Ep. 236: Judith Butler Interview: “The Force of Nonviolence”

0:13 Mark: Our question for episode 236 is something like, how can we best understand a political ethic of nonviolence? And we're talking with Judith Butler today about her new book, the Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, whose calm presence here today is thanks entirely to my. My rage murdering superego. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Pac. Sorry, I'm so nervous.

0:39 Wes: You gonna say Seth Pacifist, and.

0:41 Seth: No, no, no, no. I was not gonna say Seth Pacifist. I'm just so nervous right now. This is Seth Pacifist.

0:46 Judith: Well, there's no reason to be nervous.

0:49 Seth: Yes, you say that.

0:50 Judith: Yes, I do.

0:51 Seth: Trying to practice broad grievability in Austin, Texas.

0:57 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:59 Mark: And welcome, Judith.

1:01 Judith: Yes, thank you. I'm glad to be here.

1:03 Mark: So I wanted to maybe start us off here, Judith, talking about what kind of inquiry this is that you might think that in a book about nonviolence we'd be talking a lot about Gandhi, about Martin Luther King. There's a little reference to Gandhi, but for the most part, this is not about the practice of nonviolence. It's about sort of the theoretical apparatus of nonviolence, which you claim is something that practitioners should have. Right. They'll kind of maybe do it wrong if they don't think about these theoretical issues beforehand.

1:28 Judith: I don't know if that's exactly right. I wouldn't call it a theoretical apparatus. And I'm not speaking down to practitioners, I suppose. I am a practitioner. And in fact, in my experience, people who are practicing nonviolence in social movements are also reading, and people who are reading are also practicing nonviolence in their world. So maybe the relationship between a theoretical inquiry and a social movement practice is not as distinct as we usually take it to be. Indeed. I mean, if you think back to Gandhi, people were reading Gandhi and they were marching with him or Martin Luther King as well.

I consider him to be a thinker who had a philosophy of nonviolence, and that was in his public speeches. It wasn't written in a philosophical treatise, but it certainly was a set of ideas that were circulated in public and that were at the center of, I would say, public philosophical conversation.

2:32 Mark: I guess there's the practical problem, though, in practicing nonviolence, which is sort of how far do you go right if people are aggressively attacking to you? Most people say to make some sort of exception for self defense, right? You should be nonviolent, you should never start anything. But if somebody is actively, especially not just hurting you because maybe you're willing to take that burden, but hurting someone you care about, right, you're stepping in to protect the defenseless. That seems to be the exception that you want to make. And I know in this book you point to how there's actually a theoretical problem with that, right?

That if you say self defense, you're assuming that you know what self is and you're assuming that you know what violence is. And both those things you're saying are problematic in different ways. Do we want to kind of give the broad outline of that before we get into details?

3:17 Judith: I think there are two issues here. One has to do with the fact that in philosophical conversations when we discuss nonviolence, we usually immediately take the point of view of the individual, like what would I do in this or that situation? And I am trying to suggest that we should shift the framework for thinking about non violence from individualism to social theory and to conception of ourselves as fundamentally tied to other human beings. Now, that was in fact Martin Luther King's view. He thought we were globally interdependent. So in that sense, I suppose I indirectly draw from him.

But the example of self defense, the second issue you raise, is an important one. And there I certainly understand that if someone attacks me, I will defend myself. If someone attacks someone I love, I will intervene. There's no question about that. The question I have, however, is why is it that I intervene on my own behalf or I intervene on the behalf of someone I love or perhaps someone else who's close to me, or perhaps somebody who belongs to the same religion or race or community, But I would never intervene on behalf of some other group of people who I would leave on their own.

In other words, the point I'm trying to make is that we make distinctions all the time about who are the people who are worth intervening on behalf of. And those are demographic assumptions we make when we start to enumerate the exceptions to nonviolence that we would embrace. And I think they're telling. I'm not saying, you know, this is right or wrong. I think they're enormously telling because certain kinds of people belong to our idea of ourself. Oh, I belong to this community or who I am is fundamentally bound up with this group of people or that group of people.

So anybody who attacks that group I will defend. But some other groups that I'm not so identified with, well, I'm not going to defend them. And then we're kind of into what I would call a war logic, where you defend your own people against those who are attacking them, and you let another group of people die or perish or remain undefended. And that seems to describe, you know, forms of nationalism and communitarianism that govern our public world. And I have some concerns about that, because we are then making distinctions between lives that are more valuable and lives that are less valuable, which means we subscribe to a position of social inequality.

I think the way in which we make exceptions to nonviolence tends to point to the way we discriminate among more and less valuable lives. And that's worrisome to me.

6:11 Seth: There's two really interesting things that you just touched on, Judith. The first is the notion that nonviolence isn't necessarily passive. You know, and this comes out in the title of the book, the force of Nonviolence, that there is force and persistence and action. It's an active activity, or can be anyway, in the form of resistance or opposition to violent power. So we want to make sure that we don't have people in the back of their mind thinking that we're talking about some kind of passive activity or turn the other cheek kind of Christian charity.

And we had a similar conversation about the boundaries of obligation, if you will, with Peter Singer. So when he had the 40th anniversary of the life you can save publication he was on, and we had the same conversation about can you feel the same kind of moral obligation, or should you have the same kind of moral obligation to somebody who lives on the other side of the world as you do to the person who lives, you know, next door to you or that's part of your tribe or what have you. That conversation to me was more theoretical in the traditional sense.

We were talking about theoretical ethical obligations versus kind of like a psychological pull that one might have. But when reading your book, I was given to think about these boundaries and how there are other factors that determine what constitutes the realm of self defense. So I live in Texas. I live in the blueberry and the tomato soup, right? I live in Austin. There was a shooting recently in a church, I think, up in North Texas, somewhere around Dallas. And a gunman came in, and then one of the parishioners just happened to be armed and shot the guy dead.

And this notion that that person, by virtue of the circumstance, became a defender of the rest of that community, whether he may have consciously made that choice. I felt like it's weird how the technology of the gun is becoming the locus of what the boundaries of self defense are. If you become ar, essentially become a defender of whoever you happen to be around in this very strange way. And it just, it's kind of tangential. But I just wanted to let you know that your book sort of sprung me off on this thought about the way that technologies and boundaries, because I completely understand your point about demographics and geography, defining those things, but other sorts of things define those spheres as well for us.

8:23 Judith: I think that's true. And you're also pointing out how the media can frame an event like that, and also how people have come to accept certain language for framing an event like that. I mean, let's think about self defense and how it's used in public discourse. President Trump will say that he is defending the nation against invaders by building a wall. And we could understand that as a permutation of a self defense argument. We defend our national self against the other who does not belong to ourself or is not assimilable into this self that we are or share.

And that's a problem. And if we also look inside the law and ask, well, who has traditionally been able to invoke a self defense argument in cases where violence has been inflicted? Well, we see that some people have a self that is worth defending and others are not regarded as having a self that is worth defending. So what troubles me in particular is how often police get to use self defense arguments when they kill unarmed people, mainly black and brown men, but not exclusively. And in that case, self defense seems to work really well. So we might ask, what are the conditions of plausibility or the conditions of persuasion under which a self defense argument works?

And what does that tell us about who has a defensible self and who does not?

9:53 Wes: In the book you point to, this is kind of a, I want to call it a basic epistemological predicament that we're in. We're subject to in a lot of respects, but in this respect, psychologically, it's difficult to know when we are defending ourselves and then, as you point out, when we are. That defense is a matter of paranoia or the projection of our own aggressiveness, seeing that aggression in others and then sort of being preemptively aggressive. I think this is really borne out. So I think in interviews, for instance, of people who have participated in mass atrocities, you hear things like, well, they were going to do that to us.

So we did that first. It was really a matter of self defense or even sociological studies of things like second degree murder. When you start to think about why someone killed someone for the disrespect of taking a French fry off their plate, for instance, then that's a real case and someone feels humiliated and they pick up a gun and kill that person. It's because our concept of self defense includes existential threats to our psychical integrity, so things that humiliate us. And it's very difficult to distinguish narcissistic injury or the threat of narcissistic injury from actual physical violence.

We tend to conflate those two things. So whenever we're asking ourselves questions about whether we're defending ourselves, we're actually. It becomes a very difficult question. The potential for self deception is very high.

11:25 Judith: You put it really well, and I appreciate your formulation. I also think that this question of existential threat is central. I realize that Freud and Klein are not exactly popular figures, but they do prove central to the argument I'm making in this particular book. In part because they give us an account of the externalization of rage, right? What does it mean when we identify a rage coming at us or a violent action coming at us as properly external, as properly coming from someone else, when in fact it is a projection of our own, or it is a projection of our own that intermixes with some anger that may well be coming our way, but which then produces a situation in which we're unable to distinguish between what is emerging from me and what is emerging from the outside?

I mean, Freud says when you're no longer able at the extreme, right, when you're no longer able to make that distinction between inside and outside, you're actually verging on psychosis or have in fact entered it. And those are very serious moments. But now let's ask, what can a psychoanalytic theory that accounts for projection and externalization, what can that do for a social and political analysis or even a Social Security theory that would inform a philosophy of nonviolence? And there I would say, well, look, when police say that, we can imagine any number of scenarios in which someone is running away who happens to be a black male, and the white police person believes that that person is about to turn around and kill the policeman.

Now, it may be that that black body is so invested with violence, in other words, it is seen as a mere vehicle of violence, as a body that is always potentially violent and is always in the incipient stages of acting out of violence. In one way, or another. Right. Once that ideation is built socially and it is a social construction of a certain kind that can take hold in fantasy and be very convincing to the person who shoots. Right. That's self defense according to that person, because that body is always already on the verge of killing that man.

Now, I think that that's an investment of rage in that body. It's also a phantasmagoric transmutation of that body. But it also works in a way as a rationale for killing that gets presented in courts and is sometimes very persuasive to jurors and to judges. And we should worry about that. We should be taking that apart in our public discourse and our public reflection on such matters.

14:18 Mark: So I like how you treat in this book, I wasn't so familiar with the idea of fantasy, which can be spelled with an F if it's conscious or a ph if it's unconscious, with those things being not merely pathological, not merely paranoia, as in the case of some of these you've been describing, but that the reason those pathological options are available is because it's actually an operation of the normal workings of the psyche. And we've talked a lot on this podcast in various, you know, starting years and years ago, when we talked about Hegel's master and slave relationship and then went through Lacan Mirror Stage and numerous other formulations of this idea of the flexible self.

The idea that the Enlightenment view of the self as an atomic Robinson Crusoe, unconnected to everything, is fundamentally false. You know, you could just say, like Aristotle, man is a social animal. But if you want to actually fill out what the psychological mechanisms are by which we point to this and say, that's me, and point to this other thing and say, that's not me. That's not merely a matter of, like I was just describing it, pointing, which sounds like it's some sort of. Well, there's social customs that go into this. No, they're actual psychological mechanisms.

Do you want to say a little more about sort of in general, how this is what I felt like linked the two books, this and gender Trouble that we just covered to together is that they're both talking about what identity is, what identification fundamentally is. Maybe you start as a human. There is no self. It's all socially constructed or existentialist. There is we are nothing but nothingness. Until we sort of build up some transcendent ego, some socially built thing, a set of partially social, partially psychological, a bundle of things that we point out and say, okay, this Body is actually me and my family is extension to me.

You know, that there's that flexible sort of model and that that gives us the tools to talk about things as disparate as gender identifications on one hand and group identifications that would then lead to ethical commitments.

16:12 Judith: In this book, I wouldn't know how to relate it back to gender trouble. It's been 30 years, but I could probably try. I mean, I do think in Gender Trouble, there's a lot of repudiation going on. That's not me. Right. Like a very rigid heterosexual person would just say, well, that's not a possible modality, whatever that gay thing is, whatever that bisexual thing is. And I would in fact die if I were to engage in any of those acts. And then at which point gayness or bisexuality becomes an existential threat to that person. Right. It is figured as an existential threat to that person.

I would rather die to do X and Y. And how does that play out socially? Right. So that's definitely there in gender Trouble, I think, in the force of nonviolence. Well, when we point to others and we say, that's not me, we're also attributing it's not just a referential pointing, like, oh, here I am, indexical. There's another indexical. No, there's an attribution. There's a transfer of attribute that happens at that moment. It's not just a projection, but maybe also a transfer of an attribute that belongs to me to the other. So it can be the vehicle of an externalization as well.

I guess I would say that it's true that my point is not to get rid of phantasmatic elements of the psyche. I don't think I can do that or anyone can do that. But I do think we can learn to handle them better. I wouldn't use the term flexible, although I find it interesting. It seems to derive, I think, from Fordist economics, if I'm not mistaken. The term I would use is relational. And some people who work within a relational notion of the self framework believe that relationality is positive, like that it's just care, or it's a sympathetic disposition or connection with others.

And what I'm drawing from psychoanalysis is the notion that our social bonds do define us. So I believe in a socially relational concept of the self. But those social bonds are fraught, right? They always carry destructive potential. They also carry potential for care and for love and for empathy, but also hatred and murderous impulse. So for me, it's always an ambivalent tie, which is the basis of the moral dilemma we face as social creatures, whether to destroy those bonds or not. We can and we do, or we could choose not to. And I think that's the focus of Freud's discussion with Einstein.

That is what they're asking is that given the destructive potential in social relations, what possibility is there to achieve an international agreement that would minimize violent conflict? And that continues to be an open question for us.

Us.

19:03 Seth: Is that where the notion of intolerable dependency comes along? I very much appreciated your critique, let's call it of social contract theory and how you looked at the state of nature and the idea that the individual in the state of nature already comes sort of fully formed as a male, you know, that has natural rights. And. And how an alternative imagining or foundational myth could be that we focus on the dependency of being born and having a mother and needing to be taken care of. And it feels like that you explore the notion of intolerable dependency later.

And is that dependency, the theme that kind of carries through all of the social relations ultimately, and that you think is powering it, essentially is the motive engine that makes all of the social relations fraught, so to speak, with this notion of it can be caring, but it can also be destructive or violent. And that if we didn't have dependency in the relation, it would be a very different sort of thing. It feels to me like that's a critical element.

19:58 Mark: Yeah. Can I just add to that, which is, Yeah, I did find it hard to see how, say, the xenophobic rejection of immigrants that that is because we ourselves are related to and rely on the immigrants. And that bond is fraught with potential hostility. It seems like that's a related phenomena, but it's not exactly that that's going on.

20:18 Judith: That's right. Maybe we need to see that one a different way. Maybe what we could say is that when migrants knock at the door of Europe or at the southern border of the US they are appealing to international conventions governing migration and asylum and asking their northern neighbors to honor those obligations and process their claims and give them a chance to enter. And they are depending. They are relying on those conventions and agreements that have always allowed those who are less enfranchised or who are fearing for their lives or living under violent conditions or war conditions or unmanageable poverty to seek to migrate to better their situation or to escape from persecution.

So the dependency goes the other way. They are in some sense dependent on the north for escape and for passage and for mobility. And the question for the north, if I can speak that way, is whether we honor those obligations or not. Or whether we deny their dependency on us. Now, we. I mean, if we look at the U.S. the U.S. has depended on Latin America for its natural resources, for its cheap labor. We have. Our exportation of neoliberalism to Chile and to other regions in the south was precisely to be able to make use of their natural resources and their labor in order to keep ourselves prosperous.

And I think we could see other kinds of relations of domination, if not colonialism on the part of Europe in relationship to its southern neighbors. And so we are interconnected. Most of those interrelations have been hierarchical or subordinating or unequal. But they have involved ways of managing interconnectedness or interdependency. Now, interdependency as equality is an ideal. It's rarely materialized. It's rarely actualized. But what I'm trying to suggest is that we deny our interconnectedness at our own peril. And what we should be working towards is an idea of global interdependency.

Which would then serve as the basis of our obligations to one another. And I think that would move us towards a notion of social equality that is the basis, quite frankly, of a serious notion of nonviolence. That wouldn't just be relying on individual actions or individual reflections on whether or not to commit a violent act, but would actually commit whole regions, institutions and countries to nonviolent interdependency. But, yes, it's hard. I mean, the idea of intolerable dependency is there. I mean, the state of California has been dependent on migrant workers for decades, and most of them undocumented.

Many of our major industries could not function without undocumented laborers. And I'm sure Texas is very similar. So the question is, do we or do we not allow that dependency? And what do we make of that? It's not a dependency in the sense of a love relationship. But it is nevertheless there as an economic dependency on that labor. At the same time that we subordinate or exclude or impose monolingualism on. Or seek to sometimes impose monolingualism on our community. It's a really bad way of handling that dependency, in my view.

23:54 Mark: I've just been trying to figure out how literally to take the metaphor of what you talk about in Melanie Klein as our attitude towards ourselves. And we've, in fact, covered Mourning and Melancholia and had a episode on suicide. So we've introduced some of these notions in past episodes that if you are, for instance, angry with yourself, In a suicidal rage. It might be because we made some sort of melancholic identification. You know, somebody has your parent or whatever, somebody's angered you in the past. And instead of actually talking to that person about it, you.

You internalize. You make that person a little part of yourself. And when you have suicidal thoughts, you're raging, like against that psychoanalytic object, that part of yourself that really was inherited from the other person. So we got a. Just a model with that of a multiplicity. And so Melanie Klein, and the way that you account for her thinking in the book, talks about this in terms of even just the relationship between parent and child. That there's, as you say, within love, there is a dependence that then involves a rage because, you know, the mother is not always there.

She's going to go away, or just the fact that she could go away, or the child imagines then horrible things he or she could have done to the mother. And that gives rise to guilt, which you're then acting out. So there's all this fraught thing in love, in personal love relationships. And so the idea there is we are tying interdependency with rage. Okay, well, now, on the social level, you've talked about interdependency with us in Latin American countries, it seems to stretch the analogy to me to say that then we might have rage about that interdependency, as you say, we might choose not to honor it, not to recognize it.

Recognizing it would give a foundation for ethics.

25:38 Wes: We're talking about a kind of a basic way of operating psychologically that is transferred onto other situations. So it doesn't have to be the case that we're in a specific relationship to immigrants to have this mode of thinking apply. And then in the case of mourning and melancholia, the identification. So this is an early theory which sets the foundation for identification and the superego and ultimately for object relations. But one aspect of this internalization of an object, which. Which you are disappointed, which will become the bad object and leads to self berating, is that you are maintaining a tie to a certain kind of ideal object and to you maintain that tie unconsciously and refuse to mourn it and acknowledge it, refuse to move into what Melanie Klein called the depressive position and acknowledge one's own vulnerability, acknowledge that the object has its own interiority, basically to reach the position of empathy.

So in the case of international relations, what's important is that we identify with the various groups, including the nation. And so the thought of an invulnerable Nation without obligations. The thought of being able to identify with that power and the idea that it's self subsistent allows us to enact the fantasy of, or it helps us along with the fantasy of, of our own independence and lack of dependency. And this is something to which we are all psychologically prone. Moving into this fantasy in which we don't depend on anyone and we don't need anything from anyone, and that we don't have to meet demands that other people make.

Does that make sense? I think it's through this link of identification that you could see that dynamic playing out at a larger level. Even if you're not engaged in a specific love relation with immigrants.

27:33 Judith: Yes. Thank you. I mean, I think this is a rich discussion and we could go down several directions. I think there's a difference, for instance, between Freud and Klein. And I do think Klein focuses on dependency. She focuses less on the superego than on the notion of aggression, which she takes to be a drive. And there are many ways of parsing these differences which we can't fully do under these conditions. But I would say on the question of identification that Freud of course dealt with the problem of group identification in his work on mass psychology.

And that is an important work because it also shows us how groups identify with one another, how they build bonds of solidarity, sometimes through the positing of an enemy and through differentiating themselves from that enemy and even seeking to kill that enemy or perhaps their sovereign, their father figure. There's a great deal to be said about the political philosophy that is embedded in Freud's notion of group psychology. I think it pertains to the fundamental question of what kind of society does a political order depend upon? What do social bonds have to be like in order for a political structure, organization, state, mode of governance to function?

And one answer to that is that, well, there must be sufficiently secure bonds. That is to say, bonds must persist over time such that people are not killing each other constantly or overthrowing the state in a rageful rebellion, because that would obviously destroy the social order and the political order both. And yet those bonds can't be secured simply by hating others or externalizing an enemy. There has to be a way of working through the aggression, the destructiveness that is part of the social bond itself, which is part of the ambivalent structure of the social bond.

So whereas you're absolutely right to say that, look, Klein is talking about a mother and a child and the process of individuation by which a child seeks to establish independence separate from the parent. And that there's a certain kind of rage or even murderous impulse involved in that separation. And to talk about xenophobia, which is being stoked by our present administration. But they both involve hatred, and they both involve trying to secure a sense of self through the expulsion of another. Either an expulsion from life murder, or an expulsion across the border.

Which secures the group identification on this side of the border. I do think group psychology mediates between the Kleinian dyad, as it were, and a broader political analysis of hatred. But what I would say is that from the intimate relation of Mother Child to the broader international relations, we have to deal with the ambivalence and the potential for destructiveness that is in all social bonds. Which is why understanding those bonds as free of conflict as some pacifists seek to do would be naive and actually dangerous. Because we wouldn't be able to work through in any way that aggression and that potential for destruction.

Similarly, if we were like pure Hobbesians and we thought, yeah, destruction is what it's all about. I'm just an individual out for myself, or I'm part of a group that's going to go to war. And my war, like bellicosity, is the foundation of my being. It's the fundamental I enter the world. Then we would be kind of not understanding the relational character of the self. We would be going back to a kind of aggressive form of individualism that would be a problem. You know, many people think that the problem with vulnerability, you know, when we talk about vulnerable groups, for instance, we think that the task is to alleviate such groups of their vulnerability.

But sometimes what is assumed is that invulnerability is the normal, or invulnerability is the aim, or that's the goal of life. We should all become invulnerable. And that is not a model of the self and not a model of society that I think works at all. I think we actually need to be able to live our vulnerability freely. I mean, the problem with somebody who is designated as part of a vulnerable group, say, according to the United nations or humanitarian law, is that that person cannot live their vulnerability freely and without fe. And I think we want a world in which we can do that.

We don't want a world in which we all go back to the model of being an invulnerable individual. I think that's a masculinist model and a very dangerous one on its own, taken on its own terms.

32:38 Seth: You have a very nice illustration, alternative illustration, I think, of this point in your critique of both Kant and the consequentialist moralities. And what I really liked about it was you point out that the mechanism by which you would follow the Kantian model to will that your act be universal, or, you know, that your will be universal, as well as looking at the consequentialist views where you would take a look at what the ultimate outcomes of your actions would be and you would try to calculate, all require you to use your imagination and essentially put yourself in the other's place.

I was thinking back to when we were talking about. We've, you know, read Smith and Hume on moral sentiment and the. The need for the imagination. And, you know, essentially what you're saying is that in order to function in those systems, you have to be able to. Which seem to assume an individual who's acting and willing is that you have to actually be able to put yourself into the place of the other individual and think about what would it be to have this done to me versus be the one who's doing. And that, in a sense, subverts the whole notion that you are an individual standing alone, that it implies social relationality.

But then you have a really nice move too, where you say, and what's interesting about that is it's not. Not necessary that you would make that move and then think, okay, well, because the outcome will be bad or have bad consequences, I shouldn't do it. In fact, I should preempt. You can take an aggressive stance on that information. And so you could say, just like Wes was talking about before, I better destroy the other person before they have a chance to destroy me. Not I shouldn't do it because they might do it. And that, I think very clearly, without the notion of mother and child.

And getting into the psychoanalytic theory makes the same point about both the requirement of social relationality but also the ambivalence that's there.

34:24 Judith: I think we all engage, or at least I certainly engage in deliberate acts of imagining a world I would like to see or like to live in. So I do think we engage in those deliberate forms of imagining. And many philosophical positions do ask us almost immediately to enter into a hypothetical. And they depend upon the imagination in some ways. At the same time, we have to ask, what's the relationship between the imagination that we control and the dimensions of fantasy that are invaded by the unconscious or maybe even orchestrated fantasy, daydreams, dreams, many of which call upon social elements, including fear, anxiety, and hatred. So some of our reasoning capacities that rely on the imagination don't always know how to distinguish what is being deliberately and clearly imagined from what is being orchestrated by phantasmatic structures that are more or less unconscious.

35:27 Wes: I thought I'd bring up an example of fantasy with a ph to sort of get at what you're talking about. And I would recommend for listeners if they want to learn more about this. Susan Isaacs' the Nature and Function of Phantasy is a very good starting point. Fantasy is a mechanism for transference. So when we think we're engaged in a certain kind of mental activity, we might be also symbolically engaged in some other form of unconscious mental activity. So Freud's famous example is of a child throwing a reel attached to a string into a crib, which is draped so that the reel is hidden when it goes into it and saying basically gone when it's not visible, and then pulling it out again and being very excited and saying there or now it's here.

Sort of like a variation on the Peek a Boo game. And this child did the same thing in the mirror, kind of crouching down, can't see himself gone, and then reappearing here or there. That was interpreted as having something to do with a grandiose or a defense called omnipotence of thought, where the child is fantasizing that he has control over the appearance and disappearance of the mother. So this was a kid who was very compliant and very well trained so that he could be alone in his room without crying, made very few demands on the mother. And so in context, in the context of a lot of data, because this may sound far fetched, it's actually a very reasonable interpretation.

That game is an enacted. It becomes a fantasy for some other layer of meaning. And we do this all the time in our daily lives. You know, if I'm shopping for a new couch and I'm caressing the soft leather and I have associations between having a new couch and being, say, for some reason, youth and vitality need more context to explain that example. That's a real case. But the soft leather becomes also skin. So at some unconscious level of fantasy, and the way that translates politically is that we may think that we are looking out, for instance, for the good of our people when it comes to immigration.

Or we may think that we're engaged in an act of self defense when we're shooting someone, or in many other cases, which are not so extreme, many of our other thoughts and behaviors. But it's possible that we are doing something else symbolically and that we're driven by the need to do that. And so we have to take that into account, especially in our political thinking, which is very susceptible to that. Is that a good way to describe it?

38:02 Judith: I think it's an interesting way to describe it. It's interesting. If you may know, I was in Brazil right before Bolsonaro was elected and there was a rather large demonstration against me by right wing Christian groups who thought I represented the concept of gender, or what they call the ideology of gender. And, you know, they portrayed me as a devil and as a demon and thought I should be run out of town if not burnt in effigy. And they did in fact burn my likeness in effigy, which was, you know, an astonishing thing to happen. And they were kind of recalling witchcraft and doing all kinds of slightly crazy things, screaming about pedophilia.

Because somehow gender, if you were free to decide your gender or register as a different gender, or live your gender outside of conventional norms, apparently that means you would be free to do anything, including, you know, have sex with animals and children, because the freedom would be radically unconstrained by any biblical law. So there was quite a fantasy going on there, drawing from, you know, medieval and I mean, even more recent bits of history there regarding witch burning, but also transphobia and other elements. But the entire history of demonization, we might say, is a history of transmitted social and political fantasy that can get invoked at various times.

I think the anti Semitic attacks against George Soros could be analyzed that way. I mean, the things that are said, it's astonishing how they can kind of come up again and again. We think they're gone as fantasies of the Jew, but then there they are once again. So, you know, I do think fantasy operates at a social, political level in ways that we don't always know how to think about. Which is why I wish more people who are psychoanalytically informed or trained would enter into public discourse to show why this is a useful way to think. Of course, you know, it always raises the question of, well, isn't psychoanalysis focused on a dyadic situation, thinking back on parent, child relations, or a dyadic scene with.

Within the psychoanalytic office? But it's not always. I mean, Freud himself had a theory of culture. He himself reflected on war. And if Freud could reflect on war, we can certainly reflect on xenophobia. I guess the other thing I would want to say in that Fort/Da game that you describe from beyond the Pleasure Principle, it's a really important example because at that moment in Freud's theory, he's breaking out Of a former framework, he thought, we repeat things because we're driven by the desire for fulfillment, that wish fulfillment is the explanation of repetition.

We haven't yet gotten what we want, or we haven't recovered some early experience of pleasure, but we keep trying. And our repetitive activities, even the ones that seem very unintelligible to us, are just different ways of trying to get a satisfaction or a wish fulfilled. And at the time that he started to think about compulsive repetition in beyond the pleasure principle, 1920, it was also immediately after the First World War War, and he was seeing patients and various people in the world who were suffering from trauma, from war trauma, and they were experiencing nightmares that every night the same one or similar ones that were hideous forms of suffering.

And he had to admit, you know, there's no wish fulfillment in these dreams. This is not primarily about wish fulfillment. Something else is here. There's a destructive potential that's repeating in this psyche. And that, in a way, was his first reflection on war, as far as I can tell. And it's important to think about that, that people are to some degree traumatized. And what they repeat and what they spew out may not actually give them pleasure, or there might be some pleasure in it, but the dominant effect is actually hatred and destruction.

And it leads one to ask, well, what's the history out of which this is coming? And what are the true existential threat that people are suffering in the situation in Brazil that I was telling you about, I mean, those people, many people, have lost their jobs. They're increasingly precarious. The way in which the economy has turned out is quite terrible for many people. They do feel that the fundament of their lives is threatened by something. And we can think about climate change as another such threat. But to say, oh, gender, that's what's threatening our existence.

That's going to threaten the existence of men and women and the heterosexual family and civilization as we know it and belief in God and everything. That struck me as a kind of condensation and displacement, to use Freudian language, of a lived existential threat for which they had no good vocabulary. Which is not to say that gender isn't a threatening concept. Apparently it is, you know, much more than I would have thought, given all the gender mainstreaming that has happened and all the advertisements that now play with gender happily and all that.

But in certain parts of the world, and certainly in the US as well, gender is a very threatening category. But asking about that existential threat is important. What are people actually experiencing in their world. And what is the increased level of precarity and poverty and fear in the world that then kind of takes hold and decides, oh, it's the migrant, it's the gay person, it's the concept of. Of gender, it's the black person. How do those concepts congeal under those conditions? I think it's worth thinking about.

43:53 Mark: Well, that's great. We were able to loop back around to bring the gender stuff in at the end here. Well, can we use this to focus in on, as a sort of a final word from you on the critique of individualism that runs throughout here, that we see this in two different ways? We talked about from the beginning that there's this Hobbesian over simplistic atomic view of the self, that. That really all of continental philosophy is arguing against this. This will not be anything new. And we've shown some of the mechanisms of that with the psychoanalytic talk.

And the fact that identification, you know, what is the self, that could involve any number of internalized psychoanalytic objects. Or by acknowledging reciprocity, you sort of say, part of me is out there as well. You know, it's a complex phenomenology with this. But the other part of it was just, and we've alluded to this, a criticism of the way people in philosophy classes at least do ethics, that the paradigm case is really phenomenological. Right. I, as an individual, I'm sitting here, I'm faced with various choices, and I maybe make some notes, make some calculations, do some evaluations.

Maybe I gauge in some fantasy extension, like in the categorical imperative we were talking about. In any case, it's me as an individual, you know, of course, once you do that, then you could say, now I've determined what's right or wrong for me to pursue. What control do I have over the rest of the people If I'm in a position of power, Maybe I should advocate for this as a political view. But it definitely. The political sort of comes second. But part of your critique of individualism was know that there's something right in the initial ethical moment.

That if you think that you're doing it as an individual, that there's something naive about that, that there has to be. The political has to be built in right from the start. Can you say a little more about that?

45:30 Judith: I mean, it's interesting as you're speaking, I'm thinking, well, starting with the individual. When, under what conditions is the individual the methodological point of departure for moral reflection on conduct? And I think individualism was a political philosophy. C.B. Macpherson has written quite a bit about it. But so too have feminist thinkers Joan Tronto and Martha Fineman and psychoanalytic thinkers like Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin. So there's a history to be told about how the individual got set up as a methodological point of departure.

So there's a prehistory to the beginning, as it were. But we don't actually think about that. We just begin where we are, which means we're beginning in an historical moment in which political individualism has settled into a methodology in various disciplines, even though other disciplines have been trying to take that apart for some time. And you're right to say a lot of continental philosophy, including phenomenology, in a different sense, has been trying to do that for a long time. I don't know if I would say it's naive. I would say it's not reflective about its own beginnings.

Right. And I think philosophy should be looking at the presuppositions that it makes. It should be an inquiry into the presuppositions of our thinking and of our acting. So that political history is some part of that presupposition. We should be looking at that as well. I think that the basic idea is when. If I start as an I, a single person, and I ask, you know, what ought I to do to this other, or in relation to this other, who I perceive as threatening me or I perceive as an intolerable obstacle to my desires? I am describing something that people experience, and in a language that is very familiar.

But what if I ask, am I related to this person I'm contemplating doing harm to? And. And is that relationship actually part of who I am? In other words, perhaps I am not just this individual, but I am also this social relation that connects me to this person who I wish to do away with. And what am I doing not only to the other, but to myself if I break that bond, right? If I don't honor a certain obligation to that person, I break the bond between us? And what if I myself am that bond? Or what if the meaning of my life, of who I am and the other is.

Has to do not with our separate and distinct characteristics, although those certainly exist, but the bond by which we are related to one another? And I think that shifts the question. I'm asking a different question then. I'm asking, who are we? I'm moving from what do I do? To who am I in relation to this other? And do we form a kind of strange we. We're not we may not even know each other's name, but we are nevertheless bound to each other and on the earth. And I take this, I think, in part from Hannah Arendt. I think she really. She did understand something of this in her idea of plurality.

You know, when she accused Eichmann of not understanding that he didn't have the right to decide with whom he was going to cohabitate the earth, he didn't have that right. This cohabitation is given, and he didn't have the right to do away with one part of the population. That. That cohabitation is an originary obligation of a certain kind. If we thought that way, I think we would think very differently about ethics.

49:13 Seth: I'm glad you brought that up, because this is kind of one of the at least key points I wanted to touch on. I have a key one that I want to touch on, that I feel we should touch on, and one that I want to. But you kind of capture that in the notion of. Of equality that you say, essentially the theme of the book is that nonviolence is about equality, but equality arising from social relations as opposed to inhering in the individual subject as a right. And I mean, I think that kind of summarizes that. And this notion that as long as we are conceiving of our actions towards others in terms of rights as subjects, we're going to be caught in that logic of inequality.

And that a true radical reconsideration of equality that recognizes social relations. But more important, the interdependency that we talked about earlier, that comes from those social relations. And I feel very, very sympathetic to that point of view. It's hard because we don't have a framework. We don't have, you know, a fantasy, I guess, or a fantastic kind of framework. It's hard to reimagine that. But I get a little bit of that from Levinas, which you mention at one point in the book. But more importantly, I think the strongest notion that you put out there for us to consider this is what you call grievability.

There's a couple things about that that I'll just close with because it's very meaningful to me. The first is you mentioned that grievability is actually. It's a characteristic of the living and not the dead. We think of grieving the dead, but you use it to mention somebody who would be worth grieving, whose loss would count for something. And I'm Jewish. The process of grieving in Judaism is very formal and structured, I guess you could say. But most Importantly, it's social, it's communal. And I feel very strongly that we have lost. We continue to move further and further away from an ability to grieve as individuals.

The institutions, the social institutions that existed and particularly coming out of religious traditions, but in other ways too, of the proper form of grieving and how that brings people together to. In a social inaction. I think it's a really powerful mechanism and that there's really something to be explored here about our inability to grieve, but also how that cuts us off from a certain recognition of social relationships that you're trying to point out here that would be very beneficial.

51:34 Judith: Well, you know, if I can make a joke, I mean. I mean, I think psychoanalysis, this also accompanied that moment in the secularization of Judaism where we lost the Kaddish, we lost the social gathering for grief, where everybody had to go into an individual psychotherapy to figure out what kind of unacknowledged grief were they living with. And they had to do it with this one other person. But I do believe that we suffer. I mean, melancholy is the term that Freud used way back. But we do suffer when our losses are not openly and publicly grieved.

And, you know, I think that was also in gender trouble, the sense I had at the time that so many gay people who were losing their lovers, either to illness or in other ways, were not getting proper public recognition. Families didn't accept that their kid was gay. So if you lost your lover to AIDS or something else, your family couldn't say, wow, that must be difficult. Do you need some help? We extend our condolences. Because they never accepted that you were gay and they never accepted that you lost anything. So it was a kind of double negation that many people experienced.

And I think they formed new bonds of kinship. I think of the gay men's health crisis in the late 80s and 90s, this forming an alternative kinship for care and for grieving. You had a public that gathered to grieve. And many of the important public art projects of the time, including the famous quilt, were also efforts. Radical public grieving. But you raise another question, which is the question of, well, what does it mean to feel that your life is grievable? I think it means that you have a tacit understanding that if you were to die or if you were to be lost in some other way, that people would miss you and that it would matter and that there would be something significant, your life, that is lost.

But how many people actually go through the day feeling that they will not be mourned or that their lives are not marked as valuable lives. So when we talk about grievability, if you're living in a town where you're drinking toxic water, you're being treated as ungrievable, right? You can die from that, Admiral. We don't care. If you're living in a war zone and there is no hope for you, you are also being targeted or treated as ungrievable because if you were lost, it would not matter and it would not leave a mark and it would not be intolerable to anyone.

That's a way of feeling that one's life lacks value and certainly lacks equal value. So one way in which I want to rethink social equality and social inequality is to ask who's grievable and who's not. Who's treated as if their life matters and if it were lost, it would be grieved, and who's treated as if their life is no life or would not be grieved or does not even have to be marked as a life or as a loss. That's a way of bringing a psychoanalytic idea of mourning and melancholy, I suppose, into a broader question of social inequality. But I think, yes, we have to ask who is more or less grievable not inherently, but treated that way by policies, by governments, by immigration practices?

Are the people at the border being treated as if those. They are grievable lives? And I say, for the most part, no.

55:08 Mark: Well, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate you delving into some of these. Obviously, there are many other issues in this. I'll admit that I got a little lost in the book, just in the thesis that we started of why is nonviolence problematic? Well, because as we've said that it. The definition of violence is not clear, which we didn't cover this time. In fact, in our next episode, we're going to cover Walter Benjamin's critique of violence. So we'll circle back on what you had to say about that. That's one hole in the discussion we had today.

The other part was just I hope we've made clear that why this whole grievability thing is relevant to nonviolence, because we're saying that nonviolence is not just a matter of I'm just going to sit back and pay attention to my own business and I'm not hurting you, therefore I'm being nonviolent. Like that seems, from an individualistic point of view, that's what nonviolence is. But you're trying to say by all this talk of interdependence that no, actually nonviolence requires an acknowledgement of these connections and about the ambivalence that is involved in any such connections.

We talked about being resentful about interdependence, but there's lots of other ways conflict can come up. The inherent in the social bond is a certain amount of. Of friction. And nonviolence means being aware of that, being sensitive to that and stopping short

56:25 Wes: channeling that aggression into nonviolent resistance as opposed to a violent act.

56:30 Judith: We didn't get to talk about it, but I do think there are ways of crafting aggression and even giving nonviolent form to murderous impulse. That's another discussion. If I could add one thing. First of all, I've really enjoyed this conversation and I thank you for your engagement. It's just great. It's really very satisfying and I hope I made things better rather than worse. But I also just wanted to say this, that, you know, gender trouble gave rise to the idea that, oh, this is all individualism. We can just each do as we want. We could be whatever gender we want all ideas to proliferate genders and live in a multiply gendered world.

And I was a little surprised by the fact that it was considered a tract in individual freedom. At least some people say that, because I really was trying to make the argument that social norms produce the scene in which we then find our way with gender. So there was a social dimension of subject formation that was very important to the thesis. But it did get lost, I think, in the more popular public appropriation. So it was meaningful to me to be able to lay out a more explicit critique of individualism in the force of nonviolence in the hopes that that might inflect the reading of the former work as well.

57:51 Seth: Certainly has for us.

57:52 Judith: Okay, excellent.

57:54 Mark: Our closing song today is Dancing with Death. It's by a group called Noctorum, whose leader, Marty Willson-Piper, is better known for his 30 years in the band the Church. I interviewed Marty about this song for Nakedly Examined Music number 111. You can find that at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Good night, listeners.

58:10 Wes: Good night.

58:11 Seth: Good night.

58:13 Judith: SA.

Dreams where there's no answers at least that's what it seems Unless you invent inconvenient pipe dream to hang all your hopes on it's surely an obscene excuse so you can rule above the rest like you're the kind I don't recognize the claim I don't know you all I see is all the pain nothing to find you're cover these clim the bloody sh. I just see the world and the miracle of love the power of music comes from other not from above can justify this madness so how about working on a solution to sadness that's causing all the depth of innocence around the world far up every that you learned in the classroom I could call questions were all sp then passing on

1:00:27 Seth: and

1:00:27 Judith: truth with no song and I'll sing love. Con stupid gaming that I will lose a different voice and different ears while I'm not scared to take my chances filling you with threats and fears rivers flow of blood and tears you can leave me here I'll be safer here you can trust me to make up my own mind Sam. I don't need your finance all your mansions in the sky I can't see the bridge between the house and the helpless the coldness of winter the plight of the homeless stranded when you get locked in the corridors of baby I can tell you something now if I don't fall I'll always keep running up with my. Life.