Ontology as ideology: A critique of Butler's theory of precariousness

Abstract

In the past decade, political philosophers have increasingly deployed the concepts of interdependency, equality, and vulnerability to critique contemporary society.¹ Widely popular both within and beyond academia, these concepts offer normative anchors enabling the critique of neoliberal ideals of individuality, independence, and resilience in the name of a more egalitarian society. Consequently, although many scholars denounce violence in existing society, they abstain from denouncing human beings’ interdependency, equality, vulnerability, and precariousness.² To the contrary, these concepts are treated as grasping our fundamental, ontological condition. Indeed, their capacity to resist neoliberal illusions of atomistic independence purportedly arises from their ability to reveal the hidden truth that neoliberalism otherwise conceals: that human beings are ontologically interdependent and equal. This truth, then, is said to carry its own ethical principle, demanding the realization of equality through political action. The use of these concepts today thus mobilizes more than an ontology; it also offers an interpretation of existing society—as deviating from and concealing ontology—and a politics that seeks to organize society in accordance with ontology.

Among the many voices taking up this position, Judith Butler's is perhaps the most prominent, particularly in the ontological theory of precariousness they articulate in their late work.³ Hence, this article offers a critical engagement with Butler's ontology and the politics they derive therefrom. Butler's work, of course, has not been without criticism. However, the existing debate on their work focuses overwhelmingly on their so-called “ethical turn,” as well as their accounts of vulnerability and responsibility.⁴ Important in their own right, these debates have tended to accept or leave unchallenged the basic structure of Butler's ontology.⁵ Although critics have scrutinized the critical potential and limits of aspects of Butler's ontology, especially her account of vulnerability (e.g., Gilson, 2011), they have left two of its most central features relatively unexamined: interdependency and equality. In doing so, even those critical of Butler's work maintain Butler's presumption that interdependency and equality are ontological features that inherently oppose neoliberal individualism, independence, resilience, and inequality.⁶

In this article, by contrast, I critique Butler's ontology by submitting these two otherwise-accepted concepts to historical materialist analysis. My aim in this regard is to reveal the ideological underpinnings of Butler's ontology, with attention to its capitulations to capitalist society. In doing so, this article reveals the limitations of Butler's ontology and politics. Their theory, it shows, cannot adequately grasp the sources of capitalist violence and domination and thus fails to provide an emancipatory politics. To that end, this article develops two central claims: first, that Butler's ontological theory is transhistorical; second, that this theory is the ontologization of capitalist society.

Section one sets the stage for this critique, by outlining Butler's ontological critique of neoliberalism. Section two, then, argues that Butler operates with a transhistorical account of interdependency. Drawing on Karl Marx's analysis of capitalist interdependency as personal independence founded on objective dependence, I show that Butler overlooks the historical specificity of interdependency. Contra Butler, this section reveals that interdependency is not a veiled ontological condition to be realized through politics, but rather one that capitalist society has already realized.

In section three, I turn to Theodor Adorno to show that Butler ontologizes features and relations of capitalist society. I contend that the central feature of Butler's ontology—that we are equal by virtue of our interdependence—is uniquely capitalist. In precapitalist societies, interdependency was characterized by inequality. By contrast, it is only with the emergence of capitalism that interdependency comes to presuppose equality. Finally, in section four and in the conclusion, I explore the detrimental political stakes of Butler's ontologization of historically specific features of capitalist society. In section four, I analyze Butler's account of genocide to show that their ontology elides the violence of equality in capitalist society. And to conclude, I explore the limitations of Butler's ontological approach for theorizing emancipatory politics.

Before turning to these arguments, however, I wish to clarify this article's central aims. This article does not offer a critique of ontological theorization as such. It also does not attempt to somehow claim that human beings are not interdependent, equal, vulnerable, or precarious. And it does not, I must stress, attempt to provide a new ontology or an alternative to Butler's. Rather, my goal is to highlight the dangers of ontology-centered critiques for questions of social justice and emancipatory theory and praxis. Thus, in exposing the ideological underpinnings of Butler's ontology, my central aspiration is twofold. First, I hope to turn our attention not merely to neoliberal ideologies but to capitalism itself as a distinct form of society. Second, and in so doing, I hope to spur further critical reflection on the ontological claims at play in contemporary philosophy.

In pursuing these ends through a historical materialist approach, this article builds on a long tradition of philosophy that seeks to expose the ideological features of hegemonic ontological claims. Critiques of universal claims and theories about human nature are no novelty for philosophers. Here, Marx's critique of Adam Smith's naturalization of exchange, R. C. Lewontin's critique of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and C. B. Macpherson's reading of Thomas Hobbes’ account of the state of nature come to mind.⁷ As these theorists and others have shown, truth claims are not valid for all times and places; they are rather reflections of the dominant ideas, values, and structures of the societies from which they emerge. The contributions of feminist thinkers—and amongst them Butler themself—have likewise been invaluable in this vein. Feminists have exposed the ideological components of ontology by interrogating the fabrication of the so-called human nature, and, moreover, critiqued these components for naturalizing and legitimizing existing social inequalities.⁸ Critiques targeting obvious cases, such as Darwinism and biological determinism, abound. Yet contemporary philosophy, too, replicates the tendency to naturalize social relations—albeit in more subtle ways. Butler's ontology, as this article shows, is an important example in this regard.

In subjecting Butler's ontology to a historical materialist critique, one can anticipate at least three primary resistances. First, Butler's early work pioneered the critique of naturalistic conceptions of the body. It could thus appear as a flagrant misreading to accuse their later work of replicating the very tendencies they once vehemently opposed (e.g., Butler, 1993). However, as I shall discuss further, their later work manifestly deploys a nature/society dichotomy, as evidenced by their precariousness/precarity distinction (Lloyd, 2015). Second, we should recall that Butler's later work purports to mobilize a nontraditional ontology, one they refer to as a “social ontology” (Butler, 2009).⁹ Social ontology, Butler maintains, is not a “claim to a description of fundamental structures”; rather, they hold, it uniquely refers to the “‘being’ of the body” as “exposed to social crafting and form” (p. 3). Sophisticated as Butler's social ontology may be, however, it is nonetheless ontology. It is so, as we see Butler themself express, because the “social” of social ontology in fact merely denotes a fundamental structure of the human condition: the body's inherent capacity to be affected and formed. Social ontology, thus, simply incorporates that which is supposed to be ontology's other—the social, historical, or contingent—into ontology itself. Indeed, as I show in this article, especially in section three, the social features that Butler ontologizes are those of their own society. Social ontology, like the naturalisms of Darwin or Hobbes, thus, is eminently of its time.

Finally, there is also a common-sense objection to my argument: “But isn't Butler simply right? Human beings have always been precarious, vulnerable, and interdependent. Surely, then, these are part of our ontology.” The goal of this article is not to argue to the contrary. Instead, my aim in what follows is to show that in Butler's ontological account, society enters through the backdoor: therein, features of capitalist society masquerade as universal, ontological truths. That is, although I grant that interdependency, vulnerability, and precariousness appear in all human societies, I contend that Butler fails to grasp them because they mistake their capitalist forms for universals. However, this fundamental misstep, as this article reveals, traps Butler's theory within the terms of the very society it seeks to critique.

Butler engages in an ontological critique of neoliberalism. Opposing the ontological condition of precarious, interdependent subjects to the neoliberal conception of the autonomous and independent individual, they argue that the independent individual is fictitious and denies an ontological condition of equality and interdependency. Thus, as this section shows, Butler derives both their critique of neoliberalism and their egalitarian politics from an ontological account of precariousness.

For Butler, precariousness denotes the ontological condition of interdependency, vulnerability, and bodily exposure to socioeconomic and political forces (Butler, 2009). Precariousness, Butler writes, is an inescapable feature of the human condition because it is “coextensive with birth” (p. 14). Indeed, as they also write, it follows “from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness, and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions” (Butler, 2015).

Implied in the condition of interdependency, Butler argues, is yet a further ontological structure: equality. “Interdependency,” they write, “though accounting for differentials of independence and dependence, implies social equality: each is dependent, or formed and sustained in relations of depending upon, and being depended upon” (Butler, 2021). We are all equal, for Butler, because no one is fully independent. Thus, precariousness is a state of natural equal interdependence.

Butler, however, contrasts the equality of precariousness with the inequality of our social condition. Although vulnerability marks everyone's very existence, they emphasize, particular populations are marked by differential vulnerability (Butler, 2009). To capture this unequal distribution of precariousness, Butler introduces the concept of “precarity” (pp. 3, 25–26). They describe precarity as “a more specifically political notion,” (p. 3) one naming the “politically induced condition of maximized precariousness” (p. 26). Specifically, Butler maintains, “precarity” is the “differential distribution of precariousness” where “certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (p. 26). Precarity, for Butler, names our failure to realize socially the ontological condition of equal interdependence. It thus captures how neoliberal policies, arbitrary state violence, police violence, incarceration, war, and genocide subject certain populations to increased precariousness (pp. 26, 115, 147; 2015, p. 11).

The sororal concepts of precarity and precariousness are foundational for Butler's politics. As Moya Lloyd points out, they allow Butler to distinguish “primary vulnerability, the ontological condition of being given over to others shared by all” from the “concrete, particular, historical conditions of insecurity and liability faced by some” (Butler, 2015). The distinction enables Butler to critique aspects of precariousness, qua precarity, while affirming precariousness as such, and rendering it the ground for a new ethics of responsibility. “The recognition of shared precariousness,” Butler holds, “introduces strong normative commitments of equality and invites a more robust universalizing of rights that seeks to address basic human needs for food, shelter, and other conditions for persisting and flourishing” (Butler, 2009). By deriving ethical obligations from the ontological condition of shared vulnerability and interdependency, Butler thus posits that we are obligated to preserve the lives of others because we cannot survive independently (p. 113). More precisely, as precarity is the differential distribution of precariousness, the ethical demand, for Butler, becomes the nondifferential, or equal, distribution of precariousness (p. 25). They “call for an equally livable life” that “requires the egalitarian distribution of public goods” (2015, p. 69). Butler's politics, thus, is the normative demand for egalitarian distribution.

Here, however, Butler's egalitarianism is predicated on a peculiar understanding of equality. Because their egalitarianism is derived from an ontological interdependency, Butler describes equality as “non-individualist,” or beyond the equality of individuals (Butler, 2021). This ontological equality, Butler maintains, “cannot be reduced to a calculus that accords each abstract person the same value” (p. 16). Thus, the form of equality implied by ontology is not, Butler tells us, a liberal equality of “singular and distinct” individuals; rather, it is an equality of singularities “defined and sustained by virtue of their interrelationality” (p. 16). Ontologically we are equal in a condition of never being “fully individuated” (p. 46).

Butler's account of ontological nonindividualist equality grounds their critique of capitalism. By contrasting ontological equality with social inequality, Butler portrays capitalism as denying interdependency and equality (Butler, 2009, 2015). Under “contemporary conditions,” they write, “there is a war on the idea of interdependency” and “the social network of hands that seek to minimize the unlivability of lives” (p. 67). For Butler, moreover, capitalist ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism promote the falsehood of an independent and self-sufficient individual (Butler, 2009, 2021). Capitalism and its neoliberal illusion of individualism veil, violate, and deny global interdependency, thus producing precarity (Butler, 2021). Neoliberal individualism, Butler claims, depicts precariousness as a threat to be eradicated. Doing so, it propagates the fantasy that life can be protected, thereby justifying the very governmental mechanisms that foster precarity. By contrast, Butler holds that politics that aims to combat inequality by abolishing precariousness is futile, because our ontology cannot be eliminated. The ethical–political task, they write, is “not to overcome dependency in order to achieve self-sufficiency, but to accept interdependency as a condition of equality” (p. 47).

By contrast, they hold, ontology helps us combat precarity by offering “equality” as “a principle that organizes the social organization of health, food, shelter, employment, sexual life, and civic life” (Butler, 2021).¹¹ Thus, Butler seeks to institute equal interdependency on egalitarian terms: minimize precarity and establish “equally livable life” through an egalitarian distribution of public goods (Butler, 2015). In so doing, Butler's politics of equality would eradicate precarity by fully realizing precariousness. As Janell Watson (2012) puts it, Butler's egalitarian solution to unequally imposed neoliberal precarity is “precariousness for all.”

In opposing precariousness to neoliberalism, Butler simultaneously holds that individual independence exists only in fiction and that we are denied our ontological state of equal interdependence. But is it true that the independent individual is merely an illusion, or does it have an objective reality in existing society? Is interdependency a veiled and as yet unrealized ontological condition or are different societies characterized by different forms of interdependency? Butler, I will show in what follows, is incorrect to describe capitalism as a society somehow lacking or opposed to interdependency. Rather, the emergence of capitalism does not mark the transition from an interdependent society to an individualistic one; it constitutes a transition from one form of interdependency to another. In theorizing these changing forms, this section offers a non-ontological account of interdependency. This account, in turn, reveals the transhistorical character of Butler's ontology.

In offering such an account, to clarify, I am not denying that interdependency has been a feature of every society. However, to accept the persistence of certain features across distinct human societies is not to immediately engage in transhistorical theorization. When Marx, for instance, states that all hitherto existing societies have been class societies, the implication is not that class is an inescapable feature of ontology—in fact, his conclusion is precisely the opposite (Marx & Engels, [1848] 2010). Furthermore, the acknowledgment of historically specific formations of something called “class” methodologically precludes us from treating class as “class as such.” That is, the content of what class is, in each case, is entirely determined by the society in which it appears. Thus, Marx's claim that all hitherto existing societies have been class societies is a historical, rather than a transhistorical claim. Following Marx, the historical account of interdependency I offer articulates the specific forms it assumes in the different societies in which it exists. This reveals Butler's transhistoricism: their tendency to elide historical specificity and thus reduce interdependency to a static, unchanging ontological feature true for all times and all places.

To analyze interdependency historically, we can begin by examining its shape in capitalism. Here, consider that Butler's claim that capitalism and its neoliberal ideology are expressions of independent and atomistic individuality is not so much false as it is partial. Although Butler sets up a dichotomy between ontological interdependency and the social illusion of independence, capitalist interdependency must be understood in relation to the fact that its social relations appear like independence. Grasping the form interdependency takes in capitalism, thus, requires explaining its dialectical relationship to independence as one of capitalism's unique features.

Rather than rendering interdependence natural and independence socially imposed, Marx recognizes that both are features of capitalist society. As he demonstrates in the Grundrisse, capitalist interdependency marks the transition from fixed relations of personal dependence to “personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence” (Marx, 1993). Marx analyzes capitalist interdependency in relation to the individual freedom that arises from the dissolution of personal bonds of dependence constitutive of feudal society, the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, and its concomitant social relations. Capitalist society, for Marx, constitutes a totality in which individuals, regardless of their social roles, are fully integrated. That is, to survive as independent producers, all individuals must take part in the division of labor.¹² This integration forms a taut network of interdependencies, yet it does not entirely negate the personal independence of the individual. Rather, capitalist interdependency constitutes an opposition between the individual—as self-determining, free, and autonomous—and the sphere of objective necessity. It thus characterizes individual freedom within, what historian Moishe Postone has referred to as, “a more overarching form of unfreedom” rooted in a set of historically specific conditions in which “people make history in a form that dominates and compels them” (Postone, 2012).

In breaking with feudal forms of interdependence, in other words, the capitalist mode of production constitutes a society characterized by a new form of interdependence. Specifically, what gives rise to interdependency in capitalism is that labor comes to mediate social relations. In previous societies, labor and its products were produced and distributed in accordance with various traditional norms and overt relations of power and domination (such as slave, feudal, kinship relations, or personal and direct subordination to others).¹³ In capitalism, by contrast, one no longer consumes what one produces; rather, one's labor and its products serve as means for obtaining the products of others for consumption and survival. That is, it is not sufficient to merely produce; one must also exchange. In mediating exchange, labor in capitalism brings about a new form of interdependency whereby each is dependent on everyone else for their survival. Thus, labor comes to mediate all social relations, rather than being mediated by them, as was the case in precapitalist society.

The unique character of labor in capitalism brings about a peculiar form of interdependency. In capitalist society, each individual's labor functions in the same socially mediating way: each individual's concrete labor is a part of the whole and, as abstract labor, it is a moment of a homogeneous, general, social mediation that constitutes the capitalist social totality (Postone, 1993). Here, the specificity of labor is abstracted while labor and its objectifications become the means through which single individuals acquire the products of others. By this process, capitalist production generates its unique form of interdependency: each individual is dependent on others for their livelihood, insofar as everyone's labor mediates all social relations.¹⁴ Contrary to Butler's supposition, thus, capitalism does not dissolve interdependency “as such”; rather, in dissolving feudal interdependency, it simultaneously gives way to a new form of interdependency.

Further complicating Butler's account, moreover, Marx's analysis reveals that interdependency is not naturally given but socially imposed. In capitalism, interdependency is not a fragile, ontological condition to be protected, as Butler presumes, but a compulsory form of integration. Labor in capitalism ceases to function as a direct means of subsistence, functioning rather as a means for the acquisition of others’ goods (Postone, 2012).¹⁵ In predicating survival upon exchange relations, capitalist labor compels us to integrate in the process of commodity production.

Capitalism's compulsory interdependency is best understood as domination. The mediation of social relations described thus far—as indirect, covert, and abstract—gives rise to a form of domination that shares these characteristics. Contrasting ancient slave or feudal societies, for instance, capitalist domination is uniquely abstract. As Postone explains, this domination “is not grounded in any person, class or institution; its ultimate locus is the pervasive structuring of social forms of capitalist society that are constituted by determinate forms of social practice” (Postone, 1993). Capitalist domination, that is, cannot be traced to the agency of particular groups or individuals; rather, it is the product of the activity of all individuals engaged in capitalist relations for survival. The compulsory character of interdependency is, simultaneously, its form of domination.

The abstract nature of capitalist interdependence itself helps us explain why Butler concludes that capitalism is principally characterized by individual independence. As Marx recognizes, it is precisely because capitalism's objective form of interdependency is covert that it does not immediately appear to be a form of interdependency at all (Marx, 1993). That is, unlike earlier societies, people in capitalism appear independent even though they are interdependent. Marx's concept of alienation helps explain this appearance. Famously, alienation for Marx expresses the process by which human beings are dominated by their own productive activities and the product thereof—capital. Though this process is a social relation between individuals, it appears to them as their “subordination to relations which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals” (Marx, 1993). Individuals’ basic interdependency as expressed in these social relations, that is, is obscured by the interdependent, and yet alien, mode of production. Consequently, Marx explains, “[t]he general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual—their mutual interconnection—here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing” (p. 157). The appearance of independence, thus, emerges from the alienating condition of the capitalist mode of production.

Marx's account of alienation, however, does not negate the formal, independence of the individual in capitalism. Rather, it conserves the dialectical relationship of independence and interdependence. In Marx's historical analysis, the course of the individual earning a historically unprecedented level of independence from interpersonal relations of domination—through the dissolution of traditional social ties—is coeval with the increased dependency of individuals on objectified, abstract, impersonal, economic relations of domination (p. 158). He thus explains the emergence of the independent individual in capitalism as a phenomenon existing only in connection to the relations of interdependence that dominate it. Doing so, Marx's account undermines the dichotomy Butler imposes between independent individuals and interdependency.

This dialectic, Marx's analysis reveals, expresses the heart of capitalist interdependency itself. As Marx explains in the Grundrisse, interdependency, as an objective bond, exists as the historical product of human activity, one belonging to a specific phase in the development of the individual (p. 162). That this interdependency takes an alien and objective form in capitalism only proves that individuals “are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life” (p. 162). The individuality found in capitalism, Marx holds, presupposes “production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition” (p. 162). In other words, capitalist interdependency is intimately tied to the individual as an independent producer and exchanger, a social role that capitalist production uniquely necessitates.

The historical specificity of capitalist interdependency highlights the transhistoricism of Butler's account. Butler's naturalization of capitalist interdependency can be explained by the fact that interdependency both has a specific character in capitalist society and is a necessary feature of all human existence. In Butler, this necessity is conflated with its historically determined form in capitalism, appearing as an expression of the human condition: one is dependent on others for survival (Butler, 2015).¹⁶ As mentioned in the introduction, Marx (1992) famously critiques the political economists for manifesting the same tendency, revealing the failure of Adam Smith's analysis as lying in its treatment of historical formations as innate characteristics of human beings. In presenting features of capitalism as eternal and naturally given, Butler's account preserves this tendency, thus failing to analyze the capitalist mode of production and its social relations.

In treating interdependency as a natural fact, Butler's social ontology fails to communicate anything beyond the truism that interdependency changes over time. Thus, social ontology neglects to accomplish its purpose: rather than analyzing the social forces that form the individual, it dilutes and flattens them into general features of the human condition. Capturing the processes that bear on the body in capitalism, by contrast, requires a historical description of those processes. In indicating what such a description would look like, the foregoing account exposes interdependency as the principal mode of domination in capitalism.

Distinguishing between historically distinct forms of interdependency reveals a crucial fact about Butler's account: that the form of interdependency their theory ontologizes is capitalist. Indeed, the tendency to ontologize historically specific features of capitalism is the modus operandi of Butler's theory. This is most evident in their theory of ontological equality. Recall that for Butler ontological equality is not an equality of independent individuals but denotes an equality of “beings” characterized by “[s]ingularity” and “defined and sustained by virtue of their interrelationality” (2020, p. 16). This ontological condition contains two key features: nonindividual singularity and equality. In examining each of these features, this section argues that each is unique to capitalist society. In turn, this analysis shows that Butler's theory of the natural human condition is the ontologization of a condition that is unique to capitalist society: equal interdependence.

The political implication of Butler's transhistoricism and ontologization is that it severs the relation between equality and violence in capitalism. An essential thesis in Butler's work is that equality and violence are mutually exclusive and thus that equality can combat violence.²¹ Indeed, they firmly hold that “most forms of violence are committed to inequality, whether or not that commitment is explicitly thematized” (Butler, 2021). The idea that violence expresses and intensifies social inequality leads them to argue for “radical equality” (p. 142). This commitment is founded on a double oversight: first, of equality in capitalism and, second, of radical equality as mass extermination. It is only by overlooking these two sociohistorical manifestations of equality that Butler can present it as an ontological good to be realized.

Butler cleanses equality of violence in indicating that the social realization of the radical equality characterizing our ontology necessarily challenges neoliberal precarity. However, equality, as theorists like Tocqueville, Arendt, and Marx have warned, is no safeguard against violence. In particular, Adorno extends the analysis of equality to genocide, arguing that genocide is inextricably linked to capitalism's tendency to integrate by equalization (Adorno, 2007). Integration, as we saw earlier, as a process of sameness, expresses capitalist equality. Thus, without denying or discrediting forms of hyperinequality and their violence, Adorno shows how violence itself can be a manifestation of equality as the reduction of all to the same. “[G]enocide is the absolute integration. It is on its way wherever men are leveled off—‘polished off,’ as the German military called it—until one exterminates them literally, as deviations from the concept of their total nullity” (p. 362). The liquidation of the particular is, for Adorno, a manifestation of exchangeability—the making of nonidentical things commensurable—and thus equality (p. 362).

Adorno further theorizes the liquation of the individual in total integration through fungibility (p. 362). “[T]here could be no swapping,” Adorno writes, “without disregard for living human beings” (p. 354). The disregard that makes possible the swapping of individuals as the condition of possibility for fungibility is, for Adorno, equality. Particularly, the equality expressed in capitalist exchange reaches its radical manifestation in the camps (p. 146). But, for this very reason, the significance of Auschwitz, for Adorno, goes beyond the camp. The latter, for him, is just the most extreme manifestation of the regressive tendencies of modernity, both of which function through the principle of equality in equalizing human beings to death (Adorno, 2005). The advent of Auschwitz, in other words, indexes the utilization of the achievements of modern civilization for systemic mass murder. The principle of equality is realized in genocide.

If equality is a principle of genocide, then Butler's “radical equality” itself can manifest in absolute integration, utter exchangeability, and redundancy. An examination of their understanding of genocide illuminates the shortcomings of their politics of equality. Critiquing Arendt's analysis of Eichmann, Butler predicates their understanding of genocide on the argument that Eichmann's crimes against humanity were ultimately an effect of his inability to recognize ontological precariousness and thus the normative demands it purportedly placed on him (Butler, 2015). In their reading, Butler discards Arendt's understanding of genocide as intimately tied to superfluity (Birmingham, 2018). Note, however, that superfluity for Arendt is not transhistorical but rooted in capitalist and imperialist attempts to render humans equally superfluous. Arendt grounds this tendency in capitalist laws themselves, understanding genocide as a manifestation of capitalism's tendency to reduce all to the same. That is, contra Butler, genocide is not a product of one's ignorance of ontology; it is capital's movement of equalization that generates superfluity and genocide.

Butler's idealist solution to genocide elucidates the dangers of their framework. Having dissociated Arendt's critique of Eichmann from her critique of capitalism, Butler argues that Eichmann's actions would have been avoidable if his attitude had been different. As Birmingham puts it: “[T]he thought seems to be that had Eichmann understood the shared condition of precariousness, he might have been less vulnerable to the dominant norms of whose lives were grieveable and whose could be eradicated from the face of the earth” (2018). In other words, the complex problem of genocide is given the simple idealist solution of a change in perspective.

Butler's reading of Eichmann and account of genocide is a direct result of their ontology. They cannot think of genocide as a total integration—as a historical expression of exchangeability—because they understand equality and interdependency to be inherently opposed to capitalism. Their framework, thus, elides capitalism's most egregious forms of violence.

To conclude, I want to suggest that Butler's transhistorical and ontologizing tendencies preclude the possibility of emancipatory theory and praxis. This shortcoming can be located in Butler's categories, which, I contend, are not emancipatory because they terminate in existing society, rather than reaching beyond it.

Capitalism, contrary to Butler's analysis, is not the unequal distribution of a prior, ontological state, but the domination of fragmented individuals by social labor that produces a historically unprecedented interdependency. Therefore, the interdependency in which we find ourselves locked is not an idyllic ontological condition veiled by superimposed capitalist relations, but our domination by our own product: capital. Lacking an analysis of capitalist interdependence, Butler confuses the violent historical formation of capitalist interdependency with an ontological claim to a shared world. Consequently, they not only mask historical relations as facts of nature but also treat existing relations as an ontology to be realized.

While at first blush admirable in its aspiration, a close examination of Butler's politics, as this article has sought to provide, reveals that it capitulates into capitalism's status quo. Masquerading capitalist relations as ontological truths enables Butler to demand the realization of an already existing condition. Of course, I am not suggesting that we live in a society of equality and interdependency as such; rather, what I have endeavored to show is that it is precisely the forms equality and interdependency take in capitalism that Butler renders as ontological conditions to be socially realized. Butler's politics of equality is, thus, nothing other than a concealed version of bourgeois egalitarianism. If the state of equality shared by nonindividuals is a core feature of capitalism, and one of its most brutal expressions of the degradation of human beings, then it cannot challenge neoliberal ideology as Butler suggests.

Butler's theory testifies to the fact that one cannot escape the determinations of their own society. Indeed, their attempts to do so merely result in features of society sneaking in and infiltrating their theory nonetheless, thus rendering them impotent to either escape or critique them. Thus, the liberalism they attempt to overcome is replicated in their theory, leading them, alongside a long tradition of bourgeoise thinkers to call for equality. The categories Butler deploys—from interdependence to nonindividual singularity, and equality—do not negate but reproduce existing society. And indeed, their categories cannot help but terminate in existing society; they are, after all, borrowed from it.

Butler, therefore, cannot theorize beyond the present. Consequently, they can neither critique nor immanently elucidate historical dynamics intrinsic to capitalist social formations—such as interdependency and equality—that necessarily point beyond themselves. Having ontologized capitalist interdependency, they are trapped within it and forced to maintain that there is no way out. Accordingly, they render the task of politics as “accept[ing] interdependency as a condition of equality” (Butler, 2021). In this framework, the condition for emancipation is not the abolition of precariousness but the realization of an unhindered, equal distribution of precariousness. In other words, Butler perceives emancipation as emancipation in precariousness not from precariousness. But if precariousness itself, as we saw, is largely the ontologization of capitalist structures, then the emancipation Butler seeks lies strictly within the capitalism.

The necessity of critiquing Butler's theory is that it illuminates dangers potentially inhering in ontologically derived politics. The issue with political theories rooted in ontology is not merely that their ideological function is to provide naturalistic explanations of social phenomena; it is also that they attempt to shape human nature in accordance with the social phenomena they purport to explain. To expose the ideological components of such theories is, simultaneously, to struggle for the transformation of society. Thus, in contrast to Butler, a historical account of interdependency serves as a starting point for an articulation of emancipation as emancipation from capitalism.

My argument here opens a number of avenues for future work, which would more fully develop an ideology critique of existing ontologies that inform so much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. A critical theory of society that begins from the specific structure and determinations of our society as a capitalist one can reveal otherwise abstract forms of oppression, violence, and domination. Critiques emerging from the historical specificity of our society—i.e., from the standpoint of capitalist production—allow us to think about emancipation from capitalism. To that end, a historical account of interdependency is imperative, not only for the sake of historical accuracy but also to reveal the sources of violence in capitalism and the praxis necessary to overcome them. Because, as I argue, capitalist domination functions through, not against, interdependency and equality, denunciations of violence today must simultaneously denounce the forms interdependency and equality take in capitalist society.