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judith butler

Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins

hese two essays offer detailed arguments about some of my recent work, and so my first response to them is gratitude for the close engagement. One writes without knowing whether the reader will read closely or not, whether the work will be understood in terms of what came before, and for the most part, one is content with being read intermittently, partially, and perhaps even relieved that no one will look too closely. I dont have the luxury of that relief with either one of these essays. Oddly, in being asked to respond to them, I am also asked to write yet more precisely on the occasion when it seems to me that, surely, I have already written too much. Further, Im in a particular bind, since it never occurred to me to try and establish an internally consistent philosophical position. Because I am, as I write, a living being, I develop new views, call some of the old ones into question, change tracks, return to older problems in new ways. But I have never, I think, sought to reconcile the writing that I have done at one time with the writing I have done at another. In part, I do not want to look back too closely, since I am living and thinking now, but also because whatever I am living and thinking now emerges from that before and in ways for
Volume 18, Number 2 doi 10.1215/10407391-2007-007 2007 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

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which I am surely grateful, but for which I have no ready account. That others seek to take account of what I have written across several works is surely a gift to me, though it is not one I could or would give myself, and so not one that I can offer in return. My response will have to be something other than an account in any systematic sense. After all, one writes and then writes again, but it is probably not the case that what one writes first serves as a set of philosophical premises from which the later work is derived. There is perhaps a different kind of temporality at work, a circling back to issues left unprobed, new efforts to approach a set of problems, the exercise of a certain possibility of repetition that does not seek to produce a seamless continuity between what is past and what is present. Indeed, the discontinuities allow for the possibility of starting anew, starting again, with some of the same problems with which one began. Catherine Millss essay revolves around the claim that my call for a nonviolent ethics stands in tension, if not contradiction, with other aspects of [my] theorization of normativity and subjectivity (134). In particular, she wants to argue that violence is inherent to the operation of norms and to claim that this position is one that I myself have held. She then wants to claim that my call for nonviolence (we will have to consider whether I make such a call or in what such a call consists) seems to be in tension, if not contradiction, with this other claim, and that if I were to succeed in establishing a nonviolent ethic (and we will have to consider whether this is what I want), I would effectively vanquish or cleanse the domain of norms that are essential to subject constitution. In her view, I cannot have it both ways. To assess the argument, I have to consider what this call for a nonviolent ethics actually is and whether I have ever subscribed to the idea that all norms operate with or through violence. Even if I were to accept, provisionally, that I have made that call and subscribed to such a thesis (in fact, I think we might need to pause over both of these claims), it should still be possible to claim that a certain crucial breakage can take place between the violence by which we are formed and the violence by which we conduct ourselves once formed. Indeed, it may be that precisely becauseor rather, whensomeone is formed in violence, the responsibility not to repeat the violence of ones formation is all the more pressing and important. To understand this, we have to think for a moment about what it is to be formed and, in particular, how any of us are formed by norms (what is the formative power of norms?), and whether that forming happens once, or in the past, or in a way that is unilinear and effective.

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After all, if one considers a formation through gender norms or, indeed, racial norms, those norms act productively to establish (or disestablish) certain kinds of subjects not only in the past but in a way that is reiterated through time. It is not possible, in this sense, to narrate the beginning of the productive action of such norms (though we can, fictionally, posit such beginnings, and often with great interest), and we can, I suppose, try to date the place and time when a certain formation was said to be accomplished (but I would wager that such a chronology is invariably in bad faith). If gender acts on us in the beginning, it does not then cease to act upon us, and the primary impressions are not ones that begin and end in time. Rather, they are ones that establish the temporality of our lives as bound up with the continuing action of norms, the continuing action of the past in the present, and so the impossibility of marking the origin and end of a gender formation as such. Although it is common to say that the productive or formative power of norms takes place at a given time, it may well be that the relevant temporality is established through the operation of such norms. Constraining our sense of temporal development is precisely one of the most effective actions of such norms (an action that does not happen and then is finished, but one whose efficacy consists in its continuous and iterable action). In this sense, it is not possible to claim that there are normative conditions by which subjects are produced and then, afterward, that there are breaks with such conditions. The normative production of the subject is an iterable process, by which I mean that the norm is iterated, repeated, and in this sense constantly breaking with the contexts delimited as the conditions of production. The condition is iterability itself. To claim that there are such conditions that inaugurate a process and then conditions of breakage is precisely to miss the fact that norms function by way of their iterative exercise and that norms cannot exist outside of the iterations by which they are established, disestablished, and errantly or not-so-errantly reestablished. This reiterative founding does not happen once, and it does not belong to a scene of inauguration; the act of founding pervades the temporal life of the norms repeated institutionalization and only ceases to operate when that institutionalization comes to naught. This was Derridas argument against Lvi-Strauss as far back as Structure, Sign, and Play, and it remains important for us today as we think about the production of gender, the formation of the subject, and try and assess when and how transformations become possible. The idea of iterability is crucial for understanding why norms do not act in deterministic ways. Even if we were able to describe the

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origin of norms and to offer such a description outside of a fictional rendition, what use would it be? If the aims of a norm cannot be derived from its origins (as Nietzsche clearly tells us, for instance, about legal conventions), then even if norms originated in violence, it would not follow that the fate of norms is only and always to reiterate the violence at their origin. And it would also still be possible that if norms continued to exercise violence, they do not always exercise it in the same way. Moreover, it would have to be shown that the violence at the origin is the same as the violence that is exercised in the iterations that produce the norm through time. Does the origin of the norm constrain all future operations of the norm? It may well function to establish a certain control over temporality, but does another temporality emerge in the course of its iterations? Is this, at least, a possibility, something that one might try and orchestrate, and even that for which one might call? What one is pressing for, calling for, is not a sudden break with the entirety of a past in the name of a radically new future. The break is nothing other than a series of significant shifts that follow from the iterable structure of the norm. To say that the norm is iterable is precisely not to accept a structuralist account of the norm. It seems important, in my view, to distinguish between the two and that distinction might well help to illuminate what is at stake between Millss position (as she articulates it) and my own. It seems clear toward the end of Millss paper that the position she may have wished were mine, the one that I take distance from (and at some peril to my thinking), and the one to which she subscribes is the following: [I]t is not the content of norms that is at issue, but the normative form itself, and particularly the way in which norms give rise to and operate through a normalizing violence that creates the social space of appearance through exclusion and disavowal. What is at issue, then, is not simply a matter of formulating alternative norms, but the capacity to respond to the ontological violence that inheres in normative regulation per se. It is this that makes a nonviolent ethics necessary, but it also renders such an ethics impossible. (150) I confess to not being altogether sure what the ontological violence that inheres in normative regulation is, but I am gathering that Mills takes this to be a position for which I have argued, and a position for which she now argues. I pause here because the formulation does not sound like one that

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I would make, since it attributes violence (which violence?) to normativity itself. I am not sure about normativity itself and wonder whether this is, again, an effort to locate a founding and structural violence that resists the poststructural critique of both origins and structure. Moreover, one might expect that the final line, above, that notes that nonviolence is necessary and impossible would be the beginning of a certain reflection upon a necessary and impossible ethic. Surely, an ethic is not to be disregarded or diminished if it is both necessary and impossible. Perhaps that paradox names the impasse from which any and all ethical struggle emerges. In any case, I would caution against the generalization of the thesis that all normativity is founded in violence. This kind of claim functions as a transcendental argument and so fails to distinguish between those social instances when norms operate for other reasons or when the term violence does not quite describe the power or force by which norms operate. It is why in Bodies That Matter, a text that Mills takes as crucial to the claim she attributes to me, I refer more cautiously to some bodies. I dont know what ontological violence is, but I would worry about any effort to ontologize violence, by which I mean an equation of any and all sorts of being with violence. There are, to be sure, regimes of power that produce and constrain certain ways of being. But I am not at all clear about affirming or denying a transcendental thesis that would dismiss power from the equation and make violence essential to any and all ontologies. In my view, ontology is an effect of power, and power operates in part through norms (though not exclusively). So to speak of ontological violence is foreign to my way of thinking, and so perhaps it would be fair to say that I never maintained this thesis so never departed it from it either. If Millss position is that all normativity requires violence and that this precludes an ethic of nonviolence, then I think perhaps there might be a misunderstanding about both of these claims that are central to her argument. It is probably important to note that the rise of the norm, according to Canguilhem and Ewald alike, is precisely an operation of power that does not function through repressive or coercive means and so constitutes a departure from traditional ideas of both violent power and legal violence. As such, it might be important to return to the idea of power and to ask as well what forms of violence exist. To say that norms are coercive is surely to identify one form of force. But is it not fair to say that they are coercive precisely because violence is not manifest in traditional ways? Do we not need to know the difference between, say, violent punishment and the more subtle ruses of coercive power? If we want to

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use violence to describe all of these operations, then it seems to me that, contra Foucault, violence takes the place of power as an analytic category, and we consequently fail to distinguish among forms of violence. If the violence by which a subject is founded (and, in my view, that founding would not happen once or at the origin, but through a series of iterations that would require a departure from the idea of the origin itself) is different from the violence that the subject wages (or refuses to wage), then ethical proscriptions against the waging of violence are not necessarily efforts to disavow or refuse the violence that may or may not be at work in the production of the subject. In fact, to understand what is referred to as my call for a nonviolent ethics, it is probably necessary to reverse the formulation altogether: precisely becauseor, rather, whenone is formed in violence, and that formative action continues throughout life, an ethical quandary develops about how to live the violence of ones constitution, how to effect shifts in its iteration. How does one live the violence of ones formation? In what sense can it be redirected, if it can? And can one work with the violence against certain violent outcomes and thus undergo a shift in the iteration of violence? Perhaps the better word here is aggression, since my view is that nonviolence, when and where it exists, involves an aggressive vigilance in relation to aggressions tendency to emerge as violence. Indeed, nonviolence, if it exists, is precisely a struggle, one for which psychoanalysis strives, especially in the work of Melanie Klein. Indeed, nonviolence as an ethical call could not be understood if it were not for the violence that persists in the making and sustaining of the subject. There would be no struggle, no obligation, and no difficulty. The point would not be to eradicate the conditions of ones own production, but only to assume responsibility for living a life that contests the determining power of that production; in other words, that makes good use of the iterability of those norms and, hence, their fragility and transformability. This cannot happen outside the situation in which one is effected by violence, both through the continuous action of ones formation and by virtue of a set of unwilled impingements from elsewhere. This is what constitutes the bind or the struggle that is nonviolence. It has, I would submit, nothing to do with cleansing or expiating violence from the domain of normativity. It is precisely becauseor, rather, whenone is mired in violence that the struggle exists and that the possibility for nonviolence emerges within the terms of that struggle. Being mired in it is the condition of possibility for the struggle, and that is also why the struggle so often fails. If this were not the case, there would be no struggle

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at all, but only repression and a false transcendence, something that Mills worries about and that, she will be glad to know, I worry about as well. To understand this last, it might be a good idea to juxtapose Levinas and Klein to see what is at stake in the struggle called nonviolence. It is precisely not a virtue or a position and not a set of principles that are to be applied universally. It denotes the mired and conflicted position of a subject who is injured, rageful, who has access to violent retribution and nevertheless struggles against that action. The struggle against violence is one that accepts that violence is ones own possibility. If that acceptance were not there, if one postured rather as a beautiful soul, as someone who is definitionally without violent aggression, there could be no ethical quandary, no struggle, no problem. Such a position of virtue or principle of purity would, as Mills rightly suggests, disavow or repress the violence from which such positions are wrought. Jenkins is doubtless right to refer us back to Nietzsche and Freud at such a moment, since crucial to the elaboration of responsibility in the texts considered here is a distinction between (a) that injured and rageful subject who adopts a position of moral legitimacy for rageful and injurious conduct and, through that moralization, transmutes aggression into virtue and (b) that injured and rageful subject who seeks nevertheless to limit the injury that she or he causes and can only do that through an active struggle with and against aggression. The first is a moralization of the subject that disavows the violence it inflicts; the latter is a moral struggle with the idea of nonviolence in the midst of an encounter with social violence as well as with ones own aggression (where the social encounter and the ones own transitively affect one another). This last accepts the impurity of the subject and its social relations, accepts that the prospects for aggression pervade social life; and the struggle to which I refer becomes heightened precisely under those conditions when one has been aggressed, injured, and the desire for retribution is sharpened. This may be a personal struggle, but the parameters of such a struggle clearly pervade political situations of conflict where the move to retribution is quick and full of moral certitude. It is this juncture of violence and moralization that I am trying to undo by suggesting that responsibility may well find a different mooring. Levinas strikes me as nearly psychoanalytic, despite himself, when he describes the situation of Jacob and Esau and the utter difficulty of trying to comport oneself according to the commandment, Thou shalt not kill. When Levinas describes the encounter with the face as at once the temptation to kill and the interdiction upon killing, he references both

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the anxiety and the murderous desire that the commandment produces. He refers to Genesis, chapter 32, in which Jacob learns of his brother and rival Esaus belligerent approach. The context is an impending war over rights of inheritance and land. Levinas writes, Jacob is troubled by the news that his brother Esaufriend or foeis marching to meet him at the head of four hundred men. Verse 8 tells us: Jacob was greatly afraid and anxious (164). When the biblical commentator Rashi considers this story, he describes Jacob as exemplifying the difference between fright and anxiety (diffrence entre effroi et angoisse), and concludes that [Jacob] was frightened of his own death but was anxious he might have to kill. If Jacob might have to kill, he would kill in self-defense, in the name of his own life. But to stand for his own life over the life of the other is precisely to turn away from the face, that is, from the obligation to the other that claims priority over the obligation to oneself. Interestingly, Levinas does not argue that there should be no killing in self-defense. And anyone who knows his lamentable politics on Israel will quickly discern that he never proposed an absolute pacifism, a universalizable politics of nonviolence. What he describes is a struggle over the claim of nonviolence without any judgment about how the struggle finally ends. If there is a call that comes from the face of the Other, as it were, to nonviolence, it is a call to which one responds at the same time that one responds to other calls. As a result, it produces a quandary, a conflict, and a difficult task, one that does not resolve the ethical problem it raises. In this sense, one neither expects nor wants a full account of responsibility from such a position (whatever that might be). For Levinas, it is important to note that peace is not a peaceful state, that the injunction to peace produces a distinct ethical anxiety. After all, Jacob is frightened for his own life, but anxious he might have to kill. There is fear for ones own survival, and there is anxiety about hurting the Other, and these two impulses are at war with one another, like siblings fighting. The fight between them is the fight within each, and this fight takes place in relation to the interdiction against violence. In both of them, something wars against the interdiction itself: the desire to defend oneself, to do injury, to usurp the place of the other, to stand in the name of truth and sacrifice life for the sake of that truth. The only way they cannot go to war is by warring with themselves and struggling with the commandment. Thus, if nonviolence emerges, it is only as a consequence of another war, the one that ones own murderous impulse wages against the interdiction that proscribes its realization. This is not

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an ethic that seeks to destroy the constitutive violence of all norms. It is a mobilization of that violence itself against a particular violent outcome and for the purposes of nonviolence. For Levinas, violence is one temptation that a subject may feel in the encounter with the precarious life of the other that is communicated through the face. This is why the face is at once a temptation to kill and an interdiction against killing. The face would make no sense if there were no murderous impulse against which it had to be defended. And its very defenselessness is what apparently stokes the aggression against which the interdiction functions. Levinas has articulated a certain ambivalence for the subject in the encounter with the face: a desire to kill, an ethical necessity not to kill. For Melanie Klein, this ambivalence takes on another form. Her speculations on murderous rage follow from her analysis of mourning and loss. For Klein, the relation to the object is one of annihilation and preservation. Introjection is the mode by which a lost object is preserved for Klein, but that melancholic solution can lead to destructive consequences. Klein attributes a consuming aggression to the subject who suffers loss, and the other who is lost is psychically consumed through a kind of cannibalism. The other who is introjected in this way continues to be berated internally, and so a critical voice emerges that comes to characterize moral sadism in her view. This moral sadism is, in my view, linked with the moralization of violence that I mentioned above. The other who is lost becomes incorporated (as a way of preserving that other), but that other is also berated (as a consequence of the ambivalence of love relations and for going away). Thus, the melancholic solution restructures the ego in precisely such a way that the lost other is incessantly preserved and incessantly destroyed, without either process achieving conclusion. The rage felt against the other and against the loss of that other constitutes a reflexive turn of rage that constitutes the surviving subjects self-annihilating soliloquy. What is important to note here is that the ambivalence that Klein describes in melancholia is generalizable to the conditions of love and attachment in general. For Klein, melancholia internalizes an object that comes to persecute the ego, creating an unsurvivable situation for the ego and, hence, precipitating the expulsion of internal objects, often without regard to whether they are, in Kleins sense, good or bad. Freud traced the superegoic function in Mourning and Melancholia to the internalization and transformation of the lost other as a recriminating

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voice, a voice that spoke precisely what the ego would have spoken to the other had the other remained alive to hear the admonitions of the one who was left. This transmutation of ones own criticisms against the absent other transforms into an internal voice directed against the self. Thus, one comes to suffer the very recriminations that would have been directed against the other and that become, through deflection, directed back against oneself. Recrimination that remains unspeakable against the other becomes finally speakable only against the self, which ends up being a way of saving the other, even in death, from ones own voice. Oddly, ones own voice becomes the instrument, as a consequence, of ones own potential annihilation. Klein takes this scenario of the heightened superego in melancholia and recasts it as psychic servitude, describing at length the slavery to which the ego submits when complying with the extremely cruel demands and admonitions of its loved object which has become installed within the ego. She continues: [T]hese strict demands serve the purpose of supporting the ego in its fight against its uncontrollable hatred and its bad attacking objects, with whom the ego is partially identified (123). Significantly, the moralization of the voice as cruel demands and admonitions, precipitates the formation of the superego. The superego is not erected primarily as a restraint upon libidinal desire, but rather as the circuitry that appropriates and defers primary aggression and its nihilating consequences. The superego thus supports the ego in its fight against its own uncontrollable hatred, seeking to control an uncontrollable hatred by marshalling it against itself, a hatred that, unchecked, moves the ego toward a perilous self-sacrifice. Luckily, this is not a closed system and certainly not a foundational ontology for the subject, since this very economy can change. There is an instability internal to this economy, since as much as annihilation motivates the subject, so too does preservation. Like Levinas, Klein refers to an anxiety about the well-being of the object. Since this subject was ambivalent from the start, it can occupy that conflict in a different way. In relation to the object (living or dead), the self feels anxiety and remorse as well as a sense of responsibility, protecting itself against persecutors who are the psychic figures for the egos own destructive impulses and protecting those he or she loves against ones own persecutions. Indeed, persecution is distributed in fragments, signifying the break-up of the object (through aggression) and the return of that destruction in dismembered form. Klein thus refers to the psychic scene of fragments of a disintegrated

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object in which each piece grows again into a persecutor. The ego is not merely frightened of the specter of fragmentation it has produced; it also feels sadness toward the object, responding to the impending loss of the object, a loss that it can, may, or will institute as a consequence of its own destructiveness. Destructiveness thus forms the problem for the subject, and even if aggression is coextensive with being human, the way that destructiveness is lived and directed varies enormously. Indeed, it can become the basis of a nonmoralized sense of responsibility, one that I understand to involve seeking to protect the other against destruction: this is precisely the alternative to moral sadism, ethical violence, that is, an ethics of purity wrought from the disavowal of violence; it is also the alternative to the ontologization of violence at the level of the subject considered to be so structurally locked in and deterministic in its consequences that it precludes any possibility of an ethical commitment to safeguard the life of another. Here we can see an important distinction between moral sadism and responsibility. Whereas moral sadism is a mode of persecution that passes itself off as virtue, responsibility in the above sense owns aggression as well as the ethical mandate to find a nonviolent solution to its demands. It does this not in obedience to a formal law, but precisely because one seeks to protect the other against its own destructive potential. In the name of preserving the precarious life of the other, one crafts aggression into modes of expression that protect those one loves. Aggression thus restricts its violent permutation, subordinating itself to that claim of love that seeks to honor and protect the precarious life of the other. For Klein as well as Levinas, the meaning of responsibility is bound up with an anxiety that remains open, one that does not settle an ambivalence through disavowal, but that gives rise to a certain ethical practice, itself experimental, that seeks to preserve life better than it destroys it. It is not a principle of nonviolence, but a practice, itself fallible, of trying to attend to the precariousness of life, and not transmuting that life into nonlife. That said, I want to underscore two points. First, the theory of responsibility that I sought to sketch in Giving an Account of Oneself is not restricted to moral philosophy. Whatever ethical position is elaborated is not meant to be abstracted from social and political contexts and critical interrogations of norms. Second, and related to the first point: this ethical call emerges insistently from scenes of political conflict. Here is where I depart from Levinas, or read him against himself. Of course, these two

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domains, the ethical and the political, are separated and separable for Levinas, but it may be that even his own examples belie his argument and that the ethical demand only comes to have a specific meaning for us in the context of the political. It would seem that already, when we encounter the face of the other as fragile, as that which I might potentially kill, we encounter it in the midst of a sociality in which conflict is already at work, where violent precedents have taken hold. Would I be tempted to kill the other if I were not already in some relation to her or him? Is it that the other is fragile, and my desire to kill emerges in the face of that fragility? Or is it that I see in that fragility an opportunity for my own usurpation? Levinas puts it quite clearly when he writes, [T]he face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the You shall not kill (164). It is the face of the other I see, but it is my own violence with and against which I must struggle. It is interesting in this regard that when Walter Benjamin considers in The Critique of Violence the interdiction against killing articulated by the commandment, he also underscores the impossibility of transforming that interdiction into a generalizable philosophy or ethical prescription. He is clear that it does not mean that one never kills, only that one assumes responsibility for turning away from the commandment when one does. He describes the encounter with the commandment as an auseinandersetzunga debate, a struggle, that is undergone in solitude and from which no general principle can be derived.1 There is more to be said about what might be Jewish in this approach to nonviolence, but one thing it does mean is that nonviolence is not a universalizable principle, but a demand that emerges within a situation of conflict, where aggression is already underway and anxiety signals the possibility of redirecting aggression in ways that fail to continue violent conflict. This last point leads to a more general claim that I would like to reiterate here and which allows me a transition to Fiona Jenkinss essay in this issue. Although publicists remarked that Giving an Account of Oneself was a foray into moral philosophy, my own explicit argument in that text is that questions of moral conduct and inquiry cannot be dissociated from social theory and that neither can be separated from the practice of critique. The question of what I ought to do necessitates an inquiry into both the constitution of the I and the manner of its doing. The socially variable practice of subject production becomes an issue here, since populations are only differentially established as subjects, and power regimes

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operate in the production and de-production of subjects. Although it may be that social death is sometimes referred to as a topological feature of subject constitution, that is surely not its only modality. The idea of a vocalization that cannot be heard or a history that cannot be told suggests that social death can function in any number of temporal, spatial, and sense modalities. The situation of being a subject who is not recognized as a subject within established and legitimate norms produces a different kind of question for a politics of nonviolence, one that is explored, among other places, in Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth. 2 Further, it is in situations where dense relations of power are negotiated that moral questions emerge. This is why, for instance, the modes of legitimating retribution and aggression are crucial to my analysis. They emerged quite importantly within the u.s. after 9/11, and they continue to be crucial to any effort to think about the politics of violence in Israel/Palestine. I oppose the view that would say that questions of doing violence or nonviolence are only political and not ethical; at the same time, I oppose the view that would say that such questions are ethical and not political. These questions bring us up against that juncture of ethics and politics in which each domain is implicated in the other. It is precisely within an ongoing contestation over power that the question of doing or not doing violence emerges. It is not a position of the privileged alone to decide whether violence is the best course, but is, paradoxically, even painfully, the obligation of the dispossessed as well to decide whether to strike back. In the face of massive state violence, for example, it may well seem foolish or extraneous to pose the question, but it may be, under some circumstances, that the nonreciprocated violent act does more to expose the unilateral brutality of the state than any other. Im not sure nonviolence saves the purity of anyones soul, but it does elaborate, even negatively, another kind of social bond. Jenkins offers her own vocabulary for thinking about the problem of a nonviolent response. Importantly, she suggests that the ethical question of nonviolence does not emerge as an abstract ethical precept for a deliberating subject. It emerges, rather, in the midst of a relation, an exchange, in which the one who must decide on this issue is already injured. She writes that the suspension of the impulse to react is less an individual act than a practice that directly interrupts the obviousness, propriety, or naturalness of doing violence as an alleviating response to injury (158). In considering in what way the practice of nonviolence might be experimental, she suggests that it is not a matter of a subject adopting an alternative way of life, but rather, of exploiting a torsion within what

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it is to be living (159). This is a challenging and important suggestion, and what seems at stake is no less than the distinction between moral sadism and experimental responsibility or, put differently, an ethic that seeks to cleanse itself of all violence and one that works experimentally within the scene of violence to redirect its course. Jenkins distinguishes between a reiteration of violence that confirms the continuity and identity of violence and a different version of repetition that seeks to undo the very determinism of the first. Jenkins suggests that something different is at stake here than the familiar idea of resignification as a rupture in repetition. What she has in mind is the point of disarticulation of sovereign subjectivity, an exploitation, to use her earlier word, of the weakness and failure at the core of sovereigntys self-understanding (162). She makes use of a notion of testimony to make concrete what she means, since it would seem that the sovereign subject who seeks to fortify its own mastery nevertheless and inadvertently testifies to the weakness or failure that makes any such attempt at total mastery impossible. The sovereign subject postures precisely as not the one who is impinged upon by others, precisely not the one whose permanent and irreversible injurability forms the condition and horizon of its actions. Such a sovereign position not only denies its own constitutive injurability but tries to relocate injurability in the other as an effect of doing injury to that other (and exposing that other as injurable). The above description offers an account of a certain kind of violent action, one that has as its aims the full relocatability of injurability outside of the subject who enacts the violence. In this sense, the violent act casts the injured as identifiable with the domain of injurability, an accomplishment that produces the appearance that the subject who enacts violence is impermeable to violence. The accomplishment of this appearance becomes the precondition of violence, and we can see how a conflict over who occupies the site of the uninjurable incites the repetition of violent conflict. The specific moralization of this scene takes place when the violence is justified as legitimate and even virtuous, even though its primary purpose is to secure an impossible appearance of mastery and impermeability through destructive means. To do justice to this idea, one would need to rehabilitate Nietzsche for contemporary global politics. The exposure of the weakness and failure of the sovereign claim, however, establishes injurability as the point of departure for an ethical response within a scene of violence. It is surely possible to avow ones own injurability at the expense of avowing the injurability of any other subject. That would take the analysis in the direction of victimization

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and its various rationales. For our purposes, though, it suffices to say that injurability as a point of departure does not guarantee a politics of nonviolence. If a particular subject considers her- or himself to be definitionally injured or, indeed, persecuted, then it may be that the subject has produced a permanent ground for legitimating its own violent actions. As much as the sovereign subject disavows his injurability, locating it in the other as a permanent repository, so the persecuted subject can disavow his own violent acts, since no act can refute the identity claim in victimization. My quarrels with Levinass politics and, in particular, his identification of Israel with permanent persecution make clear my opposition to this view. Indeed, a broader analysis would have to consider how the sovereign subject that Jenkins outlines is linked with the definitionally persecuted subject and whether some route out from this antinomy is possible. To do justice to this idea, one would need to rehabilitate Adorno and Freud for contemporary global politics. Jenkins suggests toward the end of her remarks that a line has to be walked between protecting and eradicating bodily vulnerability. Perhaps it might be said that violence can take place either through recourse to a position of presumptive invulnerability (indeed, as a way of accomplishing that position) or through recourse to a position of permanent vulnerability (as a way of mobilizing that persecution to legitimate all violence without ever becoming a persecutor). And both can be ways of occupying a position of moral sadism, that is, for moralizing violence. If nonviolence has the opportunity to emerge here, it would take its departure not from a recognition of the injurability of all peoples (however true that might be), but from an understanding of the possibilities of ones own violent actions in relation to those lives to whom one is bound. There is no resolution of this conflict per se, only a way of living the difficulty of that demand. To struggle against violence is, one might say, to mobilize aggression in the service of that struggle. It is to shift the aim of aggression from violence to struggle, a change that means committing oneself to being addressed by those whose lives make a claim upon us. To do this, there must be a critical intervention in those norms that differentially produce whose life is counted as a life at all. For this purpose, we do not need to know in advance what a life will be, but only to find and support those modes of representation and appearance that allow the claim of life to be made and heard. Ethics is not a calculation, but something that follows from being addressed and addressable in sustainable ways. Whether or not to do violence, as an ethical question, emerges only in relation to the

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you who figures as the potential object of my injury. But if there is no you, or the you cannot be heard or seen, then there is no ethical relation. One can lose the you through the exclusive postures of sovereignty and persecution alike, especially when neither admits to being implicated in the position of the other. To walk the line between the fear of being murdered and the temptation to kill is to call into question both the claims of sovereign mastery and permanent persecution, and so to call into question some of the dominant modes of rationality that sustain war in both Iraq and the Middle East. To walk the line is, yes, to live the line, the impasse, and to find a mode of conduct that does not seek to resolve the anxiety of that position too quickly into decision. Not to act is, after all, a way of comporting oneself; it is even a mode of resistance.

judith butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of several books, most recently, Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press, 2005).

Notes

See my Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamins Critique of Violence.

See my Violence, Non-Violence: Sartre on Fanon.

Works Cited

Klein, Melanie. A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States. The Selected Melanie Klein . Ed. Juliet Mitchell. London: Penguin, 1986. 11546. Levinas, Emmanuel. Peace and Proximity. Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adiaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana up, 1966. 16169. Butler, Judith. Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamins Critique of Violence. Political Theologies. Ed. Hent de Vries. New York: Fordham up, 2006. 20119. . Violence, Non-Violence: Sartre on Fanon. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27.1 (2006): 324. Forthcoming in Race after Sartre. Ed. Jonathan Judaken. Albany: suny p, 2008.

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