Indeed, this objection has been raised by Butler’s critics and commentators alike.

Ontology, one might think, is simply neutral on the question of politics. Thus, it is not obvious from the point of view of ontology why any particular social arrangement should be normatively privileged over any other. Social arrangements, whatever form they take-whether just or unjust, egalitarian or inegalitarian, violent or nonviolent-will all be made possible by our shared ontological condition. Why should recognising our vulnerability prompt us to contest existing differentials of precarity and violence? After all, there can be no direct contradiction between an ontological condition of embodiment and particular social arrangements. However, the route from Butler’s metaphysical claims to their ethico-political commitments is not always clear. Butler’s ontology is meant to have a substantive normative upshot: it follows from recognition of our shared bodily condition, they argue, that we must reject violence and contest inegalitarian distributions of precarity in our social world.

This ontology understands embodied life in terms of its constitutive vulnerability and interdependency. (2023) “Ontology as a Guide to Politics? Judith Butler on Interdependency, Vulnerability, and Nonviolence”,ī eginning with work written in the wake of 9/11 and in response to the Iraq War, Judith Butler has recently been developing an ontology of the body that they hope will underpin a renewed commitment to egalitarian social conditions. These ideals and the violence they encourage amount to a disavowal of our ontological condition, while commitment to nonviolence is a way of acknowledging Nonetheless, I contend that Butler is right that genuinely acknowledging our vulnerability is likely to make us more responsive to the claims of others, loosening the grip of ideals of invulnerability and sovereign independence. I argue that one of Butler’s central attempts to derive an ethic of nonviolence from ontology is unpersuasive, resting on a conflation of the ontological and ontic senses of ‘interdependency’. I draw on Heidegger’s ontological/ontic distinction to elucidate the central concepts of Butler’s ontology: vulnerability, precariousness, and interdependency. In this paper I reconstruct Butler’s response to this challenge, arguing that there is an interesting and plausible path from ontology to politics. However, the route from Butler’s ontological claims to their ethico-political commitments is not clear: how can the general ontological features of embodiment Butler identifies introduce constraints on behaviour or political arrangements? Ontology, one might think, is neutral on questions of politics. In recent work, Judith Butler has sought to develop a ‘new bodily ontology’ with a substantive normative upshot: recognition of our shared bodily condition, they argue, can support an ethic of nonviolence and a renewed commitment to egalitarian social conditions.

Judith butler 2016