There appears to be a revival of scholarly as well as activist interest in violence and nonviolence as concepts rather than descriptions of acts or situations. This has led to the emergence of new writing on Gandhi as a thinker of violence and the historical figurehead of nonviolence, as well as to more expansive books on the subject, ranging from Slavoj Žižek's Violence to Judith Butler's The Force of Nonviolence. Étienne Balibar's text is the latest of several he has dedicated to the question of violence and the possibilities of nonviolence in political thought and practice. If in past decades intellectual life was dominated by keywords like hegemony and transgression, power and resistance, or sovereignty and subalternity, might violence and nonviolence become their successors? The...