Normative Violence after 9/11: Rereading the Politics of Gender Trouble

Abstract

Today, both politicians and the media echo the refrain that the world has changed fundamentally since 9/11. This shift involves the tacit sense that the world is more violent, as 9/11 is conceived as an act of pure violence. This article works against the grain of such received wisdom, but not by trying to refute it empirically. Instead, the article articulates and elucidates the latent concept of “normative violence” lodged within the writings of Judith Butler. Normative violence names not a type of violence that is somehow “normative,” but the violence of norms. Further, normative violence should be understood as a primary form of violence, because it both facilitates typical, physical violence and simultaneously renders such violence invisible. The article puts the concept of normative violence to work for two purposes: it rereads the politics of Butler's Gender Trouble and it rethinks our notion of violence after 9/11. The article thereby makes a case for Butler's contribution to political theory while it seeks to make sense of our post-9/11 predicament.

Notes

^*My thanks to Rebecca Brown, Anne Caldwell, Terrell Carver, Lisa Disch, Joseph Peschek, Charles Phillips, Elizabeth Wingrove, and two anonymous reviewers for comments, queries, and criticisms on earlier drafts of this essay. This paper was originally given at the Association for Political Theory conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado, October 2004; I am grateful to my fellow panelists as well as to the audience members (particularly John Nelson) for the productive exchange. This essay was also read in the spring of 2005 by a wonderful group of political theory graduate students at Penn State University; their passion, support, and professionalism are all deeply appreciated, and will not be forgotten. Finally, I thank my colleagues at Swansea University for providing such a supportive and productive environment for intellectual work.

¹ For an example of the last, see Gabriel Kolko, Another Century of War? (New York: New Press, 2002).

² See the Human Security Centre's Human Security Report 2005 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2005).

³ Colin Hay, “Taking Ideas Seriously in Explanatory Political Analysis,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 6:2 (2004), pp. 136–141.

⁴ For an example of such empirical studies, see Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan's International Handbook of Violence Research (Boston and London: Kluwer Academic, 2003), and for a recent entry into the democratic peace debate, see John Keane, Violence and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

⁵ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). All further references to Gender Trouble will be designated by “GT.”

⁶ Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York and London: Verso, 2004).

⁷ For two prominent examples, see Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997) and Butler, Gender Trouble, op. cit.

⁸ On this highly contentious point in Foucault's writing, see Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Donald Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), as well as Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Robert Young (ed., trans.), Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader (London: Routledge, 1981).

⁹ The strongest version of this critique, and the one that has remained viable in the literature over time, comes from Seyla Benhabib, “Subjectivity, Historiography, and Politics,” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 107–126. On this debate, see also Butler's well-known response, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” pp. 35–58, and Nancy Fraser's “moderation” of the debate with her “False Antitheses,” pp. 59–74. (These page numbers refer to the same volume as the Benhabib piece.)

¹⁰ Over the years there have been a number of responses to this line of critique, but if anyone can be said to put this debate to rest it would be Moya Lloyd, who has shown most convincingly that the criticisms simply do not apply to Butler. See Lloyd, Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power & Politics (London: Sage, 2005), p. 137. Compare with Lloyd, “Performativity, Parody, Politics,” Theory, Culture and Society 16:2 (1999), pp. 195–213.

¹¹ Lisa Disch, email to author, October 9, 2004.

¹² Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

¹³ Anne Norton, 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 26.

¹⁴ Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 110.

¹⁵ As will become clear below, I plan to complicate, and to move beyond, this distinction Derrida makes between “originary” and “derivative” violence. But first, a few clarifications are in order. It needs to be stressed that Derrida's sense of originary does not entail a denigration of that which is derivative. Physical violence, “derivative” though it may be, still proves crucially important. Derrida produces a paradoxical temporality: that which appears after turns out to come before. Derrida names arche-writing an “originary” violence precisely so as to call attention to its very existence, but this does not imply a denial of the existence of physical violence. Next, I would suggest the importance of keeping separate and distinct Derrida's twofold distinction between derivative violence and the violence of arche-writing, on the one hand, and the later three-part classification of arche-violence/moral violence/empirical violence, on the other. Elizabeth Wingrove, for example, has critically questioned the idea of locating political violence (both rape and war) at a “tertiary level.” See Elizabeth Wingrove, Rousseau's Republican Romance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 190. Wingrove is right to render problematic the political efficacy of this notion; however, I think she is wrong to attribute it to Derrida. The idea of three levels of violence (and the attendant notion of political violence as “tertiary,” Wingrove's word) comes not from Derrida, but, according to Derrida, from Levi-Strauss. To elaborate: the Derrida quote concerning arche-writing that I produce in the text above appears in a section in which Derrida is generalizing about his understanding of writing. The passages to which Wingrove poses her challenge to the notion of tertiary violence come from within the context of an exceedingly detailed reading of Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques. Derrida himself never proposes nor defends this notion of “tertiary violence” and he does not locate it in Rousseau (Wingrove's topic), but in Levi-Strauss. My sincere thanks to Elizabeth Wingrove for helpful discussions on this point.

¹⁶ Rodolphe Gasché names Derrida's quasi-concepts “infrastructures.” Arche-writing, as an infrastructure, can be considered both the condition of possibility for the speech/writing distinction (that which makes it possible), but also the condition of its impossibility (that which marks its limits). “Infrastructures” are neither words nor concepts, though they look like both (hence my “quasi-concepts”). They are attempts to carry out the work of deconstruction by revealing that the highest, most originary, or final concepts of metaphysics may not be either highest, final, or originary. See Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).

¹⁷ Having now unraveled the paradox of “normative violence,” it seems worth noting that for thinkers less inclined to think juridically (more inclined to read Foucault), normative violence might be more likely to seem redundant than to come across as a contradiction in terms. “Normative violence” would prove to be a redundancy to the extent that all norms inherently contain and, in their own way, wield a certain violence. That is to say, norms are not just common practices, not merely typical or expected behavior; norms contain both the median point on the normal curve and the tails at the edges of the curve. Thus, a norm is not a norm without the marginal, the deviant, the outliers that sustain it. Practices and behaviors that “deviate from the norm” are precisely practices and behaviors that make the norm possible, in that they establish the distance between “the normal” and the abject. In a sense, then, one is never really “outside” the norm. Or, as Butler herself has recently put it: “being outside the norm is in some sense still being defined in relation to it.” Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 42. Thus, one only finds oneself in tension with the norm, in conflict with it. The power relations within norms, relations that affect individuals no matter where they fall on the normal curve (i.e., the power of normalization) wield a certain violence. Norms then are always already “violent” in this way, and normative violence becomes a redundancy. I do not reject this sort of analysis, but this is not a redundancy to be overcome or eschewed; it is to be embraced. Butler, implicitly, and I, explicitly do just that, by putting normative violence to work as a political concept. “Normative violence” sounds redundant to just the extent that it draws attention to the inherent violence of norms, and this is an area, I argue, that demands more attention, both in politics and from political theorists. Most political scientists would see nothing redundant about the concept, and this is why, in the text, I approach normative violence through its apparent paradox of self-contradiction (not through its redundancy). My thanks to John Nelson for productive engagement on this point.

¹⁸ Alison Stone, “Towards a Genealogical Feminism: A Reading of Judith Butler's Political Thought,” Contemporary Political Theory 4 (2005), pp. 4–24.

¹⁹ For Stone's defense of Butler, see particularly p. 2 of “Towards a Genealogical Feminism.” For the critique of Butler as eliminating agency, see Martha Nussbaum, “The Professor of Parody,” The New Republic Online, February 1999, available online at: < http://www.tnr.com/archive/0299/022299/nussbaum022299.htm> (accessed August 5, 2004). For the more modest challenge to Butler on agency, see Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).

²⁰ For this rather radical and highly productive argument, see Diana Coole, “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities,” Political Studies 53 (2005), pp. 124–142.

²¹ See, for example, Fiona Webster, “The Politics of Sex and Gender: Benhabib and Butler Debate Subjectivity,” Hypatia 15:1 (2000), pp. 1–22.

²² This line of critique can also be traced back to Benhabib. See her “Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance,” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 17–34.

²³ For a good example of this critique, see Gail Hawkes, “Dressing-Up: Cross-Dressing and Sexual Dissonance,” Journal of Gender Studies 4:3 (1995), pp. 261–270. For a very strong response, see Lloyd, Beyond Identity Politics.

²⁴ Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). Judith Butler, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 263–280 (this monograph includes essays by Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau, but each essay is single-authored).

²⁵ See John D'Emilio, Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992).

²⁶ The Foucault quotation is from 1975, and it is quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, Trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 265.

²⁷ I seek to articulate this broader project in my Untimely Politics (Edinburgh and New York: Edinburgh and New York University Presses, 2003).

²⁸ For an attempt to make some sense of what Butler calls “the heterosexual matrix” through the terms of heteronormativity and the politics of subversion, see my article, “‘An Incalculable Effect’: Subversions of Heteronormativity,” Political Studies (forthcoming 2007). For Butler's most important encounter with psychoanalysis, see her The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

²⁹ See Nussbaum, “Professor of Parody,” op. cit. Of course, Butler herself provided a response to this line of critique early on, in the form of her book, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

³⁰ Butler, Precarious Life, p. xii. All further references to this book will be designated with the abbreviation “PL.”

³¹ Benhabib, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” op. cit.

³² And finally, to “undo gender”—as suggested in the title of Butler's recent book—is not to do away with the concept and category entirely. The project of undoing gender maintains the goal of reducing the chances of doing gender wrong; it thereby increases the prospects for a livable life. Butler, Undoing Gender, op. cit.

³³ My sincere thanks to Elizabeth Ullrich for pressing me on this point, and thereby helping me to clarify it.