The New Yorker:

In this powerful interview with Butler, from 2020, Masha Gessen focusses on Butler’s critique of individualism and what they see as the potential force of nonviolence.  

By Masha Gessen

Judith Butler holds a peculiar place in contemporary Western culture. Like very few men and perhaps no other woman, Butler is an international celebrity academic. This means that many more people know her name than have read her work—and most of them have an opinion about Butler and her ideas. One might argue that Butler’s influence is immense because some key phrases of hers have become linguistic staples; take, for example, “gender performativity.” On their way into the mainstream, however, these ideas have been simplified and transformed, often beyond recognition.

Butler, who is sixty-three, is best known for her work in gender theory, especially her book “Gender Trouble,” published thirty years ago. Butler has written extensively on other questions of culture, politics, and the psyche, such as hate speech (“Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative,” 1997), the fundamental unknowability of the self (“Giving an Account of Oneself,” 2005), and Jewish ethics and Palestine (“Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” 2012). Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has taught since 1993. She lives in the Bay Area with her partner, the political theorist Wendy Brown.

This month, Verso is publishing Butler’s latest book, “The Force of Nonviolence.” It is a slim volume that makes an outsized argument: that our times, or perhaps all times, call for imagining an entirely new way for humans to live together in the world—a world of what Butler calls “radical equality.” Butler sat down for a conversation with me during a recent visit to New York. The interview has been edited and condensed.

In this new book, you propose not just an argument for nonviolence as a tactic but as an entirely different way of thinking about who we are.

We are used to thinking strategically and instrumentally about questions of violence and nonviolence. I think there is a difference between acting as an individual or a group, deciding, “Nonviolence is the best way to achieve our goal,” and seeking to make a nonviolent world—or a less violent world, which is probably more practical.

I’m not a completely crazy idealist who would say, “There’s no situation in which I would commit an act of violence.” I’m trying to shift the question to “What kind of world is it that we seek to build together?” Some of my friends on the left believe that violent tactics are the way to produce the world they want. They think that the violence falls away when the results they want are realized. But they’ve just issued more violence into the world.

You begin with a critique of individualism “as the basis of ethics and politics alike.” Why is that the starting point?

In my experience, the most powerful argument against violence has been grounded in the notion that, when I do violence to another human being, I also do violence to myself, because my life is bound up with this other life. Most people who are formed within the liberal individualist tradition really understand themselves as bounded creatures who are radically separate from other lives. There are relational perspectives that would challenge that point of departure, and ecological perspectives as well.

Go to link