting sovereign power's 'make die or let live' with biopolitical power's 'make live or let die'. Examples include the 2015 killing of Walter Scott by South Carolina police and migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, illustrating how racism shapes perceptions of threat. Butler draws on Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein to explore social bonds, love-hate tensions, and the death drive, advocating for an ethics based on interdependency rather than individual contracts. The book also discusses Freud's 1933 correspondence with Albert Einstein on fascism's psychological motivations but acknowledges limitations in addressing economic and political war causes. Butler briefly mentions democracy as a potential form for radical equality but offers few concrete political suggestions.