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Vol. 24.1 (Spring–Summer 2024): Critical Inspirations from Le Guin and Butler

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Vol. 24.1 is a joint venture between two guest editors whose work had been running in parallel across the previous two years. Guest editor José-Antonio Orosco, acting under the auspices of the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, organized two essays growing out of a 2022 symposium marking the fiftieth anniversary of Ursula K. Le Guin’s anti-war novella The Word for World is Forest. At the same time, Will Barnes — the guest editor of Vol. 23 — had continued gathering Butler scholarship beyond what fit in that issue, and two of those manuscripts carry over here.

Orosco’s foreword, “Reimagining Nonviolence, Oppression, and Gender Justice,” frames the work of both contributors through Le Guin’s own stated aim: not to prescribe utopia, but to “dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live.” The two Le Guin essays take that charge seriously. Ben Nadler’s “‘The Root Is the Dream’: Dreaming, Storytelling, and Political Action in Two of Le Guin’s Vietnam War Era Novels” reads The Word for World is Forest alongside The Lathe of Heaven, finding in both a sustained meditation on “effective dreaming” — the way imagination and the unconscious can furnish visions of a more just world powerful enough to motivate action. Nadler links this to Robin D. G. Kelley’s concept of “freedom dreams” and to the historical Black freedom struggle and contemporary prison abolition movements, while also warning that the same imaginative power can fuel exclusionary utopian visions that erase other peoples and ways of life. Sheryl M. Medlicott’s “Use Your ‘Mother Tongue’ to Change the World: An Ecofeminist Reading of Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest on the Occasion of Its 50th Anniversary” traces the ecofeminist undercurrent in the novella — the interlocking logics of misogyny, environmental destruction, and colonial violence against indigenous peoples — while also noting that Le Guin’s narrative remains structured around patriarchal themes: fixed gender dualisms and masculine saviors that she would spend later novels learning to unlearn. Medlicott invites readers to bring that same self-critical posture to their own scholarly and activist work.

The two Butler articles complete the arc that Vol. 23 opened. Danny Marrero’s “Safeguarding Bodies That Matter: Inequal Grievability and Sexual Terror in Butler’s Analysis of Feminicidio” examines Butler’s deployment of the Spanish-language term feminicidio — chosen over “femicide” or “femicidio” to capture the way lethal violence against women and trans women in Latin America is not merely a crime but a condition enabled and sustained by social structures and legal impunity. Marrero situates Butler’s use of the term within the broader history of feminist scholarship on this phenomenon and argues that the concept, properly augmented, becomes an indispensable tool for philosophers of nonviolence as it sharpens both our analysis of the violence women face and our moral vocabulary of grievability for lives lost to institutionalized patriarchy. Justin Pearce’s “Divine Violence vs. Nonviolence: On Judith Butler’s Reading of Walter Benjamin” takes up the perennial question of whether any form of active resistance against oppressive institutions can avoid replicating the violence it contests. Butler turns to Walter Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence” as a form of action that escapes the moral traps of armed struggle, but Pearce argues that Butler misreads Benjamin as more purely nonviolent than Benjamin’s own text supports. Benjamin’s deeper aim, Pearce contends, is to transcend the violence/nonviolence binary altogether — and since many historically “nonviolent” movements have involved property destruction and armed preparation for self-defense, seeking purity of means may itself be a distortion. Pearce invites readers toward Étienne Balibar’s concept of “anti-violence”: neither abstraction from violence (nonviolence) nor its inversion (counter-violence), but an internal response to and displacement of it.

Moses’s editorial introduction closes the frame by noting what Le Guin and Butler share: both call us to attend to dreaming. Le Guin warns that our habits of dreaming reveal monstrous powers; Butler returns to Freud to diagnose how unconscious structures of self can manifest as collective murder. Together, the issue positions The Acorn as a site of what Moses calls a “dreamers’ resistance to fascism” — a philosophical practice that reaches not just for critique but for the imaginative resources required to build the house we want our children to live in.

Vol. 23.1–2 (2023): Celebrating and Augmenting Judith Butler’s Vital Contribution

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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.

Vol. 17.2 (Fall 2017): Hard Cases, Kantian Guns, and the Legacy of Gene Sharp

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Vol. 17.2 picks up where the previous issue left off in the philosophy of nonviolence and pushes directly into the hardest terrain: the cases where intuition most powerfully resists pacifist conclusions. Both articles argue from within the Western philosophical tradition — Tolstoy and Kant respectively — that nonviolence is philosophically defensible even when the stakes are highest, and the issue closes with two memorial tributes to Gene Sharp, who died on January 28, 2018, two days before the anniversary of Gandhi’s assassination. Taken together, the issue stages a sustained argument that the philosophical foundations of nonviolence are more secure, and more demanding, than either its opponents or its pragmatic defenders tend to acknowledge.

Charles Fink’s “Nonviolence and the Hard Question” takes Tolstoy’s canonical challenge seriously rather than dismissing it — the case of an innocent child threatened by a violent criminal, where killing the attacker seems to be the only option. Fink does not argue that pacifism is obligatory in this case, but that it is at least permissible — and that this more modest conclusion is less trivial than it sounds, since pacifists are routinely accused of cowardice or selfishness precisely for refusing to kill in defense of others. His argument proceeds on three fronts. First, the consequentialist case for defensive killing is shakier than it appears: we cannot know with certainty what the consequences of either action will be, and Tolstoy’s point that killing the criminal is certain while the child’s death is not has more force than our intuitions typically allow. Second, attempts to define violence narrowly enough to permit defensive killing — as retaliation only, or as harm wished for its own sake — fail, because killing someone as a means to an end still treats that person as a mere thing, violating their dignity as surely as any act of malice. Third, and most positively, if it is at least permissible to cultivate agapeic love — the boundless, impartial love that cannot simultaneously wish harm on anyone — then it is at least permissible to commit oneself to nonviolence in every circumstance. Fink draws on the Buddha’s Metta Sutta, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Sermon on the Mount to show that the ideal of agapeic love is not the exclusive property of any tradition, and that those who would compel us to commit violence in defense of the innocent are implicitly insisting that unconditional love is a moral failing — a conclusion he finds plainly absurd. Matthew Rukgaber’s “Guns as Lies” approaches the question from a different angle, mounting a Kantian argument that guns, like lies, are evil in themselves regardless of the costs and benefits they produce. Kant’s controversial claim is that lying is reprehensible even when it harms no one, because it corrupts practical reason itself — it makes truth a mere means to be used rather than a constraint to be obeyed, erodes character, and ultimately destroys the foundation on which all rights and contracts rest. Rukgaber argues that bearing lethal arms does the same kind of moral damage: guns are not merely dangerous objects but machines with their own normative and material teleology, one that requires the bearer to arrogate to themselves the power of violent enforcement — a power that in a civil society properly belongs only to the collective. Just as lying places individual judgment above the “common authority as the proper enforcer of rights,” so gun ownership constitutes a standing declaration that one wills to live in a community where violent self-help is the operative standard. This structural moral objection, Rukgaber argues, operates independently of any empirical assessment of risk and places a significant burden on any advocate of gun rights to show that the benefits outweigh not only the physical harms guns produce but the moral distortions they require.

Three book reviews carry the issue’s global reach outward in three directions. Bill Gay reviews Todd May’s Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity Press, 2015), finding it a commendable and accessible introductory text whose core contribution is a taxonomy of four nonviolent strategies: Gandhi’s satyagraha, which seeks to persuade and then to dramatize injustice through willingness to suffer; the “moral jiu-jitsu” of Richard Gregg; the “political jiu-jitsu” of Gene Sharp’s tradition, which exploits the dependence of governments on popular compliance; and the decentralized occupation-based experiments of Occupy and Critical Mass. May roots all four in the values of dignity and equality, drawing largely on Kant for the former and Jacques Rancière for the latter. May’s final chapter on neoliberalism as structural violence — arguing that the appropriate nonviolent response is to undermine rather than overthrow the neoliberal order — is, Gay suggests, one of the book’s most distinctive and timely contributions. Gay notes some gaps, including May’s failure to engage The Acorn and Concerned Philosophers for Peace literature, and his occasional conflation of pacifism with passivism. Sanjay Lal reviews the two-volume anthology Nonviolence as a Way of Life (Motilal Banarsidass, 2017), edited by Predrag Cicovacki and Kendy Hess, which brings together fifty-four contributors from twelve countries and five continents under the rubric of the Jain concept of ahimsa. Lal identifies the collection’s greatest strength as its breadth — chapters range from Jain studies proper (Donaldson on environmental rites, Fisher on the 1947 Partition) to everyday applications in prisons, parenting, medicine, and environmental ethics — while also noting its unevenness, singling out Apressyan’s “The Limits of Nonviolence in Reactive Action” for failing to engage the Gandhian means-ends literature and thus arriving too quickly at a conclusion that violent responses are sometimes justified. He offers sustained praise for contributions by Barry Gan, Robert Holmes, and Johan Galtung, whose pieces collectively make the philosophical case that violence is not basic to human nature and that nonviolence is a continuum rather than a binary. Court Lewis reviews Chaiwat Satha-Anand’s Nonviolence and Islamic Imperatives (Irene Publishing, 2017), a collection of essays written over thirty years that argues Islam’s core values require nonviolence and that the association of Islam with terrorism represents a profound misreading of Islamic history. Satha-Anand’s anchoring move is to reframe September 11 — not as 2001 but as 1906, when Muslim leader Sheth Haji Habib supported Gandhi and helped bring his South African satyagraha movement into existence — and to derive from the Qur’an and Prophetic Traditions five pillars of nonviolent peacemaking: willingness to disobey unjust laws, courage before evil, discipline, community, and constructive action. Lewis recommends the book to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Islamic history and practice, noting that its insights are valuable to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

The issue closes with two memorials for Gene Sharp. Barry Gan, former editor of The Acorn, recalls Sharp as a figure who shifted the field of nonviolence decisively toward its pragmatic and political dimensions, deliberately separating strategic nonviolence from the metaphysical and ethical framework in which Gandhi had embedded it. Gan traces Sharp’s intellectual development from early Gandhi scholarship through the magnum opus The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973) and the later From Dictatorship to Democracy, translated into thirty-one languages and used by activists across the Arab Spring and the former Soviet republics. Gan offers personal memories of Sharp speaking at the Rochester Zen Center in the late 1980s and at an Oxford conference in 2007 — “almost shy, certainly affable” in small settings, “comfortable and expansive” at the podium. Gan’s one note of puzzlement is Sharp’s determination to emphasize the political and ignore the ethical in Gandhi, a separation that Gan, as a philosopher of pacifism, never quite accepted. Jack DuVall, co-author of A Force More Powerful and longtime collaborator with Sharp’s tradition, offers a complementary portrait, calling Sharp “a general of ideas” who built the roads before commerce could travel them. DuVall suggests that the absence of overt moral framing in many Sharp-influenced movements may be less significant than it appears: Vaclav Havel’s insistence that nonviolent resistance means “living within the truth” points to an implicit moral dimension that operated even where explicit ethical commitment was absent. Together the two tributes frame Sharp’s legacy as genuinely open — the colloquy between principled and pragmatic nonviolence that his life’s work provoked is, DuVall writes, “open-ended,” and the rights and freedom of all of us may yet depend on how it continues.