The Force of Nonviolence

Many people say that arguing for nonviolence is unrealistic, but perhaps they are too enamored with reality. When I ask them whether they would want to live in a world in which no one was arguing for nonviolence, where no one held out for that impossibility, they always say no

If we operate within the horizon in which violence cannot be identified, where lives vanish from the realm of the living before they are killed, we will not be able to think, to know, or to act in ways that embed the political in the ethical

We do not have to love one another to be obligated to build a world in which all lives are sustainable.

There is no way to practice nonviolence without first interpreting violence and nonviolence, especially in a world in which violence is increasingly justified in the name of security, nationalism, and neofascism.

According to that war logic, it is a matter of choosing between the lives of refugees and the lives of those who claim the right to be defended against the refugees.

Why is a petition for peace called a “violent” act? Why is a human barricade thwarting the police called an act of “violent” aggression? Under which conditions and within which frameworks does the inversion of violence and nonviolence occur?

the population that is phantasmatically construed as the locus of destruction.

a tacit war logic enters into the biopolitical management of populations

The institutional life of violence will not be brought down by a prohibition, but only by a counter-institutional ethos and practice

how to practice nonviolence of a militant sort.