The Force of Nonviolence: Rethinking Vulnerability, Violence, and Resistance

I’m not sure what the title of this artwork is but it should be entitled “The Silence of Violence”.

If it were not for such modern fine works in modern philosophy and history, I would not have been able to generate clarity on the subject matter of which I find myself so tremendously preoccupied. The political question becomes: What are the modes of representation that are available to us to apprehend this form of violence? Of course I am talking about the use of electromagnetic frequency weapons in the phenomenon of Group Stalking. Some would say that global and regional authorities would have to identify the vulnerable groups who are the targets for this type of violence and offer them protection. Except identifying and labeling groups of people as “vulnerable” would not get to the heart of the problem. Anyone familiar with the critical analysis in discourse for vulnerable groups of individuals well knows the formation of the discourse reproduces paternalistic power and gives authority to regulatory agencies with interests and constraints of their own.(1)

The following excerpt comes from Judith Butler’s latest work, “The Force of Nonviolence: An ethico-political bind",

“What seems clear is that, as important as it is to revalue vulnerability and give place to care, neither vulnerability nor care can serve as the basis of a politics. None of us should seek to be saints, if what that means is that we hoard all goodness for ourselves, expelling the flawed or destructive dimensions of the human psyche to actors on the outside, those living in the region of the “not me,” with whom we dis-identify. If, for instance, by … bifurcated reality in which our own aggression is edited out of the picture or projected onto others. [When considered as a condition, it] can neither be isolated from other terms, nor be the kind of phenomenon that can serve as a foundation [for a new politic]. Is anyone vulnerable, for instance, without persisting in a vulnerable condition? Further, if we think about those who, in a condition of vulnerability, resist that very condition, how do we understand that duality?

….In portraying people and communities who are subject to violence in systematic ways, do we do them justice, do we respect the dignity of their struggle, if we summarize them as “the vulnerable”?”(2)

Butler acknowledges we cannot talk about vulnerability without mentioning its various groups which she sees, not only as, ethnic refugees, the social domination of women and the targeted violence of trans women, but certainly other groups like the mentally ill.

Violence is often re-afflicted, again and again, onto women induced into subordination because of there vulnerability and women who dare to make a legal complaint can be punished for the manifestation of courage and persistence. Feminicide is the most extreme form domination takes, but other forms include discrimination, harassment and battery. (And in the phenomenon as I have experienced it, all three forms coalescing with the use of electromagnetic frequency fields, weapons of torture.) These other forms have to be understood as existing on the same continuum as murder and feminicide. Women who live on in such climates are to some degree terrorized by the prevalence and impunity of these practices. They are induced into subordination by men in order to avoid a fate, which means their experience with inequality and subjection is already linked to a status as “killable". This is not a casual argument, yet every form of domination signals this lethal conclusion as a potential. Sexual violence carries with it the threat of death, and too often, makes good on that promise.

Often this power to terrorize, is too often backed up, supported and strengthened by police and court systems that refuse to investigate and prosecute the real issue that represents larger criminal orchestrations by actors responsible for the electronic domination of female victims.

Killing is obviously the upmost violent act, but its themes could not be reproduced with such great speed and intensity if it were not for those, with the legal means to act, dismiss the true crime to begin with, blame the victim, and/or pathologize her, in the spirit of exonerating those who are guilty.

Indeed, the use of electromagnetic torture and electromagnetic frequency fields to discipline and punish a human condition, the very condition which historically has been demonized and relegated to a lower often sub-human level, really a fair practice in a democracy?

“Indeed, impunity is all too often built into the legal structure (which is one reason local authorities resist the intervention of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights), meaning that the refusal to receive the report, and the failure to recognize the [real] crime all perpetuates the violence and gives license to murder. In such a case, we have to locate violence in the act, but also in the foreshadowing exhibited by the social domination of women — and of the feminized. Violence occurs in the series of legal refusals and failures to recognize it as such: no report means no crime, no punishment, and no reparation.” (2)

Sources:

(1) See Martha Fineman’s work on website foregrounding the scholarship of her research team at Emory University: “Vulnerability and the Human Condition” Emory University official website, web.gs.emory.edu/vulnerability.

Montserrat Sagot, “A rota critica da violencia intrafamiliar em paises latino-americanos,” in Stela Nazareth Meneghel, ed., Rotas criticas: mulheres enfrentando a violencia, Sao Leopoldo: Editoria Usinos, 2007, 23–50.

Julia Estela Monarrez Fragoso, “Serial Sexual Femicide in Ciudad Juarez: 1993–2001,” Debate Femenista 13:25, 2002.

Butler, Judith (2020). The Force of Nonviolence: An ethico-political bind. New York. Verso Publishing.