Faceless Violence and the Gestural Commons: The Ethics and Politics of Destitution and Support in Butler, Agamben, and Federici

Abstract

This article brings to bear different strands of critical theory on the issue of police violence and securitarian capitalism, with a focus on the current situation in France, discussing Judith Butler’s argument for nonviolence in The Force of Nonviolence in relation to Jacques Rancière’s distinction of politics and police, Giorgio Agamben’s ideas of gesture and act, and Silvia Federici’s understanding of primitive accumulation and reproductive commons. These authors, from their different perspectives, address how the questions of the distribution and the legitimation of violence involve forms of individuation that cut into a common dimension of relationality and interdepen- dency, systematically denying structural violence. On this basis, they understand the ethics and politics of nonviolence to be the matter of a common use of bodies: Butler, in the sense of an aggressive defence of those interrelational bonds that are formative of human subjects; Agamben, in the sense of a shift in our mode of thinking and doing from property and belonging to use and dwelling, as part of the destitution of the biopolitical and juridical capture of lives; Federici, as forms of mutual support organised in a struggle against the imposition of capitalist relations of production and reproduction. Moving from the question of the figuration of violence and the State’s semantic monopoly on its attribution to that of police violence and its centrality in the current paradigm of government, the article connects the various epistemologies of subjectivity in Butler, Agamben, and Federici to the critique of techniques of individuation and structural forms of vulnerabilisation that are characteristic of the police State, proposing an anarchist perspective on nonviolence as part of a larger defence of reproductive and gestural commons.