16 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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
One reason an egalitarian approach to the value of life is important is that it draws from ideals of radical democracy at the same time that it enters into ethical considerations about how best to practice nonviolence. The institutional life of violence will not be brought down by a prohibition, but only by a counter-institutional ethos and practice.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
The state monopolizes violence by calling its critics “violent”. [...] Hence, we should be wary about those who claim that violence is necessary to curb or check violence; those who praise the forces of law, including the police and the prisons, as the final arbiters. To oppose violence is to understand that violence does not always take the form of the blow.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
The ethical stand of nonviolence has to be linked to a commitment to radical equality. And more specifically, the practice of nonviolence requires an opposition to biopolitical forms of racism and war logics that regularly distinguish lives worth safeguarding from those that are not—populations conceived as collateral damage, or as obstructions to policy and military aims.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)
Nonviolence has now to be understood less as a moral position adopted by individuals in relation to a field of possible action than as a social and political practice undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction coupled with a commitment to world building that honors global interdependency of the kind that embodies ideals of economic, social, and political freedom and equality.
The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020)