Читать книгу The Force of Nonviolence - Judith Butler - Страница 9

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Nonviolence, Grievability, and the Critique of Individualism

Let us begin with the proposition that nonviolence becomes an ethical issue within the force field of violence itself. Nonviolence is perhaps best described as a practice of resistance that becomes possible, if not mandatory, precisely at the moment when doing violence seems most justified and obvious. In this way, it can be understood as a practice that not only stops a violent act, or a violent process, but requires a form of sustained action, sometimes aggressively pursued. So, one suggestion I will make is that we can think of nonviolence not simply as the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence, but as a sustained commitment, even a way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom. My first suggestion is that what Albert Einstein called “militant pacifism” might be rethought as aggressive nonviolence.¹ That will involve rethinking the relation between aggression and violence, since the two are not the same. My second suggestion is that nonviolence does not make sense without a commitment to equality. The reason why nonviolence requires a commitment to equality can best be understood by considering that in this world some lives are more clearly valued than others, and that this inequality implies that certain lives will be more tenaciously defended than others. If one opposes the violence done to human lives—or, indeed, to other living beings—this presumes that it is because those lives are valuable. Our opposition affirms those lives as valuable. If they were to be lost as a result of violence, that loss would be registered as a loss only because those lives were affirmed as having a living value, and that, in turn, means we regard those lives as worthy of grief.

And yet, in this world, as we know, lives are not equally valued; their claim against being injured or killed is not always registered. And one reason for this is that their lives are not considered worthy of grief, or grievable. The reasons for this are many, and they include racism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia, misogyny, and the systemic disregard for the poor and the dispossessed. We live, in a daily way, with knowledge of nameless groups of people abandoned to death, on the borders of countries with closed borders, in the Mediterranean Sea, in countries where poverty and lack of access to food and health care has become overwhelming. If we seek to understand what nonviolence means now, in this world in which we live, we have to know the modalities of violence to be opposed, but we must also return to a fundamental set of questions that belong to our time: What makes a life valuable? What accounts for the unequal ways that lives are valued? And how might we begin to formulate an egalitarian imaginary that would become part of our practice of nonviolence—a practice of resistance, both vigilant and hopeful?

In this chapter, I turn to the problem of individualism in order to foreground the importance of social bonds and interdependency for understanding a non-individualist account of equality. And I will seek to link this idea of interdependency with nonviolence. In the following chapter, I will begin by asking about the resources of moral philosophy for developing a reflective practice of nonviolence, and I will suggest that socially imbued fantasies enter into our moral reasoning on nonviolence such that we cannot always identify the demographic assumptions we make about lives that are worth valuing, and those that are considered relatively or absolutely worthless. That second chapter moves from Immanuel Kant to Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. In the third chapter, I will consider the ethics and politics of nonviolence in light of contemporary forms of racism and social policy, suggesting that Frantz Fanon gives us a way to understand racial phantasms that informs the ethical dimension of biopolitics, and that Walter Benjamin’s idea of an open-ended civil technique of conflict resolution (Technik ziviler Übereinkunft) gives us some way to think about living with and through conflictual relations without violent conclusions. To that end, I will suggest that aggression is a component part of social bonds based on interdependency, but that how aggression is crafted makes the difference for a practice that resists violence and that imagines a new future of social equality. The imagination—and what is imaginable—will turn out to be crucial for thinking through this argument because we are at this moment ethically obliged and incited to think beyond what are treated as the realistic limits of the possible.

Some representatives of the history of liberal political thought would have us believe that we emerge into this social and political world from a state of nature. And in that state of nature, we are already, for some reason, individuals, and we are in conflict with one another. We are not given to understand how we became individuated, nor are we told precisely why conflict is the first of our passionate relations, rather than dependency or attachment. The Hobbesian view, which has been the most influential in shaping our understanding of political contracts, tells us that one individual wants what another has, or that both individuals lay claim to the same territory, and that they fight with one another to pursue their selfish aims and to establish their personal right to property, to nature, and to social dominance. Of course, the state of nature was always a fiction, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau openly conceded, but it has been a powerful fiction, a mode of imagining that becomes possible under conditions of what Karl Marx called “political economy.” It functions in many ways: for instance, it gives us a counterfactual condition by which to assess our contemporary situation; and it offers a point of view, in the way that science fiction does, from which to see the specificity and contingency of the political organization of space and time, of passions and interests, in the present. Writing on Rousseau, literary critic Jean Starobinski opined that the state of nature provides an imaginary framework in which there is only one individual in the scene: self-sufficient, without dependency, saturated in self-love yet without any need for another.² Indeed, where there are no other persons to speak of, there is no problem of equality; but once other living human creatures enter the scene, the problem of equality and conflict immediately emerges. Why is that the case?

Marx criticized that part of the state of nature hypothesis that posits the individual as primary. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he ridiculed, with great irony, the notion that in the beginning humans are, like Robinson Crusoe, alone on an island, providing for their own sustenance, living without dependency on others, without systems of labor, and without any common organization of political and economic life. Marx writes: “Let us not put ourselves in that fictitious primordial state like a political economist trying to clarify things. It merely pushes the issue into a gray, misty distance … We proceed from a present fact of political economy.”³ Marx thought he could discard fiction in favor of present fact, but that did not stop him from making use of those very fictions to develop his critique of political economy. They do not represent reality, but if we know how to read such fictions, they yield a commentary on present reality that we otherwise might not achieve. One enters the fiction in order to discern the structure, but also to ask: What can and cannot be figured here? What can be imagined, and through what terms?

For instance, that lonely and self-sufficient figure of Robinson Crusoe was invariably an adult and a man, the first figure of the “natural man”—the one whose self-sufficiency is eventually interrupted by the demands of social and economic life, but not as a consequence of his natural condition. Indeed, when others enter the scene, conflict begins—or so the story goes. So, in the beginning (temporally considered) and most fundamentally (ontologically considered), individuals pursue their selfish interests, they clash and fight, but conflict becomes arbitrated only in the midst of a regulated sociality, since each individual would presumably, prior to entering the social contract, seek to pursue and satisfy his wants, regardless of their effect on others and without any expectation of resolution, without resolving those competing or clashing desires. The contract thus emerges, according to this fiction, first and foremost as a means of conflict resolution. Each individual must restrict his desires, put limits on his capacity to consume, to take, and to act, in order to live according to commonly binding laws. For Hobbes, those laws become the “common power” by which human nature is restrained. The state of nature was not exactly an ideal, and Hobbes did not call for a “return” to that state (as Rousseau sometimes did), for he imagined that lives would be cut short, that murder would be unrestrained if there were no common government and no binding set of laws to subdue the conflictual character of human nature. The state of nature was for him a war, but not a war among states or existing authorities. Rather, it was a war waged by one sovereign individual against another—a war, we might add, of individuals who regarded themselves as sovereign. For it is unclear whether that sovereignty belonged to an individual conceived of as separate from the state, who transferred his own sovereignty to the state, or if the state was already operating as the implicit horizon of this imaginary. The political-theological concept of sovereignty precedes and conditions the attribution or suspension of sovereign status to the individual, that is, it produces, through that conferral, the figure of the sovereign subject.

Let us be clear: the state of nature differs among Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes, and even within Hobbes’s Leviathan, there are arguably at least five versions.⁴ The state of nature can postulate a time before society; it can seek to describe foreign civilizations that are assumed to be premodern; it can offer a political psychology that accounts for civil strife; it can describe political power dynamics within seventeenth-century Europe. I am not exactly conducting a scholarly review, but I do want to consider how the state of nature becomes the occasion for a certain kind of imagining, if not a fantasy or what Rousseau calls “a pure fiction,” then one that is centrally concerned with violent conflict and its resolution.⁵ As such, we can ask: Under what historical conditions do such fictions or fantasies take hold? They become possible and persuasive from within a condition of social conflict or as a consequence of its history; they represent, perhaps, the dream of an escape from the sufferings associated with the capitalist organization of work, or they function as a justification for that very organization. These imaginings articulate, and comment upon, the arguments for strengthening state power and its instruments of violence to cultivate or contain the popular will; they emerge in our understanding of populism, the condition in which the popular will is imagined to assume an unconstrained form or to rebel against established structures; they encode and reproduce forms of domination and exploitation that set classes and religious or racial groups against one another, as if “tribalism” were a primitive or natural condition that rears up and explodes if states fail to exercise restraining powers—that is, if states fail to impose their own violence, including legal violence.

In the course of this text, we will distinguish between fantasy, understood as a conscious wish that can be individual or shared, and phantasy, which has an unconscious dimension and often operates according to a syntax that requires interpretation. The daydream can hover on the border between the conscious and unconscious, but Phantasy, as developed first by Susan Isaacs (1948) and elaborated by Melanie Klein, tends to include a complex unconscious set of relations to objects. Unconscious fantasy became one basis for the Lacanian notion of the imaginary, designating unconscious tendencies that take form as images and that pull us apart or in different directions, and against which narcissistic defenses are erected. In Laplanche, fantasy is defined somewhat differently and in two distinct ways: first, as an “imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfillment of a wish (in the last analysis, an unconscious wish) in a manner that is distorted to a greater or lesser extent by defensive processes”;⁶ secondly, in his discussion of “Fantasme” he makes clear that we are not confronting a distinction between imagination and reality, but a structuring psychic modality by which reality itself is invariably interpreted. Thus, he proposes a reformulation of psychoanalytic doctrine with the idea of “original fantasy” (what Freud called “Urphantasien”), which structures modes of perceiving, and operates according to its own syntactical rules. Thus, the original phantasy takes form as a scene with multiple actors disposed by vectors of desire and aggression. This last notion allows us to consider what is happening in “the state of nature” considered not only as a fiction or a conscious fantasy, but as a phantasmatic scene structured by multiple occluded determinants. In the following, I seek to reserve “fantasy” for most of the scenes of violence and defense that I consider, but in relation to Klein, where the term “phantasy” maintains a distinctly unconscious dimension, I reserve that spelling. I use the terms “phantasmatic” and “phantasmagoric” to consider the interplay of socially shared, or communicable, unconscious and conscious fantasies that take the form of a scene but do not for that reason presuppose a collective unconscious.

If we understand the state of nature as a fiction or, rather, a phantasy (and the two are not the same, as we shall see), then what set of wishes or desires does it represent or articulate? I suggest that these wishes belong neither simply to the individual nor to an autonomous psychic life, but maintain a critical relation to the social and economic condition upon which they comment. This relation can function as an inverted picture, a critical commentary, a justification, or, indeed, a ruthless critique. What is posited as an origin or an original condition is retrospectively imagined, and so posited as the result of a sequence that begins in the already-constituted social world. And yet, there is a yearning to posit a foundation, an imaginary origin, as a way to account for this world, or perhaps to escape its pain and alienation. This train of thought could easily lead us down a psychoanalytic path if we were to take seriously the idea that unconscious forms of phantasy function as a foundation for human psychic life in relation to its social world. This may well be true. However, my desire is not to replace fantasy with reality, but to learn how to read such a fantasy as yielding key insights into the structure and dynamic of historically constituted organizations of power and violence as they relate to life and to death. Indeed, I myself will not be able to offer a critical rejoinder to this notion of a “man without needs” at the origin of social life without engaging a conjecture of my own: one that does not start with me, but takes me up into its terms, articulating, as it were, the syntax of the social through a different imaginary.

One rather remarkable feature of this state of nature fantasy, which is regularly invoked as a “foundation,” is that, in the beginning, apparently, there is a man and he is an adult and he is on his own, self-sufficient. So let’s take notice that this story begins not at the origin, but in the middle of a history that is not about to be told: with the opening moment of the story, that is, with the moment that marks the beginning, gender, for instance, has already been decided. Independence and dependency have been separated, and masculine and feminine are determined, in part, in relation to this distribution of dependency. The primary and founding figure of the human is masculine. That comes as no surprise; masculinity is defined by its lack of dependency (and that is not exactly news, but it continues somehow to be quite startling). But what does seem interesting, and it is as true for Hobbes as it is for Marx, is that the human is from the start an adult.

In other words, the individual who is introduced to us as the first moment of the human, the outbreak of the human onto the world, is posited as if he was never a child; as if he was never provided for, never depended upon parents or kinship relations, or upon social institutions, in order to survive and grow and (presumably) learn. That individual has already been cast as a gender, but not by a social assignment; rather, it is because he is an individual—and the social form of the individual is masculine in this scene—that he is a man. So, if we wish to understand this fantasy, we have to ask what version of the human and what version of gender it represents, and what occlusions are required for that representation to work. Dependency is, as it were, written out of the picture of the original man; he is somehow, and from the start, always and already upright, capable, without ever having been supported by others, without having held onto another’s body in order to steady himself, without ever having been fed when he could not feed himself, without ever having been wrapped in a blanket for warmth by someone else.⁷ He sprang, lucky guy, from the imaginations of liberal theorists as a full adult, without relations, but equipped with anger and desire, sometimes capable of a happiness or self-sufficiency that depended on a natural world preemptively void of other people. Shall we then concede that an annihilation has taken place prior to the narrated scene, that an annihilation inaugurates the scene: everyone else is excluded, negated, and from the start? Is this perhaps an inaugural violence? It is not a tabula rasa, but a slate wiped clean. But so too is the prehistory of the so-called state of nature. Since the state of nature is supposed to be, in one of its most influential variants, a prehistory of social and economic life, the annihilation of alterity constitutes the prehistory of this prehistory, suggesting that we are not only elaborating a fantasy, but giving a history of that very fantasy—arguably, a murder that leaves no trace.

The social contract, as many feminist theorists have argued, is already a sexual contract.⁸ But, even before women enter the picture, there is only this individual man. There is somewhere a woman in the scene, but she does not take form as a figure. We cannot even fault the representation of women in the scene, because she is unrepresentable. An expulsion of some sort has taken place, and within that vacated place is erected the adult man. He is assumed to desire women in the course of things, but even this postulated heterosexuality is free of dependency and rests on a cultivated amnesia regarding its formation. He is understood to encounter others first in a conflictual way.

Why bother with this influential phantasmatic scene in political theory? After all, my topic is the ethics and politics of nonviolence. I am not actually going to argue against the primary character of conflictual relations. In fact, I will insist that conflict is a potential part of every social bond, and that Hobbes is not altogether wrong. Indeed, Freud harbors a Hobbesian thesis when he challenges the biblical commandment to honor thy neighbor and not covet his wife; for why, Freud asks, should we not assume that enmity and hostility are more fundamental than love? My thesis, which will arrive a bit later, is that 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. When destruction becomes the ardent aim of desire but is nevertheless checked, what accounts for that check, that imposition of a limit and displacement? From where does it come, and what lets it take hold and be maintained? Some would say that the check is always a form of self-checking—that it is the superego that checks the externalization of aggression, even as “the super-ego” is the name we have for the process of absorbing aggression into the architecture of the psyche. The economy of the super-ego is a moralism whereby aggression unleashes itself against itself in an intensifying double bind that weighs down upon the psychic life that bears this recursive structure of self-negation. It denounces violence, and that denunciation becomes a new form of violence in the course of things. Others would say that this check on violence can only be applied from the outside, by law, by government, even the police; that is the more properly Hobbesian view. In this view, the coercive power of the state is necessary to contain the potentially murderous rage of its unruly subjects. Others claim that there is a calm or pacific region of the soul, and that we must cultivate the capacity to dwell always there, subduing aggression and destructiveness through religious or ethical practices or rituals. But, as I noted, Einstein argued in favor of a “militant pacifism,” and perhaps now we can ourselves talk about an aggressive form of nonviolence. To understand this, I propose that we think first about an ethics of nonviolence that presupposes forms of dependency, and interdependency, that are unmanageable or that become the source of conflict and aggression. Second, I propose that we consider how our understanding of equality relates to the ethics and politics of nonviolence. For that connection to make sense, we would have to admit into our idea of political equality the equal grievability of lives. For only a departure from a presumptive individualism will let us understand the possibility of an aggressive nonviolence: one that emerges in the midst of conflict, one that takes hold in the force field of violence itself. That means such an equality is not simply the equality of individuals with one another, but a concept that first becomes thinkable once a critique of individualism is waged.

Dependency and Obligation

Let us, then, try a different story. It begins this way: every individual emerges in the course of the process of individuation. No one is born an individual; if someone becomes an individual over time, he or she does not escape the fundamental conditions of dependency in the course of that process. That condition cannot be escaped by way of time. We were all, regardless of our political viewpoints in the present, born into a condition of radical dependency. As we reflect back on that condition as adults, perhaps we are slightly insulted or alarmed, or perhaps we dismiss the thought. Perhaps someone with a strong sense of individual self-sufficiency will indeed be offended by the fact that there was a time when one could not feed oneself or could not stand on one’s own. I want to suggest, however, that no one actually stands on one’s own; strictly speaking, no one feeds oneself. Disability studies has shown us that in order to move along the street, there must be pavement that allows for movement, especially if one only moves with a chair or with an instrument for support.⁹ But the pavement is also an instrument for support, as are the traffic lights and the curb stops. It is not only those who are disabled who require support in order to move, to be fed, or indeed, to breathe. All of these basic human capacities are supported in one way or another. No one moves or breathes or finds food who is not supported by a world that provides an environment built for passage, that prepares and distributes food so that it makes its way to our mouths, a world that sustains the environment that makes possible air of a quality that we can breathe.

Dependency can be defined partly as a reliance on social and material structures and on the environment, for the latter, too, makes life possible. But regardless of our quarrels with psychoanalysis—and what is psychoanalysis but a theory and practice with which people quarrel—perhaps we can say that we do not overcome the dependency of infancy when we become adults. That does not mean that the adult is dependent in the exact same way that the infant is, but only that we have become creatures who constantly imagine a self-sufficiency, only to find that image of ourselves undermined repeatedly in the course of life. This is, of course, a Lacanian position, articulated most famously by the “mirror stage”—the jubilant boy who thinks he stands on his own as he looks in the mirror, and yet, watching him, we know that the mother, or some obscured object-support (trotte-bébé), holds him in front of the mirror as he rejoices in his radical self-sufficiency.¹⁰ Perhaps we can say that the founding conceits of liberal individualism are a kind of mirror stage, that they take place within an imaginary of this kind. What support, what dependency, has to be disavowed for the fantasy of self-sufficiency to take hold, for the story to start with a timeless adult masculinity?

The implication of this scene, of course, is that it would seem that masculinity is identified with a phantasmatic self-sufficiency, while femininity is identified with the support she provides, a support regularly disavowed. This picture and story lock us into an economy of gender relations that hardly serves us. Heterosexuality becomes the presumptive frame, and it is derived from the theory of mother and child, which is but one way of imagining the relations of support for the child. The gendered structure of the family is taken for granted, including, of course, the obscuring of the mother’s labor of care and the full absence of the father. And if we accept all this as the symbolic structure of things rather than merely a specific imaginary, we accept the operation of a law that can only be changed in incremental fashion and over a very long time. The theory that describes this fantasy, this asymmetry, and this gendered division of labor can end up reproducing and validating its terms, unless it shows us another way out, unless it asks about the scene prior to, or outside of, the scene—the moment, as it were, before the beginning.

Let us now move from dependency to interdependency, and ask how that alters our understanding of vulnerability, of conflict, adulthood, sociality, violence, and politics. I ask this question because, at both a political and an economic level, the facts of global interdependency are denied. Or they are exploited. Of course, advertisements for corporations celebrate a globalized world, but that idea of corporate expansion captures only one sense of globalization. National sovereignty may be waning, and yet new nationalisms insist upon the frame.¹¹ So one reason it is so difficult to convince governments such as that of the United States that global warming is a real threat to the future of the livable world is that their rights to expand production and markets, to exploit nature, to profit, remain centered on the augmentation of a national wealth and power. Perhaps they do not conceive of the possibility that what they do affects all regions of the world, and that what happens in all regions of the world affects the very possibility of the continuation of a livable environment, one on which we all depend. Or perhaps they do know that they are in the midst of a globally destructive activity, and that too seems to them like a right, a power, a prerogative that should be compromised by nothing and no one.

The idea of global obligations that serve all inhabitants of the world, human and animal, is about as far from the neoliberal consecration of individualism as it could be, and yet it is regularly dismissed as naive. So I am summoning my courage to expose my naiveté, my fantasy—my counter-fantasy, if you will. Some people ask, in more or less incredulous tones: “How can you believe in global obligations? That is surely naive.” But, when I ask if they want to live in a world where no one argues for global obligations, they usually say no. I argue that only by avowing this interdependency does it become possible to formulate global obligations, including obligations toward migrants; toward the Roma; those who live in precarious situations, or indeed, those who are subject to occupation and war; those who are subject to institutional and systemic racism; the indigenous whose murder and disappearance never surface fully in the public record; women who are subject to domestic and public violence, and harassment in the workplace; and gender nonconforming people who are exposed to bodily harm, including incarceration and death. I want to suggest, as well, that a new idea of equality can only emerge from a more fully imagined interdependency, an imagining that unfolds in practices and institutions, in new forms of civic and political life. Oddly enough, equality imagined in this way compels us to rethink what we mean by an equality among individuals. Of course, it is good that one person is treated as equal to another. (I am all in favor of anti-discrimination law; don’t get me wrong.) But that formulation, as important as it is, does not tell us by virtue of what set of relationships social and political equality becomes thinkable. It takes the individual person as the unit of analysis and then establishes a comparison. When equality is understood as an individual right (as it is in the right to equal treatment), it is separated from the social obligations we bear toward one another. To formulate equality on the basis of the relations that define our enduring social existence, that define us as social living creatures, is to make a social claim—a collective claim on society, if not a claim to the social as the framework within which our imaginings of equality, freedom, and justice take form and make sense. Whatever claims of equality are then formulated, they emerge from the relations between people, in the name of those relations and those bonds, but not as features of an individual subject.¹² Equality is thus a feature of social relations that depends for its articulation on an increasingly avowed interdependency—letting go of the body as a “unit” in order to understand one’s boundaries as relational and social predicaments: including sources of joy, susceptibility to violence, sensitivity to heat and cold, tentacular yearnings for food, sociality, and sexuality.

I have argued elsewhere that “vulnerability” should not be considered as a subjective state, but rather as a feature of our shared or interdependent lives.¹³ We are never simply vulnerable, but always vulnerable to a situation, a person, a social structure, something upon which we rely and in relation to which we are exposed. Perhaps we can say that we are vulnerable to those environmental and social structures that make our lives possible, and that when they falter, so do we. To be dependent implies vulnerability: one is vulnerable to the social structure upon which one depends, so if the structure fails, one is exposed to a precarious condition. If that is so, we are not talking about my vulnerability or yours, but rather a feature of the relation that binds us to one another and to the larger structures and institutions upon which we depend for the continuation of life. Vulnerability is not exactly the same as dependency. I depend on someone, something, or some condition in order to live. But when that person disappears, or that object is withdrawn, or that social institution falls apart, I am vulnerable to being dispossessed, abandoned, or exposed in ways that may well prove unlivable. The relational understanding of vulnerability shows that we are not altogether separable from the conditions that make our lives possible or impossible. In other words, because we cannot exist liberated from such conditions, we are never fully individuated.

One implication of this view is that the obligations that bind us to one another follow from the condition of interdependency that makes our lives possible but that can also be one condition for exploitation and violence. The political organization of life itself requires that interdependency—and the equality it implies—is acknowledged through policy, institution, civil society, and government. If we accept the proposal that there are, or must be, global obligations—that is to say, obligations that are globally shared and ought to be considered binding—they cannot be reduced to obligations that nation-states have toward one another. They would have to be post-national in character, traversing borders and navigating their terms, since populations at the border or crossing the border (stateless people, refugees) are included in the larger network of interrelationships implied by global obligations.

I have been arguing that the task, as I imagine it, is not to overcome dependency in order to achieve self-sufficiency, but to accept interdependency as a condition of equality. That formulation meets with an immediate and important challenge. After all, there are forms of colonial power that seek to establish the so-called “dependency” of the colonized, and these kinds of arguments seek to make dependency an essential, pathological feature of populations who have been colonized.¹⁴ That deployment of dependency confirms both racism and colonialism; it identifies the cause of a group’s subordination as a psycho-social feature of the group itself. The colonizer, then, as French-Tunisian novelist and essayist Albert Memmi has argued, understands himself as the adult in the scene, the one who can bring a colonized population out of their “childlike” dependency into an enlightened adulthood.¹⁵ We find this figure of the colonized as the child requiring tutelage in Kant’s famous essay “What Is Enlightenment?” But the truth is that the colonizer depends upon the colonized, for when the colonized refuse to remain subordinate, then the colonizer is threatened with the loss of colonial power. On the one hand, it looks good to overcome dependency if one has been made dependent on a colonial structure, or made dependent on an unjust state, or an exploitative marriage. Breaking with those forms of subjection are part of the process of emancipation, of claiming both equality and freedom. But which version of equality do we then accept? And which version of freedom? If we break the ties of dependency in an effort to overcome subjection and exploitation, does that mean that we now value independence? Well, yes, it does. Yet, if that independence is modeled on mastery and so becomes a way of breaking ties with those forms of interdependency that we value, what then follows? If independence returns us to the sovereignty of the individual or of the state in such a way that post-sovereign understandings of cohabitation become unthinkable, then we have returned to a version of self-sufficiency that implies endless conflict. After all, it is only from a renewed and revalued notion of interdependency among regions and hemispheres that we can begin to think about the threat to the environment, the problem of the global slum, systemic racism, the condition of stateless people whose migration is a common global responsibility, even the more thorough overcoming of colonial modes of power. And that we can begin to formulate another view of social solidarity and of nonviolence.

Throughout this book, I move between a psychoanalytic and a social understanding of interdependency, laying the groundwork for a practice of nonviolence within a new egalitarian imaginary. These levels of analysis have to be brought together without assuming the psychoanalytic framework as a model for all social relations. The critique of ego psychology, however, does give a social meaning to psychoanalysis that links it with a broader consideration of the conditions of sustenance and persistence—questions central to any conception of the biopolitical. My counter-thesis to the state of nature hypothesis is that no body can sustain itself on its own. The body is not, and never was, a self-subsisting kind of being, which is but one reason why the metaphysics of substance—which conceives the body as an extended being with discrete boundaries—was never a particularly good frame for understanding what a body is; the body is given over to others in order to persist; it is given over to some other set of hands before it can make use of its own. Does metaphysics have a way to conceptualize this vital paradox? As interpersonal as this relation may sound, it is also socially organized in a broader sense, pointing as it does to the social organization of life. We all start by being given over—a situation both passive and animating. That’s what happens when a child is born: someone gives the child over to someone else. We are, from the start, handled against our will in part because the will is in the process of being formed. Even the infant Oedipus was handed over to that shepherd who was supposed to let him die of exposure on the side of the hill. That was a nearly fatal act, since his mother handed him to someone tasked with arranging to let him die. Being handed over against one’s will is not always a beautiful scene. The infant is given over by someone to someone else, and the caregiver is conventionally understood as given over to the task of care—given over in a way that may not be experienced as an act of deliberate will or choice. Care is not always consensual, and it does not always take the form of a contract: it can be a way of getting wrecked, time and again, by the demands of a wailing and hungry creature. But there is here a larger claim that does not rely on any particular account of the social organization of motherhood or caregiving. Our enduring dependency on social and economic forms of support for life itself is not something we grow out of—it is not a dependency that converts to independence in time. When there is nothing to depend upon, when social structures fail or are withdrawn, then life itself falters or fails: life becomes precarious. That enduring condition may become more poignant in care for children and the elderly, or for those who are physically challenged, but all of us are subject to this condition.