London Non-violence

Neoliberalism transforms the possibility of a good life, the undiscovered wonder of collective existence, into an ‘I’ that accumulates. The state-sanctioned imperative is more: to own and hoard, to be bigger, faster, better, to stretch our capacity in service of self. Because the individual appears at the centre of the story liberalism tells about itself, group-differentiated vulnerabilities to violence, death and precarity of all kinds emerge as distinctly personal problems, their many complexities reduced to the singular. This reduction lessens the ability to foreground sensuous relation; that is, relations which recognise the necessity of thinking and feeling through one another. It is no wonder that in recent years moral philosophy has turned its attention towards the ethical implications of the singular versus the collective body. To make a claim from a group position is to betray the contract of individualism, to encroach on the space marshalled by self. What then to make of atmospheres of catastrophic violence, in which a virus continues to ravage communities left defenceless by their governments, genocidal war rages, thick layers of dispossession organise and determine the scale of our breathing? How do we respond to the multiple threats seeking to extinguish life as their infrastructure and capacity grow? How do the resurgent slogans ‘Black Lives Matter’ / ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ definitive of our times, signal towards a notion that freedom must be fought for by any means necessary? What does moral philosophy propose in response?

‘The case for non-violence encounters skeptical responses across the political spectrum.’¹ So begins Butler’s polemic in The Force of Non-violence: An Ethico-political Bind published in 2020. They wade into the debate with trepidation and a desire to correct traditional misconceptions about the practice of non-violence. The book’s epigraph quotes from Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Angela Davis are intended to alert us to the defining legacies of non-violence in radical and revolutionary movements. Butler situates themself in the legacy of these movements, relying heavily on Gandhian philosophy to convince us that non-violence is more than just ‘a failure of action.’ At every turn they pre-empt counterarguments, careful to warn us that the text does not understand non-violence to mean passivity, nor does it implore political subjects to do nothing in the face of the life-threatening violence that structures being. Butler acknowledges that violence is sometimes ‘tactically necessary in order to defeat structural or systemic violence, or to dismantle a violent regime’ but disputes its inevitability by thinking through Freud, Fanon, Rousseau and a range of social contract theorists. Their aim is to extinguish the myth of individual autonomy that makes violence possible through a focus on interdependency. Interdependency is a prerequisite of sensuous relation: that is, a kind of knowledge which respects the dimensions of togetherness. The ability to engage the faculties of perception depends upon the mediation of that perception through connectedness with others. It is through our ‘sense’ – interpretation, perception and intuitive awareness – that our experience of the world and the process of surviving it is heightened. Sensuous orientation allows us to evacuate what Berlant calls capitalist ideologies ‘locating [of] the data about whether life [is] ‘meaningful’ along an arc of accrual.’² The interdependency Butler gestures towards is radically constitutive – we not only make and unmake one another, we are one another.

Butler begins their polemic by mapping out the contested terrain of the terms ‘violence’ and ‘non-violence.’ They argue that when the state and its institutions can so easily name resistance ‘violence’, as is the case with a peaceful demonstration that took place against Erdogan’s fascistic rule in Gezi Park, Istanbul, in 2013, met with water canons and tear gas by police, is a definition of these categories actually possible, is it even worthwhile? Butler argues that the purposeful misnaming of resistance as violence by the state, by the police, by the media purposefully obscures.

What about those most exposed to the world’s violent edges? What use is non-violence to them? Butler clarifies, reverting to the simplest of maxims, that we must question the morality of the idea that ‘others do it and so should we.’³ They suggest that violence on the grounds of reciprocity is a concession to its inevitability. We must abandon this paradigm, stepping beyond the ‘realistic limits’ determined by neoliberalism, to truly understand the power of non-violence as a practice invested in ‘claims to life.’ Through this abandonment perhaps a world without violence may enter the realm of possibility. The tenets of such a world require a prioritisation of the relation between human beings and an abandonment of the instrumentalist framework which views violence as a means to an end, affirming the myth of the singular body. As Hesham Shafick argues, Butler’s notion of non-violence is dependent on a complete rewriting of the idea that ‘as long as we exist as individuals, non-violence could only be an act – contractual or passive, but never a normalised social condition.’⁴ It is only when we understand our fundamental interdependence, when ‘us’ becomes inclusive of ‘them,’ that we will be able to recognise that a blow to the other, even in self-defence, harms the collective body. In this context, establishing non-violence as a normalised social condition rather than an individual act would cause the notion that violence may be necessary in self-defence to fall apart.

No one wants to see this world more than the imperilled political subjects whose lives are endangered by the one we live in. But Butler’s mission, to invite their readers to question the ‘self’ we imagine to be so disconnected from one another, is also haunted by another question their own work poses, what makes a life grievable? They argue that the practice of non-violence must be premised on an ‘equality of grievability’ (that is, the humanist recognition that all lives are valuable and thus worthy of being grieved). Turning away from violence means looking beyond the instinct to hurt because we are hurt in order to usher in a horizon in which this cycle may be permanently upended. But what good is this proposition to those who use violence in the process of revolt because, as Fanon argues, they can no longer breathe? Butler’s intervention is interesting in its refusal to capitulate to the terms of the present; one can hardly critique the necessity of looking beyond the conditions imposed by neoliberalism in order to craft what comes next nor take issue with the idea that all political subjects are interconnected. But non-violence is not merely an ethical or social condition, it is also a political practice and ideology. Like other proponents, Butler pays scant attention to the history, political context and constitution of capitalist domination, the landscapes where acts of violent self-defence take place – the devastating layers of physical, structural, physiological catastrophe produced by capitalism’s slowing of time and the generational ripples born from acts of destruction by oppressive power.

Advocates of non-violence invoke the necessity of using our subjective imaginations to break specific paradigms regarding the ethics of violence, but in order to do so they downplay the register and scale of domination to which resistant violence attends and to which the practice of non-violence can never adequately respond. We might pause here to consider the many sensuous elements of a violent world. Inside of any social landscape, the capacity to reach for violence or non-violence as a means of responding to state-sanctioned threat is framed by a subject’s felt experience of that threat. In their use of abstraction for the purposes of philosophical argument, Butler does not adequately engage with the fact that violent resistance emerges from environments in which state-sanctioned threat is lived at the level of the body. Such experiences cannot simply be glossed over for the sake of argument – they encase political subjects in sensorial landscapes of death and destruction which change their perceptions of what it means to a human being. Sensuousness speaks to the ability for political subjects to be in the world through all manner of afferent impulses. To understand violence in this manner means to take seriously the auditory, haptic, visual, gustatory and olfactory dimensions of violence and the pain it causes. One register’s pain as a bodily sensation, feels danger with the heart not the head, we experience the overwhelming power of grief through the sobbing convulsions of the body. Inflicted violence becomes all consuming in the way that it splits political subjects in half, cutting them off from their capacity to experience sensations that are conducive to life. To emphasise the sensuous elements of a life under capitalism is to understand the central role that the body and feeling play in the construction of reality. The practical and philosophical dimensions of non-violence reach their logical limit when they come up against the all-consuming experience of violence, war, starvation at the hands of the state as well as the determinative drive that inspires them to take up arms for the sake of their survival.

One might argue that it is actually non-violence which symbolises the individual. It’s successful application in Euro-American contexts is so heavily tied to the expected benevolence of institutions. If vulnerabilities are differentiated by proximity to violence, the difference between its use in the context of a bourgeois university campus or protest inside the imperial core versus its use by the working classes on the streets of a country strangled by Euro-American sanctions is palpable. Non-violence appears as an option in the former because the institutional setting carefully obscures what is at stake whereas violence becomes a responsibility in the latter example for the sake of life. Butler’s argument is unsatisfying precisely because its reliance on the possibility of establishing an equality of grievability assumes that those people, subjects and systems who want us dead, who establish a threat to our lives, are capable of first registering our claims to life and then compassionately incorporating the imperilled into their notion of the social body without material force. If such a thing were possible, the world would indeed be different. The social violence to which the oppressed respond is structured by mass death, it cannot affirm or recognise the lives it destroys. From Fanon, whom Butler draws on heavily, we learn that there is no equivalence to be drawn between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor, and the act of violence itself is paradigm breaking the second it occurs from below; its function becomes therapeutic, revolutionary, it warps temporality and temporarily restores the ability of the colonised subject to defend themselves, to become a person in the world. It is also important to note, as French philosopher Elsa Dorlin does, that defences of non-violence like Butler’s are premised on an understanding of violence emanating from singular events and confrontations rather than as a forcefield constituting the atmospheric pressure of every encounter in the social world. Dorlin writes, ‘My theoretical and political culture has instilled in me a foundational idea, namely, that relations of power in situ can never be fully reduced to collective standoffs, as they always involve lived experiences of domination that occur in the intimacy of bedrooms, in subway station corridors, beneath the surface of family reunions, and so on. In other words, for some, the question of defense does not disappear when the moment of overt political mobilization ends but is part of a continuous experience, a phenomenology of violence.’⁵

Violent self-defence is an act that seeks to honour and repair a social bond inside of a phenomenology of violence, rather than destroy it, as Butler would have us believe. The intimacy of the bedrooms and subway station corridors to which Dorlin elucidates gestures towards the way violence undergirds bodily experience on the earth, such that it is impossible to think about human sensation divorced from it. Rather than understanding violent self-defence as a betrayal of interdependence, we might view it as an attempt to reconstitute an interconnectedness that frees human sensation from domination. In other words, the violent struggle for self-determination awakens political subjects to engage in the touch, taste, smell, sight and feel of liveable life. Struggles for freedom are ontological projects in sensorial existence: the fight for pleasure, for free erotic, for desire, for yearning, for intimacy, for comradeship is never promised and must be cultivated. Dorlins reconceptualisation of violence as well as the insights gleaned from the Black radical tradition can help build a robust counter-argument to Butler by critiquing the hollow egalitarianism that is foundational to their conceptualisation of non-violence. Is an equality of grievability more important than the fight for survival?

Throughout the book, Butler examines subjecthood and citizenship through the lens of the rights-bearing citizen as posited by Foucault, gesturing at a critique of ontology without ever really delivering this in a way that shifts the terms of their argument. In other words, at many points, they gesture towards the imperilled but we become little more than a rhetorical device to critique an instrumentalist logic. If, as they argue, we must ‘fight those who are committed to destruction, without replicating their destructiveness,’ surely we should begin by questioning, radically, the terms on which an ‘equality of grievability’ which could occlude that destructiveness are premised: questioning the concept of the human and the notion of the rights-bearing citizen. Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the ‘human’ through an examination of the Western construction of ‘man’ holds that it is forged in relation to an ‘other,’ which emerged through colonial encounter. The ‘human’ is a product of violent historical circumstance, not merely a benign ontological category. Butler takes the notion of the human for granted, and their focus on law and morality prevents a recognition that the very notion of the human as a genre of man was dependent on the non-recognition and non-grievability of enslaved people. Enslaved people’s violent resistance broke open the terms of the human and fractured its legacy in the West – the legalistic notions of ‘equality’ and ‘rights bearing citizens.’ Butler’s reliance on the fuzzy domain of equality as a prerequisite for non-violence as a social condition seems at odds with their previous engagement with non-grievability, the notion that some lives are deemed less valuable and therefore unmournable. Whilst they concede that some loss of life does not register as a loss in the body politic, they refuse to contend with the histories that produced this predicament and might free us from it or with what this means for the project of non-violence. They write, ‘We are not yet speaking about equality if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability or the equal attribution of grievability.’ But who is Butler’s ‘we’? Does it begin with those who mourn for the unmournable? Is the impossible task of making, for example, Black lives legible to the state as the arbiter of equal grievability a meaningful endeavour for those also in danger? What good is the ability to be recognised in death for those who should be alive?

In chapter three of her book, ‘The Ethics and Politics of Non-violence,’ Butler recognises how the racial schema and phantasmagoria of racism negate Black life – turning the Black person into something other than a rights-bearing subject. They carefully note the reiterated patterns of violence in which the racial phantasmagoria appears and occludes the social bond, leading to death. This recognition allows them to pose the following question: ‘Does the police officer who strengthens the hold to the point of death imagine that the person about to die is actually about to attack, or that their own life is endangered? Or is it a life that belongs to the racial schema; hence, because it does not register as a grievable life worth preserving?’⁶

The positing of such a question reveals how easily abstracted ‘snuffable’ life becomes when the racial schema is assessed at the point of its enactment rather than its consequence. It obscures the truth of grieviability: a person is dead. To use the language of interdependency that is central to Butler’s own argument: a parent is dead, a son is dead, somebody has lost a friend or a sibling or a lover. This death cannot adequately be attended to within a treatise on the ethical bind that does not as, Elsa Dorlin argues, ‘begin with muscles rather than the law,’ and in doing so recognises that the stakes of defensive violence are not always self-evident but are always nothing other than life itself. Outside of the reconceptualisation of relation, what does the practice of non-violence offer ‘the person about to die,’ when the current social contract is enriched by the fatal encounter described above? Does Butler imagine that a change in the metric of grievability or that equal grievability supposedly produced by non-violence is enough to recover the dead? To honour them? The descriptive examples of Black death they offer – the stories of state-sanctioned murders of Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, George Zimmerman, Shantel Davis, Trayvon Martin, Gabriella Nevarez – further emphasise the necessity of posing a credible threat to agents of dispossession, such that the list of those we have lost does not increase. What happens when the racial phantasm, which steals and destroys Black life in such a way that the names of the dead might be reduced to a list the reader skims over, refuses to capitulate to demands for equality? Without a sustained recognition and treatment of the contested category of the human, and the holes in their thesis of grievability (grievable to whom, visible to whom, the state? Sovereign power? The law?), calls for the practice of non-violence deny oppressed subjects the ability to meet the threshold for living, the ability to say no, to dissent, to meaningfully challenge what threatens their life in order to recover their ability to experience it through all manner of sensations.

When Fanon writes, ‘For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me to stone,’⁷ perhaps he is not gesturing towards an ‘assertion of equality’ as Butler argues, but one of liberation, which would drastically rewrite the terms of human relation by smashing and destroying the very metrics that maintain his inferiority through colonialism. In response to the limits of Butler’s theorisation, how might we, those who desire what Fanon desired, reconceptualise violence, thinking of it following Christina Sharpe, as a way to ‘tend and defend the dead.’ Sharpe asks, ‘What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death? It means work.’⁸  It would mean a recognition that equality and grievability are inadequate metrics for assessing the lives of some oppressed subjects and that the expansion of frameworks that cultivate the continued survival and agency of the imperilled through self-defence remains crucial. Perhaps a first step would be understanding that those who use violence in revolutionary struggle, those who engage in violence as a means of self-defence, do so precisely because they recognise that the loss of their lives cannot and will not register as loss in a paradigm defined by conceptions of the human or the subject that arise vis-à-vis Western social contract theorists. Perhaps they use violence as means of defending the living dead, crystallising the love ethic expressed by Joy James’s invocation that ‘my capacity to love is my capacity to fight.’⁹ Recognition or inclusion into the category of human cannot repair the ruptures caused in the aftermath of state and imperialist violence. What might Butler say of violence in spite of the human? In spite of equality and the politics of grieving? Perhaps violence is the kind of work that enables some to remain alive long enough to contemplate violence’s in/evitability or to break its stronghold on our imaginations. Perhaps it is what enables us to feel the sensations in our fingers and toes. Love might follow violence – if the person who strikes harms themselves as well as the ‘other’ in the action, the ‘other’ does not strike back without knowing what is at stake. Perhaps they strike back so they may survive long enough to end the cycle.

Sharpe’s words rang clear as Europe and America erupted in riots following the murder of George Floyd and the Minneapolis Third Precinct Police station was burnt to the ground by protesters on 28 May 2020. Months later, the world watched again as members of the Nigerian army murdered at least twelve citizens protesting police brutality as part of the #ENDSARS movement at Lekki Toll Gate on 20 October 2020. ‘It is precisely because we can destroy that we are under an obligation to know why we ought not to do it,’ Butler wrote in their book published the same year. There is still much to be reconciled in their work, chief among them the emotions conjured by their insistence on avoiding destruction in retaliation even as the world reduces us to ashes. The violence of the oppressed may be theorised as misguided, futile and self-defeating, but at the very least it is material – enacted in response to dominant force, action that respects what Elsa Dorhlin calls ‘the government of the body,’¹⁰
a recognition of the need, as June Jordan argues, to ‘become a menace to [one’s] enemies.’¹¹ Can the same be said of the moral and ethical obligation towards non-violence?

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That year, 2020, produced its own ethico-political bind. We watched as, across the world, police cars went up in flames, people protested en masse, using any and all means possible to say ‘no more.’ Protesters were kidnapped and dragged into unmarked cars. Mainstream publications turned their attention towards the concept of abolition with curiosity and disgust. A global pandemic, ushered in and strengthened by multiple governments’ callous disdain for the most vulnerable, began the slow process of killing more than 3.4 million people. Considering these events, one key point in Butler’s text rises above all else: relationality outweighs the false promise of the bounded self offered by neoliberalism. Our social bonds change everything. ‘No one is born an individual … we were all, regardless of our viewpoints, born into a condition of radical dependency,’¹² they claim. Indeed. What, by virtue of that dependency, did we owe to each other then and what do we owe each other four years later? What would it mean to operate as if affirming life were a precondition of existence? How could a society divorced from the concept of the individual change our understanding of love, care, desire?

In 2020, protesters took to the street demanding the abolition of the police. As Tobi Haslett writes, ‘Too much was born and broken amid the smoke and screams. The least we can do is remember.’¹³ If we are to take the abolitionist promise sowed in those moments seriously, we meet with Butler again and agree that if our social relationships, our radical dependency, is all we have, then we are obliged to preserve and extend them by any means necessary. Abolition, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, is a political project that seeks to abolish the conditions under which prison became the answer to social problems. Gilmore recognises that criminalisation and the affective vengeance it conjures act as a proxy in societies in which basic needs are not met by the state and that, crucially, ‘Freedom is the object of history.’¹⁴ Abolitionists believe that it is possible, through emancipatory forms of social organisation – building access to aid, housing, multiple forms of welfare through the state, community self-governance and much more – to separate organised violence (prisons and policing as technologies of control) from organised abandonment (the state’s displacement of the responsibility to meet its citizens needs to NGOs and charities). They argue that, instead of treating violence as an inevitability and conceptualising justice through revenge, banishing those who perpetrate harm, we might examine the root causes of violence to identify the reasons for the state’s failure to meet basic needs, attempting to rectify harm without disappearing people into the prison system. Abolitionists recognise that we need one another to survive because we are and always have been enmeshed. Butler’s critique of the individual guides us to this point: there is no self in isolation. We are marked by our experience of each other’s presence. It is incumbent on us to reject drives towards expulsion, containment and essentialist notions of the character of human nature. Much like a defence of violent resistance, abolition requires an examination of the conditions under which certain violence takes place. If we hold commitments and dreams to end harm, we must account for those who perpetrate it without banishment. The scope of our concern must extend beyond ‘I,’ the individual person we imagine exists in isolation, towards that ‘other’ that we imagine is separate from us. Abolition is premised on the necessity of recognising that fictionalised ‘other’ who harms us and whom we seek to harm in return through carcerality is part of a collective body to which we both belong.

Carceral logics tell us that those who are convicted of crimes deserve what comes to them. Our own innocence is affirmed by this premise. This frame allows us to distance ourselves from those in prison, helping to construct a legitimate threshold of innocence that can be weaponised against ‘evil wrongdoers.’ The year 2020 taught many that if ‘justice’ is synonymous with arrest, we capitulate to the same structures (policing, prisons, detention) that ensure loss of life. Jackie Wang in Carceral Capitalism turns her body against innocence, the logic that carcerality depends on. In the murderous myth that is the criminal legal system, arrest and prosecution of the perpetrator require a pure victim. In order to mobilise around someone’s death, their past must be scrubbed clean: any victim’s deviation from innocence voids the contract that defines the parameters of our care following their murder, state sanctioned or otherwise. Anybody who knows the names and stories of Mark Duggan or Chris Kaba understands how this metric operates. Wang refuses the morbidity of this contract: ‘When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that requires passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead Black boy to make its point.’¹⁵ What abolition seeks to do, by making a material case for a green and red revolution that would free up land and resources, smudge out the border, give a new name to abundance through welfare and deconstruct those modes of social organisation that seek to siphon us off and isolate us, is demonstrate that harm can only be rectified when life is affirmed. There is no justice after the fact.

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If the self is in fact constitutive of these ‘others,’ then abolition is also a call to recognise how we have become responsible for one another, a process neoliberalism tries its best to prevent. Liberal humanism falsely elevates the emancipatory promise of human being as expressed through the rights-bearing subject but betrays us again and again by alienating us from the vulnerable. In the UK, no other figure captures this betrayal more than the migrant that drowns between nations. A symbol of sickly virtue or parasitic leeching, the migrant, the person who is defined by their movement, has become the phantasmagoric enemy of the fascistic right wing. Shanice McBean and Aviah Day write that in the UK, ‘competition for crumbs created by spending cuts, dwindling council housing, as well as increasingly precarious and low paid work … created the material conditions ripe for the construction of a new enemy within.’¹⁶ An overemphasis on the rights-bearing subject rather than the collective body gives way to what Gilmore calls ‘the doctrine of least eligibility,’ a scarcity logic that engulfs political subjects, producing and reproducing the feeling that there is not enough to go around. In the UK, over two decades of devastating austerity measures, rising infant mortality rates, harsher border sentences and increased surveillance under the guise of ‘counter-terror’ demonstrate how this scarcity logic, a precursor to social restriction, has nestled itself into the body politic. Against this, abolition calls on us to recognise, eternally, our inseparability. This inseparability is not only related to those who wish to harm us, it is also related to ‘the enemy within,’ the vulnerable who are mischaracterised as a threat. Analysing the operation of racism and other modes of differentiated vulnerability as they inhere in the social world makes clear what a relationality that does not foreclose violent action on each other’s behalf can offer to our multipronged methodologies for resistance.

Even beyond a binarised logic, if we begin to think sideways and in circles, we always end up back with one another, the non-rational intensities that flow between us, those forces that precede language, the emotion of even feeling can powerfully determine the grounds of possibility. Relation is sticky connectedness – it’s rubbing up against those who will keep you safe and those who want to kill you.
Our dependence needn’t be mischaracterised as burdensome, that we need each other for everything from care, shelter and food to the provision of the emotional and psychological materials that make the world habitable speaks to the most glorious aspects of living. We have organised our social relations around these logics. If we proceed as if no one is disposable, then we must grapple with the idea that systematically disappearing those who harm us via the police and prison system is, as Butler argues, an attack on the collective self. Unlike Butler’s advocation of non-violence however, an abolitionist vision is not at odds with the use of resistant and revolutionary violence; instead, it recognises precisely how everyday life is shaped by violent absences and seeks to remedy those gaps in ways that emphasises the agency of political subjects, affirming their presence and their duty to resist against the state that produces the conditions of violence, rather than each other.

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‘I’ve felt impelled to understand the world through lots of political and analytical frameworks – I’ve felt I really need to understand Marxism, imperialism and anti-imperialism, feminism, post-structuralism and all of these things, right across the board. But everything I’ve done to try and grasp this complexity and every framework I’ve tried to think through – in the end, it’s all because I’ve been trying to understand my mum … what it means to be a gendered subject in a particular nation-state formation.’¹⁷

Gail Lewis reflects on the relationship between one’s political work and one’s experiences in the world in Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah’s Revolutionary Feminisms, a collection of conversations with radical scholars about their feminist practice and collective action. She opens up a space for us to think about the possibilities of relation. Her scholarly work, which is attuned to the consequences of social formations and their influence on social policy, is contoured by personal reflection and an understanding of Black feminism as what she calls ‘a project of ethical relation.’¹⁸ To begin with, understanding one’s own mother as a means of examining connection is to truly grapple with ideas of ‘community’, ‘care’ or ‘collectivity’ which exist as necessary components of any transformation of social life. Perhaps this is feminism’s greatest gift: the idea that lived experience should not be wielded as a totality but understood as a sensuous arena of emotional resonance that inflects materialist analysis and action, changing its shape. In her more recent work, Lewis instructs us to think about the passage of time and the creation of ‘fault lines’ that produce generational divides. She writes, ‘what is the relationship between a preceding generation of activist/scholars and those of the subsequent generations who take up the baton, if not one of proprietorial birthing and authority? How can this relation be conceived and practiced outside of the unquestioned logics of heteropatriarchal kinship?’ Following Lewis, perhaps the act of trying to understand one’s mother or identifying the political legacy to which one belongs is an attempt to solidify radical interdependency, to know more of one another as a means of strengthening collectivity. As political demands develop, we steal from the past and make better or bastardise but we do so with the aim of extending the political traditions based on cooperation and mutual aid for mutual benefit, ensuring that nobody is sacrificed to the election, the border, the surveillance apparatus.¹⁹

Perhaps violence for the sake of the other – violence to clear a space to think about non-violence and other world-making potentialities is how we demonstrate what is owed in lieu of what is. If one’s political work is by necessity an exploration of those around them, if all our grasping and reaching for dignified existence is done in the service of others, we gesture towards a politics that acknowledges our intertwined fates. Perhaps to understand the value of a life, one must create the conditions that enable us to defend it and then to flourish. Isn’t this the most imaginative task of all? Isn’t the real ethico-political bind the tussle between what is and what could be? Philosophy’s task in this struggle is to clear the way for a reassessment of who and what we are by interpreting the routes we can use to free ourselves. But the point is, as Marx notes, to change the world.²⁰ Philosophy must work in the service of abundance. Abundance means an exploration of the ways we might prosper versus merely surviving. How do we intend to change a world that venerates the myth of the individual, a world that could orchestrate the deaths of those trapped by poverty in the UK’s Grenfell Tower, detain human beings like cattle at the border, conceive of public health policy using eugenics, kill people slowly by withholding social welfare benefits, condemn the Palestinian and Sudanese people to die via disease, starvation and military obliteration, and imprison those seeking asylum on a floating prison in a port on the English coast? Perhaps revolutionary violence can help wake us up to the urgent necessity to answer such questions. Facing this world requires an unshakeable belief in interdependence as a bond. Such a bond requires commitment to doing what is necessary on each other’s behalf, violently resisting what imperils us in order to reconstitute a social body that would enable all of us to breathe again.

This piece contains line excerpts from Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, an experimental, creative non-fiction book by the contributor.

1. Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-political Bind, London New York: Verso, 2020.
2. Nicholas Manning and Lauren Berlant, ‘Intensity is a Signal, Not a Truth’: An Interview with Lauren Berlant,’ Revue française d’études américaines, vol.154, no.1, pp.113–20.
3. Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence, op. cit.
4. Hesham Shafick, ‘Book Review: The Force of Non-violence by Judith Butler,’ London School of Economics Blog, April 6, 2020.
5. Elsa Dorlin, Self-defense: A Philosophy of Violence (trans. Kieran Aarons), London: Verso, 2022.
6. Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence, op. cit.
7. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974.
8. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
9. Joy James, ‘Captive Maternal Contradictions: The Limits of Advocacy when Black Women Save Democracy,’ Lecture, Cambridge University Gender Studies Department, Cambridge,
   25 January 2020. 
10. Elsa Dorlin, Self-Defense, op. cit.
11. Poem: ‘I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies,’ 1976. Papers of June Jordan, 1936–2002, MC 513, 64.13, box 64, Cambridge, MA: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.
12. Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence, op. cit.
13. Tobi Haslett, ‘Magic Actions,’ n+1, no.40, 2021.
14. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (ed. Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano), London: Verso, 2022.
15. Jackie Wang, ‘Against Innocence: Race, Gender and the Politics of Safety,’ LIES Journal, vol.1, 2012.
16. Aviah Day and Shanice McBean, Abolition Revolution, London: Pluto Press, 2022.
17. Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah (eds), Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought, London: Verso Books, 2020.
18. Gail Lewis, ‘Once More With My Sistren: Black Feminism and the Challenge of Object Use,’ Feminist Review, vol.126, no.1, pp.1–18, 2020.
19. Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, London: Hajar Press, 2021.
20. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ German Ideology, 1963, New York, NY: International Publishers.