Vol. 23 is a double issue built around sustained philosophical engagement with Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (Verso, 2020). Its origins trace to a September 2021 email in which the editor invited Will Barnes to reach out to scholars who might be interested in contributing. The response exceeded all expectations: by the time the issue went to press in February 2024, four peer-reviewed articles had been assembled under Barnes’s guest editorship, along with a separate symposium on a second book. The issue is dedicated to Anne F. Pomeroy (1958–2023), Professor of Philosophy at Stockton University, whose wide-ranging scholarly commitments — from Critical Social Theory and African American Philosophy to Feminist Theories and Marxism, culminating in her acclaimed Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism — made her an ideal reader of Butler. Pomeroy had been in what Barnes describes as a “veritable Butler zone” when the manuscript arrived, contributing a remarkable four-thousand-word peer review; her partner, Peter Amato, later informed the editorial team that she had been planning a book on Butler at the time of her death. The issue memorializes her life and work by carrying her name on its dedication page.
Barnes’s foreword, “Celebrating and Augmenting Judith Butler’s Vital Contribution,” surveys Butler’s intellectual trajectory from the performativity arguments of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter through The Psychic Life of Power, Precarious Life, and Frames of War, locating The Force of Nonviolence as the point at which Butler takes on the question of violence and nonviolence directly for the first time. The four articles that follow engage that book from complementary angles. Barnes’s own contribution, “A More Skillful Illusion,” navigates tensions between Butler’s poststructuralist and psychoanalytic commitments, arguing that careful navigation of those tensions reveals Butler’s work to be an indispensable but not self-sufficient contribution to the field — one that benefits from supplementation by more “traditional” elements of the nonviolent toolkit: love, morality, and human rights grounded in the integrity and dignity of the individual. Barry L. Gan’s “The Truth of Nonviolence” offers the sharpest critical challenge, beginning with Butler’s association of social-contract theory with a non-relational self. Gan also questions Butler’s grounding of nonviolence in the preservation of life rather than Gandhi’s wider concern for the whole self and all beings. He then questions Butler’s framework of equal grievability as against a concept of function and moral responsibility. Finally, Gan challenges Butler’s claim that violence resists context-independent definition, and their exclusive reliance on a Freudian account of aggression — an overreliance that, Gan argues, occludes the nonviolent remedies to social aggression found in Jane Addams and William James. Capucine Mercier’s “Nonviolence as a Critique of Individualism in Butler and Gandhi” takes a more constructive approach, mapping the convergences between Butler and Gandhi — above all their shared critique of individualism and their questioning of self-defense — and arguing that these convergences demonstrate that any adequate defense of nonviolence must be grounded in interdependency and equality. Mariah Partida’s “Is Judith Butler’s Rejection of Liberal Individualism Compatible with a Relational Understanding of Autonomy?” opens a productive gap in Butler’s argument. Partida contends that Butler’s tendency to sidestep autonomy as a concept is a mistake, and that if autonomy is reconceived through the philosophy of disability as an intersubjective achievement rather than a liberal possession, it becomes indispensable to both the theory of nonviolence and the project of equalizing grievability.
Vol. 23 also features a symposium organized by Graham D. Parsons of the US Military Academy: “The Moral Price of Preparedness: Ned Dobos, Author of Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, Meets Critics.” Dobos’s book — Ethics, Security, and the War Machine: The True Cost of the Military (Oxford University Press, 2020) — examines the ethical costs of maintaining a standing army, and the forum brings Dobos into conversation with Parsons, Kevin R. Cutright, and Lee-Ann Chae. The juxtaposition of this symposium with the Butler articles is quietly resonant: where Butler’s book theorizes the psychosocial conditions that make nonviolence possible or impossible, the Dobos symposium presses the question from the institutional and strategic side, asking what obligations — and what moral prices — attach to the security apparatus that liberal states maintain. Together, the two sections of Vol. 23 constitute a compact but unusually rich meditation on the deep structure of political violence and the philosophical resources available for resisting it.
The Acorn Journal 