**1. Introduction**

With their<sup>1</sup> 2020 book, *The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind*, feminist political philosopher Judith Butler joins a long tradition of nonviolent resistance that includes proponents such as Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, Te Whiti o Rongomai III, Martin Luther King Junior, Václav Havel, Alice Paul, Rosa Parks, and others, noticeably Mahatma Gandhi. Many social justice movements have been inspired by the ideal and strategy of nonviolent resistance. For example, according to one estimate, between 1966 and 1999, "nonviolent civic resistance played a critical role in fifty [out] of sixty-seven transitions from authoritarianism" (Ackerman and DuVall 2000). In addition, in their book, Chenoweth and Stephan conclude both that "historically, nonviolent resistance campaigns have been *more effective* in achieving their goals than violent resistance campaigns" (Chenoweth and Stephan 2013, p. 220; emphasis added) and that, since "civil resistance campaigns are more successful than violent campaigns at overcoming barriers to participation" (Ibid, p. 28), they produce *more stable outcomes* in the long run.

In contrast, although "violent insurgencies captured power in some cases", the human costs in terms of casualties were very high. Moreover, "the conditions in these countries after the conflict ended have been overwhelmingly more repressive than in transitions driven by nonviolent civic pressure" (Ibid, p. 60). Typical for post-violent-conflict societies were widespread retaliatory violence, lack of respect for human rights and lack of respect for minority rights (Ibid, p. 60). Gene Sharp's influential 1973 three-volume opus, *The Politics of Nonviolent Action* (Sharp 1973), provides a theoretical foundation for nonviolent action by linking it with a specific understanding of power. Different methods of nonviolent action that he discusses include nonviolent protest, social noncooperation, economic boycotts, strikes, political noncooperation and nonviolent intervention, and he explains that adversaries can be nonviolently affected or changed through conversion, persuasion, accommodation and coercion.

**Citation:** Du Toit, Louise, and Jana Vosloo. 2021. When Bodies Speak Differently: Putting Judith Butler in Conversation with Mahatma Gandhi on Nonviolent Resistance. *Religions* 12: 627. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel12080627

Academic Editor: Daniel H. Levine

Received: 4 July 2021 Accepted: 3 August 2021 Published: 10 August 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

The specific contribution of Butler's book against this backdrop is to make a philosophical case for the use of nonviolent resistance toward oppressive regimes, without turning it into an absolute prohibition on violence or self-defence (Butler 2020, p. 23). Their argument is rooted in their understanding of the human subject as constituted in discursive and performative ways—an understanding they partly take from Michel Foucault, and partly develop more concretely in terms of the performative body. Butler's argument for nonviolence is therefore embedded in their earlier work on subject formation, and the in/ability to appear (and be recognised) in the social or public world as a moral and political subject—themes that run through their whole oeuvre, as we will show.

Even though Butler's book title references Gandhi's concept of *Satyagraha* (meaning love force, truth force or soul force),2 and they evoke him explicitly a handful of times (Butler 2020, pp. 16, 21, 181, 201), Gandhi's own thinking does not feature much in the book. The point of this article is to go beyond the book's purview and place Butler and Gandhi in conversation on the topic of nonviolence. Although the abovementioned sources are important for addressing the common assumption that nonviolent tactics as a strategic choice are naïve, misplaced, ineffective or implausible (Chenoweth and Stephan 2013, p. 17), the focus of this article is on a more fundamental, i.e., ontological, level. In quite different yet complementary ways, Gandhi and Butler argue that the imperative for nonviolent resistance aimed at social transformation flows from a certain relational ontology, a certain perspective on the world and human co-existence. The aim of this article is to draw out the most salient implications of such a conversation for the right of public assembly and contemporary cultures of protest globally.

The ontology that Butler places at the root of nonviolence is a secular social ontology of the constituted, performative, exposed subject, coupled with a radically egalitarian imagination, as is discussed. In his turn, the vision that underlies Gandhi's nonviolence is a faith-based ontology that sees the force of love as a cosmic principle greater or more powerful than violent force. It is important to remain faithful to the very different vocabularies that these two thinkers employ; nevertheless, it is mutually illuminating and fruitful for a systematic philosophical exploration of the nature of nonviolent resistance, we claim, to place them in conversation with each other, on four central themes related to nonviolent resistance. The conversation between Gandhi and Butler is structured according to these themes: (i) the ontological roots of the nonviolent imperative; (ii) their rejection of an instrumental view of violence; (iii) nonviolent resistance seen as communicative action; and (iv) nonviolence viewed as a way of life. The discussion emphasises the continuities and complementarities between the two thinkers but also indicates where tensions remain. We conclude the article with some concrete suggestions that flow from this discussion for social protest and public assembly.

#### **2. Gandhi and Butler on Nonviolent Resistance**

## *2.1. The Ontological Roots of the Nonviolent Imperative*

Butler's social ontology is best understood as being inspired by Foucault, who is a key critic of the "constituting" subject of western modernity. Against this influential view of the human subject as sovereign, as pre-existing its social conditions and as fully transparent to itself and governed by reason alone, Foucault posits a "constituted", i.e., a historically contingent subject, who is formed or moulded into a self through everyday social practices, dominant discourses and knowledge formations, and the power relations that infuse these. "Objectifying knowledge practices" and "processes of subjectivation" or of self-formation all represent a form of power that transforms human beings into the subjects required (and recognised) by the dominant, anonymous structures at work in modern societies. Thus, writes Foucault in "The Subject and Power" (Foucault 1982, p. 781), "[t]his form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him." There is therefore no presocial or prediscursive, or natural subject.

Instead, we find ourselves always already embedded in, shaped by, measured, called forth and named by a force field of norms embedded in language and in other material manifestations, ranging from singular bodies to institutions, to, nowadays, the Anthropocene planet itself. Butler largely adopts this Foucauldian understanding of the subject but focuses it on the notion of bodily performativity or the animate body. They define their key notion of performativity as "not a singular or deliberate 'act', but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice[s] by which discourse produces the [material] effects that it names" (Butler 1993, p. 2). Butler (2015, p. 28) in their later work noted that "performativity characterises first and foremost that characteristic of linguistic utterances that in the moment of making the utterance makes something happen or brings the phenomenon into being".

Their notion of performativity thus equally inverts the modernist logic where action proceeds from a unified, pre-existing, rational and free mind. Performativity instead posits that people become subjects, e.g., gendered subjects, through the performance of desires, acts, speech and gestures that cite or reiterate the dominant (heterosexual) gendered and gendering norms (see their *Gender Trouble*, Butler 1990). An important point that Butler takes over from Foucault (1982, p. 778) is that we become subjects partly by objectifying ourselves as objects of knowledge and power; we are at once object and subject of these ongoing processes. It is by inserting ourselves through bodily gestures, expressions, motilities and so forth into the force field of norms that constitutes or moulds recognisable (gendered) subjects, and thus by "passing", that we come to recognise ourselves and be recognised by others, as properly gendered subjects. Our actions are themselves attuned to, or aligned with, discursive meanings. When this attuning translates into bodily habits, then discursive norms have been successfully materialised in the world. This understanding of performativity moreover extends far beyond gendering processes to encompass the subject as a whole. Butler's social ontology therefore entails that we are constituted as subjects in an inescapably relational, social and discursive manner. We only appear as legible persons or subjects to the extent that we align our sense of self and our behaviour (speech and action) with the social scripts and norms that shape personhood. Dominant norms and social recognition thus work together to give shape, form and content to individual subjects.

However, and this is key, Butler's social ontology does not lead them to an understanding of the self as fully socially or externally determined (as they explain in detail in *Giving an Account of Oneself*, Butler 2005). Key here is that abstract norms as deposited in language, are not only pervasive and powerful, but at the same time are unstable and ephemeral, and fully dependent for their endurance upon the ongoing, largely habitual obedience or docility of bodies that reiterate, repeat and re-cite them. Since it is obedient or imitative, citational actions and habits bring selves and other social realities into being and sustain them and make them matter and materialise in the human world; therefore, action is also the key to resistance against oppression. When bodies perform or act *differently*, by transgressing or otherwise challenging, disrupting, misquoting, parodying or queering the norms, then they can over time change, or subvert, the norms themselves. Furthermore, new sets of norms can shape radically different selves and institutions into being over time.

Butler's social ontology does not lead to a deterministic view of the self, as we have seen, but neither does it allow for change to be driven from somewhere beyond the social world. There is no self, and there are no hermeneutic resources on the radical outside of (or beyond) the discursive force field which has constituted us as subjects. Butler's commitment to nonviolence as preferred change strategy thus stems from their understanding of the deeply relational, communicative nature of the self. We only come into being as subjects or persons through our constant exposure to the norms embedded in discourse, action and institutions, and to others, who (we) need to recognise us as such.

Exposure to norms and others is a prerequisite for being shaped or moulded into a person; at the same time, it renders us vulnerable. This is because of what Butler calls "normative violence", or the violence of the norm (Butler 2004b): dominant norms are always embedded in, and serving, dominant power relations. On a basic level, Butler's

social ontology implies that every person is in principle, constitutively, equally vulnerable because of the pervasive ways in which we are all exposed to, and dependent upon, social recognition in conjunction with dominant norms. On another level, however, vulnerability is differentially distributed, and the distinction between our shared ontological vulnerability (precariousness) and politically wrought vulnerability (precarity) is important here (Butler 2009). The potential for violence lies in the precise way in which norms distribute the terms and conditions of subject-formation. Simply put, where heterosexism, patriarchy and racism are dominant norms embedded in discourse and institutions, and in practices of recognition and knowledge production, and thus in self-understandings, there, bodies marked as gender nonconforming, female and/or black, are likely to struggle to appear as "proper" subjects and citizens, both to themselves and to others.

This is precisely the kind of situation where Butler would evoke the force of nonviolent resistance, which is exerted where and when "a social and political practice [is] undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction coupled with a commitment to world building that honours global interdependency ... and equality" (Butler 2020, p. 21). We want to draw attention to a number of elements in this quote. First, note the element of collective action<sup>3</sup> ("undertaken in concert") in which shared resistance is expressed towards a situation that is read as systemically destructive. Moreover, this collective resistance is performed against the normative violence exerted by the dominant social system, which prevents some human beings from appearing as subjects and citizens in public spaces. For Butler, then, wherever there is performative resistance against oppression, one can discern a struggle against socially induced precarity or the destructive unequal distribution of the chance of becoming (social) subjects. Butler (2020, p. 10) therefore argues that "nonviolence requires a critique of egological ethics as well as of the political legacy of individualism in order to open up *the idea of selfhood as a fraught field of social relationality*" (emphasis added). Nonviolent resistance illuminates not only the direct suffering or grief carried by groups and individuals that struggle to appear as social subjects but also shows how social mechanisms operate in order to pre-emptively "disappear" that suffering as suffering, to render those lives publicly "ungrievable".<sup>4</sup> As Ruti (2017, p. 97) points out, Butler "deftly demonstrates [that] one of the ruses of power is to delimit the domain of grievability so that—under normal circumstances—we are prevented from mourning the suffering (or death) of those deemed different from, or inferior to ourselves". Grievability therefore does not only play a role at the end of a life: whether the loss of any particular life would register socially and publicly as a loss or not is already inscribed in the multiple ways in which people's lives are either materially and symbolically supported or not (Butler 2020, p. 59).

Note also from the quote above that the destruction (violence) identified in the system is opposed in nonviolent resistance not by yet another form of destruction but rather by a force of a different nature—by the power that springs from "a commitment to world building that honours interdependency and equality". The commitment to world building and respect for interdependency is rooted in Butler's social ontology, which is wary of processes of individualisation that turn the oppressed into the main cause of their own oppression and thereby obliterate or erase the largescale social complicity that is always needed for systemic oppression, as discussed. They relate equality with interdependence as follows: "Equality is ... 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, and tentacular yearnings for food, sociality, and sexuality" (Butler 2020, p. 45). This quote helps us to understand why Butler proposes that a radically egalitarian imagination must inform nonviolent resistance and provides much of its countervailing force or impetus. For Butler (2020, p. 16), this radically egalitarian vision lies on the level of the social imaginary and springs from the understanding that each person is dependent, "or formed and sustained in relations of depending upon, and being depended upon". Thus, "social interdependency characterizes life, and ... violence [is] an attack on that interdependency". Therefore, the infliction of harm (violence) requires a forgetfulness of interdependency, and the egalitarian imagination by contrast increasingly avows and reckons with it, also or especially, in how it performs its demands for social inclusion and change. The shape or nature of performative resistance must be compatible with the affirmation of equal grievability.

Active, collective resistance to destructive (bond-denying and -defying) norms must therefore take the form of bond-affirming ("world-building") yet transgressive action; the performance must be at once relational and resistant, resisting *through* relations. Put differently, in our activist attempts to change socially embedded norms, we must remain ever mindful of their very nature. Recall that norms only have power over us because and insofar as we repeat and uphold them in our everyday actions. In that sense, every norm that holds sway does so through a pervasive yet often silent social pact. This is why all lasting and effective change in the shared world depends upon new ways of acting, in concert, combined with a respect for fundamental equality. In addition, why those very ways of acting must be respectful of the ontological sociality or interdependence, or the very worldliness, of all meaning making, including subject-formation. The *force* of nonviolence as conceived by Butler lies in the fact that as collective transgressive action, it remains steadfastly social, communicative, relational and committed to "living and sustainable [and sustaining] bonds" (Butler 2020, p. 15). Concerted transgressive action therefore demonstrates and reveals at once the social nature and power of existing norms and their dependence upon obedient repetition, as well as their fundamental changeability.

Gandhi's ontological orientation takes another, yet comparable, route to nonviolent resistance. Butler (2020, p. 181) comments on what Gandhi calls "the law of love", which he views as "a higher law than that of destruction". True to Butler's social ontology, they state that his stance "may not rest upon a discoverable law" but rather function only rhetorically. However, Gandhi does not intend for the law of love to be a mere rhetorical device. In *Hind Swaraj* (CWMG (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi 1958) vol. 10, p. 84), Gandhi explains that the [human] universe would disappear without "the force of love and pity<sup>5</sup> [which] is infinitely greater than the force of arms". He writes, "[h]istory is really a record of every *interruption* of the *even* working of the force of love or of the soul ... History, then, is a record of an interruption in the course of nature. Soul-force, being natural, is not noted in history" (CWMG 10, p. 90; emphases added). He gives the example of two brothers who overcome their mutual animosity as a story that would not go down in history. Soul-force or love force (*Satyagraha*) works evenly, constantly and unnoticed in the background, *building the world*, which is why the world as such is based "not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love". Similar to Butler, then, Gandhi also derives his nonviolent imperative from a vision of the human world as consisting of a fabric of social bonds, woven, built and continuously sustained through the force and labour of love and pity or empathy.6 In contrast with Butler for whom the force of nonviolence derives purely from social bonds, Gandhi's ontology is however a religious one: truth force or soul force is an "indefinable mysterious power that underlies everything"; it is also called "God", by Gandhi.<sup>7</sup> He sees love force, truth force, or God, as "purely benevolent", for "in the midst of death, life persists, in the midst of untruth, truth persists, in the midst of darkness, light persists". Therefore, if one aligns oneself with love force, one sides with and taps into the stronger force in the universe. For Gandhi, then, there is a force in the world, in the cosmos and in nature, that is a force for good and that exists independently of the human world but which underpins and sustains also the social bonds in the human world. This is why he claims, "as long as there is even a handful of men true to their pledge [of *Satyagraha*], there can be only one end to the struggle and that is victory" (Gandhi 1928, p. 116). Drawing from this quotation, and because Gandhi understands nonviolence as tapping into a divine source, one might deduce that Gandhi is more optimistic about the effectiveness of nonviolence than the secular Butler. However, later in his life, Gandhi also experienced many setbacks and failures of his nonviolent tactics, most spectacularly with conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in India. He was thus finally not naïve about the

limits of nonviolence and conceded cases in which the force of violence was needed (see Note 10). However, we think the larger point which he shares with Butler is to draw our attention to the *limits of violence* as an instrument for decisive and lasting social change, and to open up more strategic space for nonviolent tactics.8

Gandhi's nonviolence therefore comes from a different place than that of Butler but ends up being very similar in its practical implications.<sup>9</sup> Because *Satyagraha* is attuned with the love force, which is God, it aims for "the conquest of the adversary" purely through persuasion, since it cannot be reconciled with causing him harm. For Gandhi, his faith position implies that "hatred is a positive breach of the ruling principle" of *Satyagraha*, and therefore, it has no place within nonviolent resistance—it would oppose and thereby dilute or completely thwart this alternative force. Moreover, because love force or God is an ontological force, it (or He) is also latently present in one's adversary—there is always the chance that the opponent can (learn to) tap into their own capacity for love and pity.10 The adversary or opponent is never the enemy whom one is allowed to hate this is very similar to Butler's idea that nobody should be socially construed as finally ungrievable. The temptation to construe another person as ungrievable and therefore violable is particularly strong within the frame of self-defence, as we see below. For Gandhi, for the *Satyagrahi* to indulge in having enemies would be a failure of faith in the force of love. Instead of aiming to harm the adversary, therefore, *Satyagraha* aims for and "postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one's own person" (Gandhi 1928, p. 124). Where hatred and violence attempt to either eliminate the opponent altogether or to coerce them into obedience, through the infliction of harm or threat of harm, love force instead aims for the opponent to change their own perspective, to learn something and to connect with their own capacity for love and empathy. With their notions of vulnerability, precarity and grievability, we have seen how Butler positions suffering as a central element that is evoked and activated through collective resistance. Similarly, yet differently, Gandhi sees "the potency of suffering" as "key to *Satyagraha"* (Ibid, p. 18). At first glance, their attitudes towards suffering as a key element of nonviolent resistance may appear quite different, as Butler sees hidden suffering as being brought to light and simultaneously resisted through collective nonviolent action, whereas Gandhi sees the collective nonviolent action or *Satyagraha* itself as necessarily entailing bodily suffering. We show why we regard their positions on this point as complementary rather than contradictory, under theme (iii) below.

For Gandhi, based on his faith-based ontology, nonviolence cannot be treated as a mere instrument that might be discarded and replaced with violence as a supposedly more efficient means. Hatred and harm cannot be a viable alternative to love and truth. This leaves us with the interesting implication that Gandhi's nonviolence is not in the first place or only a moral demand but fundamentally ontological and strategic.11 In order to "see" the force of love as stronger than the force of violence and hatred, as Gandhi does, one needs a kind of countercultural imagination.12 At least in many scholarly circles in the west, violence is viewed as ingrained and inevitable, an inherent part of agonistic politics, and the ideal of nonviolence is viewed as naïve and utopian. Nevertheless, Gandhi might be described as sharing with Butler their alternative, "egalitarian imaginary" (Butler 2020, p. 24), which insists upon foregrounding the human capacity for love and pity and which foregrounds a similar relational ontology. In addition, similar to Butler's understanding of the social construction of subjects, Gandhi has a keen insight into how everybody's understanding is a finite function of their time, their social group and their upbringing. A vivid example is when he decided not to hold then President of the Transvaal Republic, Paul Kruger's, blatant racism against him, seeing that Kruger had only ever read the Old Testament and regarded Indians as the "descendants of Esau" (Gandhi 1928, pp. 56–57). Long before scholars such as Chenoweth and Stephan (2013) did the research to back up the empirical claim, Gandhi's faith position led him to reject violent resistance as a relatively ineffectual short-cut (CWMG 25, p. 424) to social change, rooted in a lack of faith. This critical view of violence, which shares many elements with that of Butler, is discussed next.
