27 quotes
Nonviolence is not an absolute principle, but an open-ended struggle with violence and its countervailing forces.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
Lives matter in the sense that they assume physical form within the sphere of appearance; lives matter because they are to be valued equally.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
We must fight those who are committed to destruction, without replicating their destructiveness. Understanding how to fight in this way is the task and the bind of a nonviolent ethics and politics.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
Nonviolence does not necessarily emerge from a pacific or calm part of the soul. Very often it is an expression of rage, indignation, and aggression.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary (1993)
Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
Peace is a resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war.
There is no practice of nonviolence that does not negotiate fundamental ethical and political ambiguities, which means that “nonviolence” is not an absolute principle, but the name of an ongoing struggle.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.
There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
When the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.
If nonviolence is to make sense as an ethical and political position, it cannot simply repress aggression or do away with its reality; rather, nonviolence emerges as a meaningful concept precisely when destruction is most likely or seems most certain.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
We are not yet speaking about equality if we have not yet spoken about equal grievability, or the equal attribution of grievability. Grievability is a defining feature of equality. Those whose grievability is not assumed are those who suffer inequality—unequal value.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
Preserving seeks to secure the life that already is; safeguarding secures and reproduces the conditions of becoming, of living, of futurity, where the content of that life, that living, can be neither prescribed nor predicted, and where self-determination emerges as a potential.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
To affirm equality is to affirm a cohabitation defined in part by an interdependency that takes the edge off the individual boundaries of the body, or that works that edge for its social and political potential.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
We do not have to love one another to be obligated to build a world in which all lives are sustainable. The right to persist can only be understood as a social right, as the subjective instance of a social and global obligation we bear toward one another.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
To subdue destruction is one of the most important affirmations of which we are capable in this world. It is the affirmation of this life, bound up with yours, and with the realm of the living: an affirmation caught up with a potential for destruction and its countervailing force.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.