Against the Logic of War: For a Theory and Practice of Nonviolent Resistance

“There is war.” This finding, which may sound so trivial in view of almost omnipresent warlike violence that it could be taken for a tautology, or at any rate for a platitude—isn’t there always war?—may hold a few insights after all. For it could also be read as if war dominates our imagination to such an extent that we are hardly able to imagine alternatives to it, as if war simply governs everything, a “totally unsocial fact,” so to speak. This, in turn, would make it difficult for us to recognize how people, even under the most adverse conditions of war, still resist, do not simply submit, but engage themselves against belligerent violence and for more peaceful relations. This contribution is intended as a contribution focusing on a philosophical theory of social practices of (potentially) nonviolent resistance. The starting point of the following lines of thought is first of all Hannah Arendt’s consequent differentiation between three kinds of activities and their respective relation to what she calls the “common world,” whereby violence—and especially armed violence—can be understood as that which tends to disrupt world as an index of relational experiences, which can cause destruction up to the state of worldlessness. In a second step, in the context of a consolidation of the recent arguments of Elsa Dorlin on Self Defense and Judith Butler on The Force of Nonviolence, passages between violence and nonviolence will be discussed that could be relevant for an understanding of resistance that is able to transcend existing relations of violence—not least armed ones. And finally, the findings will be related once again to the finding that there is war, and a re-orientation will be proposed.