Butler on (Non)violence, Affect and Ethics: Renewing Pedagogies for Nonviolence in Social Justice Education

Abstract

This paper complements pedagogical efforts of foregrounding nonviolence on inner reflexive work with approaches that highlight notions of nonviolence as both subjective and collective resistance to the norms and structures of social injustice and violence. It is argued that Butler’s theorization of affect, ethics and (non)violence can serve as a productive entry point into enriching our understandings of ethical and political responses to violence in the context of social justice education, especially in renewing pedagogies for nonviolence. In particular, Butler’s construal of nonviolence as enmeshed with ethics and affect is noteworthy in social justice education for two important reasons: first, it highlights how the ethical and the political are intertwined, just as violence and nonviolence are entangled, hence theorizing nonviolence in social justice education is founded in the claim that we are all from the beginning enmeshed in both resistance and complicity. Second, Butler’s understanding of nonviolence as an interruption or suspension of norms that are taken for granted emphasizes the need to take into consideration how affective relations may be mobilized in social justice education not only on the basis of ethical appeals but also on political terms.

Notes

1 If one considers, for example, the role of state-sanctioned violence in the context of the United States and the deep entanglement of violence, not only as inter-personal and direct, but also as structural and systemic, then one recognizes how dismantling such conditions is not (only) a matter of the individual. Police brutality, the criminal justice system, violence attributed to poverty, and the military are just some out of many forms of state-sanctioned violence against the body that cannot be overcome by simply focusing on nonviolence as reflexive responsibility. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this clarification.

2 In acknowledgment of the protests emerging today in the context of Black Lives Matter, it is important to recognize that Butler’s ideas on nonviolence intersect with Black liberation and other understandings of nonviolence by individuals such as Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. These understandings are very much connected with Butler’s (2009) interest in how “frames” serve to affectively product and regulate societal norms on whose life is more worthy and how vulnerability invokes ethical responsibility to the other. I am also indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for recommending that I make this connection.

3 The classroom setting could be a secondary school or a higher education setting, depending on students’ maturity and background experiences, local political sensitivities etc.