fiona jenkins

Toward a Nonviolent Ethics: Response to Catherine Mills

On Irresolution and Injury

“W hat might it mean,” Judith Butler asks in the context

of a reflection on responsibility, “to undergo violation, to insist upon not
resolving grief and staunching vulnerability too quickly through a turn
to violence, and to practice, as an experiment in living otherwise, nonvio-
lence in an emphatically nonreciprocal response? What would it mean, in
the face of violence, to refuse to return it?” (Giving 100).
This is certainly not the only context in which Butler speaks of
nonviolence, but I shall begin by paying some attention to this instance
in order to open out further a series of questions that are perhaps not
adequately posed in Mills’s challenging discussion in “Normative Violence,
Vulnerability, and Responsibility.” Why does Butler evoke nonviolence
as an “experimental” ethical practice in her recent work? To what order
of violence does nonviolence respond? And how is a nonviolent ethical
response even possible?
A striking aspect of this passage is its way of locating nonvio-
lence within framing problems to do with the temporalization of response
to injury: what might it mean to not resolve grief—nor staunch the bleeding

Volume 18, Number 2  doi 10.1215/10407391-2007-006

© 2007 by Brown University and  d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
158 Toward a Nonviolent Ethics

of some wound that is vulnerability—through “too quick” a recourse to

violence? This seems to ask primarily that we pause before recourse to
violence—a violence that may yet come, but not so quickly nor, therefore,
so unreflectively; a violence for which, then, we might better take respon-
sibility, as the contemplated action is more truly ours than the impulsive
one, or as a burden of justification is assumed for what we do. And indeed,
in a sense this is what, on Mills’s account, Butler’s ethics would most
properly demand.
But does the phrase not also pose as a dilemma how grief might
ever be resolved through violence, or vulnerability “staunched,” perhaps
insinuating that in the too-quick response, the element of injury—as the
time in which it subsists and its testimony to bodies irreparably vulnera-
ble—is, in effect, displaced and disavowed? Moreover, might the insistence
on allowing a certain nonresolution to be sustained also arise from the
sense that the violence toward which we would turn would itself fail to
deliver what it promises to perform—a resolution, a closure, the healing
of a wound? For supposing this doubled reading of Butler is correct—and
I shall offer more support for it in what follows—we may be being asked
to consider questions of the following order in asking after the “meaning”
of practicing nonviolence in an emphatically nonreciprocal response:
What does a returning violence try (and fail) to practice insofar as its role
is to resolve grief and to staunch vulnerability to the point of their utter
disappearance (as the wound, once fully closed, vanishes)? How does this
practice constitute the subject as one strangely removed from or redeemed
of its vulnerability—such that injury is in effect displaced or disavowed?
And how might we undo the form taken by these practices by posing anew
the question of the ethical aspect of injury—in and as we refuse “too quick”
a turn to violence?1
If the willingness to undergo violation appears as the refusal
to enact the compulsive necessity of responding to injury with violence,
it would be significant at least in part for what it did not do (that is, to not
resolve, to not reciprocate). This way of locating nonviolence gives another
sense to the temporalization that is so crucial here to the thought about
response to injury. The suspension of the impulse to react is not only
that created in individual reflection but is also a practice that directly
interrupts the obviousness, propriety, or naturalness of doing violence
as an alleviating response to injury; the force of undergoing violation is
implicated in its being an experimental practice directed at an order of
meaningful action. If it is a “living otherwise,” this is perhaps not in the
d i f f e r e n c e s 159

sense of adopting an alternative way of life, but in the sense of exploiting

a torsion within what it is to be living. Arguably, it is in this arena that we
will approach a question that seems vital for Butler’s reflection on ethics:
the question of what it is to take up a “living” relation to norms and how
that space may be foreclosed (Giving 5–10). This issue seems to me crucial
to characterizing a form of normative life less inherently violent than Mills
would have us think. And within that, a sense of the stakes of locating
injury in the affective time of a living human being appears essential to
what is (not) done in refusing a reciprocal gesture of returning injury.
Now, the paradox Mills traces in Butler’s recent work directly
touches on little of this but turns around a reading of nonviolence that
would equate its work with a “cleansing” of ethics in the sense of oppos-
ing violence without oneself enacting it but also implying that the very
thought is governed by an ideal of purity. This, then, seems to lift ethics
out of the sphere in which violence is encountered; in other words, a puri-
fication, such as nonviolence is imagined to be, would perform the very
annihilation of injury that, on my reading of Butler, a responding violence
promises yet fails to deliver. In advancing such a reading of nonviolence,
Mills finds grounds for, first, charging that with the turn to an ethics of
nonviolence, Butler is refusing the challenge to “think and live ethics in
the midst of violence” and, second, for holding that this ethics ought prop-
erly to flow from the grasp of a certain irreducibility of violence that her
work would otherwise appear to display (153). The point is bolstered by a
reconstruction of Butler’s account of the role of normative regulation in
producing the subject of responsibility and of recognition. Here, Mills is
drawing on some broad themes of Butler’s work, which might be brought
into focus by the apparent qualification that Butler introduces when she
takes up Adorno’s thought about the “living place” of the “I”: “[W]e must
ask, however, whether the ‘I’ who must appropriate norms in a living way
is not itself conditioned by norms, norms that establish the viability of the
subject. [. . .] [Did] Adorno consider that norms also decide in advance who
will and will not become a subject?” (Giving 9).
In what sense does this emphasis on the role of norms in
granting the place of the subject qualify and restrict thought about the
importance of locating the “living place” of the “I”? Must we consider here
what Mills insists upon as a violence that attends the “form of the norm”?
Or might we read this passage, rather, as qualifying and extending the
terms of social critique to challenge the hegemony of such normative con-
stitutions of subjectivity as would (violently) foreclose this “living place”?
160 Toward a Nonviolent Ethics

Favoring this latter reading, in which Butler is specifically targeting a

violence at work in coercively “crafting [.  .  .] the ‘human’ in opposition
to life itself” (Giving 13), I shall argue against Mills’s interpretation of
the “ontological violence of norms” in order to indicate how Butler does
indeed locate ethics “in the midst of violence,” but I will do so without the
theoretical commitments to remaining within the terms of its inevitable
repetition that Mills ascribes to her.
It is in line with Mills’s thought that nonviolence seeks a kind
of “purity” to conclude that an ethics that radically breaks with its ori-
gins in violence risks a “hypostatization” of the ethical, foreclosing social
analysis and critique. In Mills’s version of this difficulty, to seek to separate
an “aspirational” dimension of norms from their constraining dimension
would be to lose a critical perspective on the idealization of norms in
Enlightenment thought through a disavowal of their exclusionary violence.
Indeed, Mills’s sense of the importance of acknowledging that “ethics is
in fact violent, even if that violence is necessary as a delimiting response
to another, perhaps more severe violence” (150) seems closely bound up
with the idea that in the aspirational moment of ethical life, we vitiate
the element of normative violence in and as we acknowledge the violent
limits and thus contingency of any normative order. At stake in Mills’s
reading is a form of fallibility with which I shall also quarrel; it suggests
that only by acknowledging the irreducible violence in normative life can
we keep open an awareness of the limitations of every conception of the
human. This awareness may then itself limit and disrupt confidence in
the adequacy of our norms without, however, fully disabling them. This
seems to be the value ascribed to thinking “at the limit of the ambivalent
violence of norms” (135).
In response to this line of argument, I shall offer an account
of ethical nonviolence that does not “purify” norms of their violence, but
perhaps “expiates” the guilty life caught in a certain moralizing closed
circuitry. Butler’s evocation of the dilemma and predicament of being
human and fallible correspondingly appears differently to me than Mills’s
account of it, and I would argue that Butler’s own account more profoundly
links together ethics and critique than Mills’s reconstructed version of
what Butler “ought” to say allows. Mills reads Butler’s crucial gesture in
ethics as that of “replacing the fiction of the sovereign individual [. . .] with
a view of the subject as vulnerable to pain and injury while and because
it is irremediably tied to others and to social norms in its very being.”
But the term “replacing” may be telling here, whereby one hegemonic
d i f f e r e n c e s 161

conception of the subject succeeds another, as if we simply revised a “fic-

tion” to offer a more truthful account of ourselves and thus instituted a
“new vocabulary of the normative” (134). This version of things indeed
implies that the attempt to resist normative violence through a practice
of nonviolence must be sidelined from the start. For in the picture Mills
draws, the idea of a nonviolent ethics is not only logically unworkable in
Butler’s own terms but is a dangerous distraction from the crucial gesture
of identifying the subject as vulnerable rather than as sovereign. Mills’s
thought here comes very close to seeming to endorse the view that we are
“productively” held in the binds of ethical life by the threat of violence.
If the idea of nonviolence seems to renege on acknowledging what Mills
calls the “founding condition” of violence (151), which on this account
irreducibly “regulates” both the appearance of lives that matter and the
subject capable of caring about it, then this must be because both vulner-
ability and responsibility are together constituted through exposure to
violence. If, on the face of it, that might seem a plausible enough claim, I
nonetheless wonder whether it captures what Butler is saying. Is this, for
instance, the sense we should give to the phrase cited in Mills’s epigraph,
that violence “delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot
slip away” (Butler, Giving 101)? Is to delineate the same as to constitute?
And what might we make, instead, of the turn to a practice of nonviolence
if we understand the relationship between the position of sovereignty and
that of vulnerability not as that of a rival ontology, but rather as related
through a negative dialectic?
I have already suggested that one way to understand the rela-
tion of violence and nonviolence might be as practice and counterpractice,
yet this requires some careful description. Butler writes, for instance: “If
violence is the act by which a subject seeks to reinstall its mastery and
unity, then nonviolence may well follow from living the persistent chal-
lenge to mastery that our obligations to others require” (Giving 64). If
violence is an act performed by the subject in seeking to constitute itself,
then nonviolence is what “might follow” from the undoing or stalling of
this attempt. Here, Butler seems to put a somewhat different inflection on
the familiar idea of resignification as a rupture in repetition. We might
further understand this relationship of doing and undoing as articulated
around a kind of testimony, whereby what is disavowed in a form we
subsequently recognize as “fictional” is not simply replaced by another
belief but made to give away (or testify to) its converse truth; or whereby
the imperative that drives and provides the rationale for a practice (the
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“reinstatement of mastery”) is revealed through counterpractice to be a

form of repetition whose necessity is purely reflexive—the reinstatement
of itself as the pure content of its imperative (as a what “must be done”
without regard to what is done).
Following through such thoughts, I want to argue in what fol-
lows that the vulnerability Butler identifies as the point of disarticulation
of sovereign subjectivity does not replace one ontological frame of refer-
ence with another, but rather operates as testimony to the weakness and
failure at the core of sovereignty’s self-understanding and in this sense
bears witness to its fictional quality (just as, conversely, violence bears a
perverse kind of witness to the vulnerability it exploits). The problem of
articulating a nonviolent ethics would then turn around elaborating the
nature and action of such testimony, to show what testifies to the failure
to be responsible within the way that one claims to be responsible (the
failure that indicts the sovereign subject as violent in the very gesture—of
installing mastery and unity—that is imagined as the precondition of
responsibility). It is this order of fallibility that I shall set against the “for-
mal” fallibility Mills identifies when she notes the (in principle) openness
of the norm to resignification.
In what follows, then, I first pursue the reading of the “work of
violence” that I began to sketch above, for without a better grasp of this, I
do not think we can begin to understand what is at stake in its interruption
through a practice of nonviolence. From this I shall go on to a critical con-
sideration of the reading Mills gives of the ambiguous value of normative
violence in Butler’s thought.

Rupturing Violence

Let us return to the question of how the emphatically nonre-

ciprocal response might figure in a practice of nonviolence. I have sug-
gested that, in the passage I cited at the beginning, nonviolence is neither
an alternative practice to violence nor an attempt to “purify” norms of an
instrinsic violence, but rather works to expose a failure inherent in the
hyperbolic promise of violence to staunch vulnerability or resolve grief
through recourse to a returning violence. That this nonreciprocal response
is not a purely abstract ideal or a simply formal practice of resignification
may be brought out by considering its implication in the responsibility
that “arises as a demand upon the persecuted” whose central dilemma
is “whether or not one may kill in response to persecution” (Levinas qtd.
d i f f e r e n c e s 163

in Giving 92). Taking this thought from Levinas, Butler constructs just
such a nexus of persecution and responsibility as “the limit case of the
prohibition against killing, the condition under which its justification
would seem most reasonable” (92). To not respond to persecution with an
answering violence or more precisely, to experience the question of how
to respond as a dilemma, is (at least) to confound the self-evidence of the
“most reasonable justification” of violence. 2 This suspension of the force of
moral or legal justification—a crucial aspect of which will come through
the “inviolable” face of the other—has a distinct significance in hollowing
out the space of responsibility. On Levinas’s account of undergoing this
dilemma, it seems that in persecution, testimony is provided of an exposure
to injury that is the “obverse” of responsibility for the Other (Giving 93).
Such “heightened” responsibility thus begins in undergoing injury or viola-
tion as a primary vulnerability is exposed (and not “resolved” away), and
this exposure can occur precisely because the injury is not imagined as
the sort of experience that would be resolvable through violence. Remain-
ing in its specificity, this injury does not entail a reciprocal response, but
opens the space of response as an ethical demand and opportunity or, one
might say, as the space of precarious life. 3
Butler contrasts this “heightened” order of responsibility (one
that “emerges from the experience of injury and violation”) with a “height-
ened moral sense” (Giving 99). For the latter it is crucial that the exercise
of a responding violence, far from appearing as a dilemma, is fully—
indeed, exaggeratedly—justified. In this respect, we should note how the
gesture of nonreciprocal response strikes at the capacity to establish the
force of certain problematic forms of moral justification for returning
violence to injury. These are characterized by their “infinite” and their
“retroactive” qualities, which Butler goes on to discuss as ressentiment (“a
permanent moral justification for retaliation” or “an infinite way of renam-
ing its aggression as suffering”) and bad conscience (the internalization
of the sources of all suffering as guilt—which “exacerbates our sense of
omnipotence, sometimes under the very sign of its critique” [101]).
Both these forms of response to injury effect a significant dis-
placement of suffering in and through an appeal to justice that absorbs
violence into itself (as “the just punishment we suffer,” “the just revenge
for what we suffer” [101]). They further entail that the injury that would
be dissolved is, in effect, interminably reenacted. In a sense, what hap-
pens here is that the defense against injury loses sight of the vulnerable
body and substitutes for it a defense that protects the subject of moral
164 Toward a Nonviolent Ethics

judgment, (and this in a capacity for moral condemnation that is itself a

direct enactment of returning violence). The construction of this subject
occurs through a normative response to injury—its condemnation tout
court, which establishes a permanent license for aggression against all
that threatens the subject’s inviolability.
Now, crucially, violence is here not simply playing the role of
securing given borders but is articulating them, and it is in this sense
of subject-constitution that we might speak of a violence internal to the
condemnation of all injury. By “all injury,” I intend a generalized term that
here means violation per se—the violation of a boundary, the violation of
a law of prohibition—where the key thought is that the violation only sub-
sists to the extent that a law is enforced sustaining the being of that entity
that is violated. “Violation” (and note that it is violation that is undergone
in a practice of nonviolence) occurs to a certain kind of identity, one that
is normatively sustained as the effect of a protective law. Moreover, the
violence is understood as being aimed as much at the law sustaining this
being as at the being itself. The terms of victimhood and aggression, of
impotence and omnipotence, become curiously abstract and reversible,
precisely insofar as violence is thus reflexively instrumentalized; for in so
becoming a response to violation, violence is withdrawn from and defeated
in its capacity as testimony to vulnerability or to the specificity of injury.
This traces an essential aspect of the reading I would give of the passage
that Mills cites as an epigraph to her essay: for only if violence is withdrawn
from its absorption into punishment and revenge can it “delineate a physi-
cal vulnerability from which we cannot slip away” (Giving 101). Conversely,
to the extent that we invoke violence within this moral frame, it is precisely
from the vulnerability of injurable bodies that we seek to slip away; and
if we should by no means understate the strength or intelligibility of that
desire for invulnerability, equally we should not understate the price paid
for the flawed attempt to secure it.
Butler charges, then, that those responses to injury that favor its
condemnation tout court and work to build a sense of guilt extending even
into suffering undergone, foster reflexivity not responsibility, enclosing
the subject within a narcissism manifest as a concern with moral purity
(Giving 99). What she elaborates here as a circuit of violence is clearly a
pathology—and she relies upon the authority of Freud and Nietzsche to
recite its tautological character as one in which the “impulse feeds the
very law by which it is prohibited” (100). Her crucial claim is that we can
locate this pathology in an order of moral life that effectively mistakes
d i f f e r e n c e s 165

its reflexivity and capacity for judgment for the ground of responsibility
(thereby construing responsibility as the property of the autonomous will-
ing subject in a sense that very precisely disavows its first conditions in
vulnerable and “unwilled” exposure to the other).
Moreover, these articulations of violence as a response to injury
are indicative of attempts to occupy time in a problematic way. They seek
a mode of mastery over, or a transcendence of, time that is bound up with
an attempt to locate (or bury) injury in some atemporal or radically recon-
structed temporal zone (perhaps within the timeless self or in an eternal
antagonism). The effect here is again to dematerialize injury. This occurs,
on the one hand, through offering an identification with the “inviolable”
subject whose moral dimensions are strictly interior (the subject of guilt)
or strictly transcendent (the “doer” behind the deed) and, on the other,
by absorbing the corporeality or “lived” character of injury—as grief that
remains unresolved, as a wounding that cannot readily be staunched—into
its reified meaning (as that which violence would in principle be able to
annul by fully appropriating or fully expunging its cause, though it end-
lessly fails to achieve this in practice and so must begin again and again).
In what passes for a fully justified returning violence, injury is made to
lose its irresolvable temporality, its corporeal resonance, and its mate-
rial significance beyond that which can be absorbed by the claim to legal
justice. It is the very abstraction of injury into an element that violence
might appear to annul that in an important sense allows injury to persist
as the “deadening” force of a moral law, one exploiting the very violence
it putatively claims to curb.
I am suggesting, then, that Butler’s Levinasian thought on non-
violence must be set in the framing context of some Nietzschean reflec-
tions on the imaginary and symbolic structures securing the recourse to
violence. Read thus, her evocation of nonviolence does not directly imply
that violence should never be used, nor indeed that it cannot ever function
instrumentally to obtain certain desired effects (its threat may indeed
function, for instance, as a deterrent). Rather, Butler’s point is very specifi-
cally directed at the instrumentalization of violence as a reflexively consti-
tutive force within a morality system of which Freud and Nietzsche are the
diagnosticians. Butler, further, shows how within these circuits of violence
the lived experience of injury as well as the life of the other from whom
the risk of injury comes are rendered inaccessible or invisible. 4 In partial
answer to the questions of why Butler evokes nonviolence and to what order
of violence this responds, then, I want to claim that Butler’s evocation of
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nonviolence, first, must be grasped as a practice that intervenes in those

symbolic and imaginary dimensions of violence that make it appear as a
fully justifiable response to injury (qua “violation”); and second, that it
articulates resistance to a certain dematerializing temporalization and
spacialization of injury, a disavowal of the corporeal, material, or “lived”
character of injury in favor of a hyperbolic construction of violation. To
“undergo violation” is, then, to put in jeopardy the terms of social being
that “feed the law” in its hyperbolic claim to annul injury.
This is the crucial backdrop to situating a responsibility that
begins in the conditions of precarious life. Given the abstraction that char-
acterizes a responsibility organized around reflexivity, one should stress
here by contrast the nonformal character of this responsibility, which
is linked to an exposure of injury in nonviolently undergoing violation.
Ethical exposure registers the undergoing of grief, pain, or suffering by
maintaining these in their weight as intransitive experiences—as a vul-
nerability to injury that cannot be eradicated without loss of the human.
Unlike violation in the precise sense given to this term above, these are
not the kinds of experiences that can be generalized in law or symbolically
annulled by a canceling violence—and it is this order of grief I highlighted
in my opening citation. Meanwhile, the critical exposure of injury must
focus on how the effort at canceling injury seeks to simultaneously annul
its own terms of responding violence, for instance in the way a violence
done to the other is constructed as a response that is at once (1) fully justi-
fied by (2) the violation to self and (3) premised on denying that the other
is a being that can be violated. There are multiple instances of such criti-
cal analyses in Butler’s work. The “war on terror,” Israeli offences against
Palestinians, indefinite detention, homophobic or racist intimidation—all
offer instances of actions where the exercise of violence is disavowed in the
name of a right to destroy that which threatens one’s very existence and
so warrants action in the name of a hyperbolic vulnerability. The right to
exercise force that is staked upon the cancellation of its very meaning as
violence invokes the other’s threat of annihilation, as aggression against
which all means are justified; and all means, moreover, are deployed
to indicate that violence being done by the hegemonic authorities is not
violence, since those others to whom it is done do not themselves qualify
as violable.
Thus in the legal judgment Butler analyzes in Excitable Speech,
a burning cross in a black family’s backyard can be deployed in figuration
of the conflagration of the First Amendment, becoming a smokescreen for
d i f f e r e n c e s 167

inferring an aggression against the state from the very vulnerability of a

black family (54–61). In Precarious Life another violence is exposed at the
limits of speech, giving the sense in which the “slaughter of Palestinians”
on the part of Israeli authorities is rendered “unspeakable,” an impossible
attribution of injury within the hegemonic grammar (13). 5 Further essays
pursue this “erasure” of violence, linking the invisibility of violence to a
disavowal of vulnerability (we cannot be vulnerable at all) coupled with
a hyperbolic inflation of the threat posed by the other (we are utterly vul-
nerable, to the point of annihilation). These spectral limits of sovereignty
are haunted by lives that are unable to die because they have never been
allowed to live and by a violence that ever fails to annihilate, binding itself
to its own repetition. As Butler writes,

[i]f violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from
the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives
since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange
way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and
again). They cannot be mourned because they were always lost
or, rather, never “were,” and they must be killed because they
seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence
renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its
object. ( Precarious 33)

Here, those who are “unreal” lack the boundaries protected by a norma-
tive constitution; they cannot be violated and so it is possible to do infinite
violence to them. But worse, it is necessary to do infinite violence, for what
it is to be living is not exhausted by what it is to be normatively constituted
as violable. And so the law, threatened by what persists outside its claim to
comprehensiveness, strikes to annihilate the inviolable again and again.
This is at once the Levinasian inviolable face that one seeks to kill but
cannot kill; and the “inviolable” of that which lies outside the terms of
social recognition as a legal subject. 6
Now, one might well ask how nonviolence as a practice most
effectively intervenes in this infinitely self-renewing violence. But at
least it seems clear that if the engine of this work of power is the claim to
comprehensive power and thus the bad infinity of condemnatory violence,
then the problem of responding to its authority and effects in ways that
would unsettle and disrupt rather than perpetuate such circuits must be
at the heart of Butler’s response. What is crucial to such a responding
practice is something very far from establishing the “purity” of one’s own
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gesture; rather, the point of this order of critique is that an irreducible

vulnerability—a vulnerability, note, that itself escapes representation in
the hegemonic order—should be made to appear as the perverse testimony
of violence, as that which violence “delineates” and as that which is ren-
dered invisible when violence is resolved into the purified instrument of
morally justified action. Moreover, it is crucial that our understanding of
what occurs here is diachronically rendered, for vulnerability cannot be
disavowed once, but must be hidden again and again. This violence is an
ongoing work characterized by an inherent failure initiating repetition.
On my reading, it is this situation that Butler insists we “must
heed” (Giving 101) and in a double sense. The exposure of a vulnerabil-
ity “delineated” by violence forms the first condition or “ground” of our
responsibility on terms that will seem to invert the terms of responsibility
claimed by the sovereign subject; but it also allows us to grasp the vulner-
ability in violence itself, to discern its opening onto failure and to refuse to
vindicate this failure as the occasion for a renewed attempt to realize the
compelling ideal of invulnerability that animates it. So let me now specify
more fully the terms of my disagreement with Mills’s reading of Butler,
for if the ambiguity Mills identifies in normative violence is “productive,”
I would suggest that it is unfortunately productive in ways that “feed the
law” in its claim to power, rather than disabling it.

On Life and Discourse

On Mills’s account, if ethics cannot be normative without being

violent, it is because such violence is held to constitute the agent and
patient of responsibility and recognition; and what we must not do is
“evade the violence that conditions our assumption of responsibility as
bounded beings given over to others in our very existence, whose ethical
appearance and survival rests on recognition by others in the context of
regulatory norms” (152). It therefore appears that nonviolence is impos-
sible, since normative violence, on the one hand, forms the subject of
responsibility qua subject (through the threat of desubjectification and
the constraining law of interpellation); and on the other hand, it engen-
ders the very recognizability of the face of the other qua human (via the
social regulation of appearances). Here, Mills says almost nothing about
the evident contours of a critical treatment in Butler’s work of a moral-
izing subjectivity that internalizes the threat of desubjectification in a
particular way as “bad conscience” (and will thereby be, in effect, held to
d i f f e r e n c e s 169

foreclose its responsibility); nor does she acknowledge the complexity of

the account Butler gives of the dissonance between the face and what can
be recognized in the field of social appearance.7 Indeed, in Mills’s version,
responsibility is closely aligned if not equated with recognition in a sense
that seems to limit responsibility to a relationship between those who
appear intelligibly—or become “visible”—within the social order. This is
problematic even if an “aspirational” aspect of norms remains open, one
in which we might commit ourselves to reaching for ever greater social
inclusion.
In the above citation, Mills identifies violence as that which
should not be evaded, whereas I would argue that it is, rather, our inherent
injurability that marks a vulnerability from which Butler warns against
fleeing. For not violence, but one’s exposure to violence in injurability is
what conditions our responsibility beyond what law can mark or requite
(Levinas, Adorno). Violence itself, on the other hand, we quite properly
seek to evade and to avert. On my account, it is Butler’s insight into non-
violence as a practice of exposure of violence that links ethics to social
critique, for we must also critically understand how it is that we find
ourselves mired in violence where we seem most fully concerned with
protection against injury. In Mills’s account, nothing is directly aimed
at the efforts of a “fully justified” violence to capture and eradicate (to
remedy) the terms of generalized injury (“violation”). Instead, it is the
very irredeemability of violence that works to generate a social critique
whose role is limited to highlighting the inadequacy of the norms within
whose strictures I offer recognition to the other. If this also marks the
ontological failure of normative violence, it is as a problematic failure to
be comprehensive (a failure to fully include), and that failure is partially
redeemed by allowing this reflexive insight to mitigate the aggression of
exclusion in the name of renewing the attempt to become more inclusive.
Here, the project of “becoming human”—as that which can never be fully
attained—simply functions abstractly as an infinite horizon of possibility
rather than as an undergoing of exposure. Likewise, Mills seems con-
cerned with the subject’s failure to be comprehensively responsible for
what it wills insofar as it is conditioned by what precedes its own forma-
tion, but she views this as paradoxically redeemed through the ethical
bind of mutual vulnerability in which it places us. In this sense of paradox,
we acknowledge conditions of impossibility as conditions of possibility for
recognition and responsibility—but again, in a highly formal sense. Occur-
ring at the site of normative violence, ethics is a response to violence that
170 Toward a Nonviolent Ethics

avows responsibility for it and that allows its “positive” value even in and
as it allows that we are ethically situated in ways we did not choose. But
this recuperation of a certain value to otherwise irredeemable violence, I
suggest, comes very close to installing a form of bad conscience that risks
exacerbating “our sense of omnipotence [. . .] even under the very sign of
its critique” (Giving 101).
Everything hangs here on Mills’s conjunction of the claim that
we “cannot do without” norms (150, citing Undoing 207) with the claim that
the normative form itself is violent. 8 Mills’s view that there is an “ontologi-
cal violence that inheres in normative regulation per se” (150) is supported
in two ways: first, through an interpretation of the operation of ontological
violence—variously linked to the world-making capacity of norms, to what
is “enforced and compelled” in this, and to social exclusion and the threat
of desubjectification; second, by a reading of Levinasian address as a scene
of violence—quoting Butler’s phrase “there is a certain violence already in
being addressed, given a name, subject to a set of impositions, compelled to
respond to an exacting alterity” (147, citing Precarious 139). These readings
lead Mills to force Butler into a certain disabling version of the paradox
in the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of an ethics of nonvio-
lence. But on both fronts, these are rather tendentious interpretations.
In conclusion, I shall make some brief comments on each.
We can agree, I think, that norms are to be thought of as regu-
latory and productive; thus they produce the bodies they govern (Bodies 1).
The important question on my account, however, is how comprehensive
this operation purports to be. Sex, for instance, is “materialized in the
body through a forcible process of reiteration” (136) that retroactively
installs sex as a natural attribute. The sense in which this is compelled
can be derived from a second aspect of norms, whereby they function
through an exclusionary matrix to separate the valid from the invalid,
generating “abject” life as “constitutive outside” to the domain of the
subject. The sense in which this is “world-making,” however, follows
from the success of this exclusionary construction in becoming “natural-
ized,” and that, in turn, depends upon its generating the appearance of
comprehensiveness. It is the success of the norm that turns upon seam-
lessly producing its own field of application—or the “reality” it will then
appear to describe rather than constitute; and it is to this end that the
abject which threatens that appearance must be excluded, as well as
violently assaulted, to demonstrate the utter absence of any claim on the
protection of the norm.
d i f f e r e n c e s 171

Now, where Butler writes that “the norm produces itself in the
production of that field [of application]” (my emphasis), she would seem
to be delineating the kind of closed circuit of meaning that I have equated
with the reflexive violence that “feeds the law.” To the extent that the
norm’s power subsists, the norm, as Mills notes, is “actively conferring
reality; indeed, only by virtue of its repeated power to confer reality is the
norm constituted as norm” (140, citing Undoing 52). Yet Mills reads this as
evidence both that “we necessarily live in a normative universe” and that
“norms are internally and necessarily violent” (140), and she gives a strictly
formal sense to the possibility that they might be repeated otherwise—as
an opening to agency that in no way acts against the inherent violence
in the norm. This downplays—indeed, obscures—the inherent vulner-
ability of the norm (to which its violence testifies) as the failure to fully
generate reality and thus as the noncomprehensiveness of its effort to do
so. Norms that attempt to naturalize themselves will typically do so in an
abstracted field of meaning organized around idealizations (it is just this,
for instance, that occurs when injury becomes synonymous with “viola-
tion”); and they will be challenged by all forms of violation of the norm that
drive a wedge between the effects of idealization and materialization (as
in the nonviolent force that is attached to undergoing a grief-not-resolved
through violence).
Mills’s account of normative violence thus blunts several
aspects of Butler’s articulation of “bodies that matter,” overly stressing
the “world-making” power of norms (omnipotence) and downplaying the
disruptive force of the abject and the bodily inhabitation of the norm (under
the sign of its critique). Yet, if a normative discourse confers reality, then
equally, bodies “materialize the norm” (Bodies 16)—and the relationship
goes both ways. “Matter” is inscribed in the realm of intelligibility, while
signification is embedded in a material practice, and the key ambiguity of
“mattering” reveals how materiality and signification pass through one
another in a “chiasmic” relation, neither one reducible to the other nor
possessing full dominance over the other. Within the terms this account
provides, we cannot refer to bodies as an extradiscursive reality; nor can
we imagine as closed an ontology premised on the constituting power of
discourse, since the boundary of intelligibility is inevitably “troubled”
by that which it excludes. To follow through with the image with which
I began, such would be the effect of an unresolved grief in a practice of
nonviolence, where the negativity of irresolution tracks the unredeemable
“this-injury” that the generalized condemnation of “all-injury” excludes.
172 Toward a Nonviolent Ethics

Likewise, those abject bodies that, in being excluded, provide the support
for regulatory norms enforcing the terms on which bodies matter are also
the site of a potential challenge to the symbolic hegemony; they might
“force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as ways of living that count
as ‘life’ ” (Butler, Bodies 16). 9 Mills’s account fails to show that the chiasmus
of materiality and signification might deauthorize the sovereign moment
of the performative because she only notes the temporal inscription of its
apparent ideality as containing formally alternate possibilities. But in a
sense, that is critical here: an undoing grief does not unfold in the empty,
homogenous time of merely formal resignification.
Mills further articulates her account of normative violence
through the broad identification of Butler’s position on subjectification
with Althusser’s. Noting that Butler is critical of this account, she does
not point out how Butler explicitly criticizes its “theological” structure10
and hence its participation in fostering an account of normative life that
“deadens” the living subject, thus opening the suggestion developed in
her more recent work that we need some account of how the individual
might instead take up a “living” relation to a normative world. Even in
her earlier work, it is in making this criticism that Butler moves toward
a version of ethics that thematizes the “desire to be” as potentially dis-
junct from normative violence. Specifically, she asks how the conditions
under which “attaining recognizable being requires self-negation” might
be suspended (Psychic 130). Here, we are invited to consider not only
the normative life that establishes the terms of recognizability but also
that desire which “sets the limits and the conditions for the operation of
recognition itself” and that figures as the Spinozist “desire to persist in
one’s own being” (Giving 43–44). That this desire must be honored and
“allowed to live” sets the terms of one dimension of the ethical for But-
ler. Equally, we must understand how this desire is coopted by coercive
normative power that offers recognition, in much the same way as the
proper desire of vulnerability to avert violence lends itself to the violent
project to eliminate all-injury. What we should not conclude, however, is
that this desire necessarily leads to this cooption; nor that this cooption
is the end that desire desires.
But surely, it might be objected, Mills quotes accurately from
Butler when she cites phrases that indicate our capture by norms if we
recognize vulnerability—and it may seem that I have said nothing yet
that fully engages with this. Thus, Butler indeed writes that vulnerability
cannot be properly thought about at all “outside a differentiated field of
d i f f e r e n c e s 173

power and specifically, the differential operation of norms of recognition”

(Precarious 44), and this would seem to lend clear support to Mills’s claim
that vulnerability can only appear as the “consequence of recognition
within the strictures of normative violence” (146).
Yet, these passages in Precarious Life that, so cited, would
seem to lend strong support to Mills’s claims, read again, might yield
another meaning. Preceding this claim are a set of reflections on how
we might negotiate our vulnerability without repudiating vulnerability
itself by becoming violent ourselves, or becoming “affectively dead” (42).
We must seek a world, Butler suggests, in which a line is walked between
protecting and eradicating bodily vulnerability—where the latter possi-
bility is the one I have sought to present as the absorption of injury into
the violation/justified-violence pair. Is the positing of such vulnerability
a “new basis for humanism”?11 No, Butler answers, because vulnerability
is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition. But in what
sense? What is the nature of this “dependency” for appearing? Butler has
linked this thought to “the possibility that a vulnerability will not be rec-
ognized and that it will be constituted as the ‘unrecognizable,’ ” as well as
to the thought that “when a vulnerability is recognized, that recognition
has the power to change the meaning and structure of the vulnerability
itself” (Precarious 43). I would read these remarks as cautioning about
the capacity of existing modes of recognition to coopt vulnerability in the
sense of leading our perception of it away from awareness of injurability
toward a generalized attribution of (in)violability. If vulnerability is “one
precondition of a humanization” that “takes place differentially,” then
could it be that the refusal of humanization to those who are constituted
as the “cannot be violated” gives us the specific sense of the violence done
here? But this would be on terms quite different from Mills’s account of how
recognition and violence work together. My version lends an ambiguity to
the act of recognition owing not simply to its in principle incapacity to do
justice to any other but, more specifically, and within that, owing to its
potential not to be engaged by the recalcitrance of vulnerability. In other
words, my version would concern recognition’s failure to address itself
to the resistance of life to being absorbed into discourse where this is an
undoing resistance, a scene of trouble, a place that always risks becoming
violent but need not and at best should not so become.
Expanding on the theme of vulnerability’s dependency on
norms of recognition, Butler engages in a tortuous analysis of what is
“done” and “not-done” in the act of recognition whereby, for instance,
174 Toward a Nonviolent Ethics

we recognize and at once, in so doing, sustain (note, not “constitute”) the

infant’s vulnerability:

We perform the recognition by making the claim, and that is

surely a good ethical reason to make the claim. We make the
claim, however, precisely because it is not taken for granted,
precisely because it is not in every instance honored. Vulner-
ability takes on another meaning at the moment it is recognized,
and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability.
We cannot posit this vulnerability without performing the very
thesis that we oppose (our positing is itself a form of recognition
and so manifests the power of our discourse). This framework,
by which norms are essential to the constitution of vulnerability
as a precondition of the “human,” is important precisely for this
reason, namely, that we need and want those norms to be in
place, that we struggle for their establishment, and that we value
their continuing and expanded operation. ( Precarious 43)

The question, perhaps, is how to interpret the anguish or carefulness that

clearly marks this passage. Is it an anguish before necessary violence (that
we can yet value because we value norms)? Or is an attempt staged here
to elaborate a tension between vulnerability and recognition, in which,
although in a sense mutually dependent, the relationship is also marked
by escape, petition, transformation, and travesty. The latter might well
be connected with Butler’s immediate turn in the succeeding paragraph
to a refigured Hegelian dialectic, one resistant to collapsing into identity
the “I” and the “you.” At stake here is the space between-us; the space of
address. Here, it is said that to “posit” vulnerability does something we
oppose. But what does it do that we oppose? Does it do violence? Butler does
not say so. Rather, it seems that what we oppose is how positing “manifests
the constitutive power of our discourse”; and perhaps we “oppose” this in
order to make manifest or expose this power—in order, then, to put this
form of power in play, to defuse its claim to fix and establish what is real by
resituating its “world-making” force in what lies between us. As she goes
on to say, a recognition located in the order of address is “not for what one
is,” but “solicits” a becoming, instigates a transformation (Precarious 44).
It does not reinstate normative violence except when address has failed,
has ceased to mark the spacing of the “I” and the “you” in which the power
to reduce the other to the same is being opposed.
d i f f e r e n c e s 175

One should notice, then, the role of a certain negativity in

these accounts of the scene of recognition, such that Butler constructs her
thought around claims about disorientation and loss that seem to resist
the appropriative capacities of language: “I cannot muster the ‘we’ except
by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you,’ by trying to translate but
finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know
you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss” (Precarious
49). Here, the “you” occupies a position analogous to the nongeneralizable
injury; in this instance, it is the “you” resisting the recuperation of speci-
ficity into a language premised on the interchangeability-without-loss of
subject positions. If one must often fail to mark this “you,” given the pres-
sure of language toward substitutability, one must equally—and as the first
condition of responsibility—find that opening again and again.
The sense in which the address of the “face” or to the “you”
breaks with normative violence marks again the vulnerability of every
system of power—its lack of closure, its opening onto the chance of being
reinscribed otherwise. But this is only insofar as the potential for doing
violence by “constituting” the other as unrecognizable (Precarious 43)
is exposed in the nonviolent performative: in undoing the given terms of
social recognizability. Perhaps this is the force, for Levinas, of the claim
that humanity is a “rupture in being.” The difference between knowledge
and acknowledgement of the other that is so important here turns upon
the way in which vulnerability escapes representation, so that to reach it
we must try to subvert the “constitutive power” or sovereignty of our own
discourse (Precarious 43) in the direction of accepting an open-endedness
of encounter in which our own vulnerability is also undergone (44). The
point is also put in another essay as the image that “must not only fail to
capture its referent but show this failing” (Precarious 146). This is not to
say that address occurs “outside” normative articulation of the recogniz-
able, but rather that it exposes the limits of this schema of power. Thus
the face expresses a vulnerability that breaks with the order of meaning
through an unworking of language and power. As Butler puts it, “[T]he
face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will be that for which no words
really work; the face seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of language
evacuating its sense, the sonorous substratum of vocalization that pre-
cedes and limits the delivery of semantic sense” (134). The “situation of
discourse” is one in which a vulnerability to being undone must and can
be exposed.12
176 Toward a Nonviolent Ethics

If to give a human face to the other may often be to violently

capture them in our own frames of representation, we do well to remember
how and within what rationale the inviolable face has thereby been erased.
Writing of the photographs of Afghani women’s bared faces, presented in
the wake of war to symbolize for Americans their act of liberation, Butler
seeks in them what they are designed not to show. She thereby figures—
even in a scene of total capture—the irremediable grief that, lying unseen,
may yet expose the violence of its occlusion.

It became bared to us, at that moment, and we were, as it were,

in possession of the face; not only did our cameras capture it,
but we arranged for the face to capture our triumph, and act as
the rationale for our violence, the incursion on our sovereignty,
the deaths of civilians. Where is loss in that face? And where is
the suffering over war? Indeed, the photographed face seemed to
conceal or displace the face in the Levinasian sense, since we saw
and heard through that face no vocalization of grief or agony,
no sense of the precariousness of life. ( Precarious 142)

The point, perhaps, is that even “no vocalization” might speak against the
picture in which it is silenced, or against the invisibility of loss in what
occurs as injury to the inviolable. And if, in posing as a question where
loss has gone, one must avoid claiming to know already the experience one
imagines is effaced, the gesture of asking might yet oppose the recitation
of violence and as such to begin to mark its undoing.

fiona jenkins is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Australian National University. She
teaches and researches on Nietzsche and post-Nietzschean ethics and political thought,
on feminist and gender theory, and on film as philosophy. She is currently engaged in a
research project under the working title “Ungrievable Lives.”

Notes 1 Note that it will also be important
to avoid appearing to resolve this
last issue in a simple validation
of the lesson in vulnerability
that is taught by persecution;
or in a melancholy attachment
to irresolution itself.
2 Butler’s discussion of the pas-
sage here quoted from Levinas
is complex, and for want of space
I cannot begin to do it justice.
But I would like to point out
the importance of the slippage
she notes in Levinas’s account
between the ontological and the
preontological (Giving 94), as well
as what are held to be the advan-
tages of Laplanche’s account of
subject-formation over Levinas’s
insofar as the former is dia-
chronic rather than synchronic
(96), thus more adequately char-
acterizing the temporality of the
sphere of a responsibility begot-
ten in exposure. Neither point
d i f f e r e n c e s
affects the argument I suggest she
draws from him here. See Levi-
nas, Otherwise; and Laplanche.
3 For Levinas’s account, see his
Otherwise Than Being 111 and
Difficult Freedom 8. Butler also
follows Adorno (Minima Moralia
164) in speaking of such expo-
sure as the “chance of becoming
human” (Giving 136; see also
101–03). Compare this with her
discussion of exposure in Precari-
ous Life (30), which indicates the
political potential of holding grief
open.
4 These thoughts are clearly at the
centre of Butler’s meditations
on the response to 9/11. See, for
instance, Precarious Life 33–34,
in which the “derealization” of
those killed as “ungrievable lives”
is linked to an “infinite” justifica-
tion for violence—such that “the
war against terrorism as a war
without end will be one that justi-
fies itself endlessly in relation to
the spectral infinity of its enemy”
(34). It is important that Butler
gives such examples of the ways
in which these pathologies are
alive and active in the contempo-
rary world. See my point in the
next paragraph about the nonfor-
mal character of this critique.
5 For a more extended discussion
of this order of violence and the
asymmetric attributions of horror
it is bound up with, see Jenkins.
6 This indicates the importance
in Levinas’s ethics of a curious
revaluation and reinscription of
the imperative form. Precarious
life enjoins as imperative “thou
shalt not kill”; yet the face is also
“what one cannot kill” (Levinas
qtd. in Precarious 132; see Levi-
nas, “Peace” 167). The “banal
fact” of murder is countered by
a limit posed to the very capaci-
ties of action by that face whose
“claim” belongs to an order of
177
inviolability beyond the reach of
law: “At the very moment when
my power to kill realizes itself,
the other has escaped me [. . .]. To
be in relation with the other face
to face is to be unable to kill. It is
also the situation of discourse”
(Levinas qtd. in Precarious
138). Here, ontological violence
encounters a certain limit in an
ethics that “ruptures” its power;
and the authority of the impera-
tive is strictly articulated around
a principle of nonviolence, reach-
ing toward that which (paradoxi-
cally) disables the will. Similarly,
I suggest that the ethics Butler
seeks to specify is normative, but
not in a sense bound up with the
judgment system of moralizing
subjectivity. In “Critique, Coer-
cion, and Sacred Life in Benja-
min’s ‘Critique of Violence,’ ” she
discusses this form of normativity
at length: it is noncoercive; it is
a “guideline,” not a prescription;
and one must “wrestle” with its
implications, first, in the space
between the fear of inflicting and
undergoing violence (being will-
ing to countenance the latter),
and second, because one must
“take it on”—perform the uptake
of its law—again and again.
7 See Precarious Life 138–44, dis-
cussed more fully in what follows.
8 Mills notes that Butler’s claim
that we cannot do without norms
is conjoined with the thought
that “we do not have to assume
that their form is given or fixed,”
but she gives no explicit read-
ing of the further remark that
“even if we cannot do without
them, it will be seen that we
cannot accept them as they are”
(Undoing 207). It seems Mills is
reading this “unacceptability” of
norms-as-they-are as entailing
the injunction that we aim “for
a more expansive conception of
what counts as human within
normative regimes of social
178
intelligibility” (Mills 150); and
the sense she gives to “critique”
is thus directed at revealing a
normalizing violence that works
through exclusion and disavowal.
I am suggesting that this may not
be what Butler means when she
writes of the “unacceptability” of
norms as they are; indeed, I have
suggested that the problem with
some forms of normative life is
precisely their violence, but also
that there is no obvious case to
be made for saying that all norms
are of this order.
9 In the introduction to Bodies That
Matter, Butler indeed specifies
how her theorization of performa-
tivity is distinct from constructiv-
ism, insofar as the latter’s “limits
are exposed at those boundaries
of bodily life where abjected or
delegitimated bodies fail to count
as ‘bodies’ ” (Bodies 155). Here,
it seems that precisely the prob-
lematic existence of abject life
marks the difference between
an account organized around
“performativity” (the reiteration
of norms where failure, or rep-
etition, is otherwise more than
merely a formal possibility, being
a way of exposing violence) and
constructivism (involving the
figure and fiction of a “sovereign”
power of discourse able to bring
wholly into being what it names
and conferring identity on a pas-
sive object). Mills’s account of
the social appearance of bodies
(organized around a focus on how
they are successfully constituted)
results in a problematic construc-
tivism reentering as the impos-
sibility of escaping ontological
violence—which, however, begs
Toward a Nonviolent Ethics
the question as to why this should
be conceived as violence at all,
unless (impossibly) we imagine
it as violating a prediscursive
reality on which it is imposed.
10 “[T]he performative force of
the voice of religious authority
becomes exemplary for the theory
of interpellation, thus extending
through example the putative
force of divine naming to the
social authorities by which the
subject is hailed into social being”
(Psychic 114).
11 By “humanism” I take Butler to
evoke the “simple entry of the
excluded into an established
ontology” as opposed to her own
concerns to instigate an “insur-
rection at the level of ontology, a
critical opening up of the ques-
tions, What is real? Whose lives
are real? How might reality be
remade?” (Precarious 33).
12 A comparable internal movement
is at work in the thought that
one’s right to preserve oneself
fails and founders on the desire
and need of its internal risk of
undoing. “One seeks to preserve
oneself against the injuriousness
of the other, but if one were suc-
cessful at walling oneself off from
injury, one would become inhu-
man” (Butler, Giving 103). This
does not vitiate the importance of
rights nor the attempt to oppose
injury. But crucially, it requires
us to avoid the temptation to
oppose all risk of injury, at once
generalizing or homogenizing its
terms of reference and failing to
locate it in the more fundamen-
tal capacity for impingement or
being-affected.
d i f f e r e n c e s 179

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Ref lections from Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott.
London: Verso, 1974.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London: Routledge,
1993.

. “Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence.’ ”

Political Theologies. Ed. Hent de Vries. New York: Fordham up, 2006. 201–19.

. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge, 1997.

. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham up, 2005.

. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso,

2004.

. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, ca: Stanford up,
1997.

. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge, 2004.

Jenkins, Fiona. “Dialogue in the Aftermath: On Good, Evil, and Responsibility after Sep-
tember 11.” borderlands e-journal 3.1 (2004). http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.
edu.au/vol3no1_2004/jenkins_dialogue.htm.

Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore,
md: Johns Hopkins up, 1985.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Sean Hand. Baltimore,
md: Johns Hopkins up, 1990.

. Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.