‘My’ place is that which I occupy as an embodied being. Yet, by my very embodied nature, I am an ecstatic being, outside of myself, given over to others. ‘My’ place is thus not entirely mine, because we, as bodies, cohabitate, we are and we have together. In a world in which to have means to be the sole possessor, having something together often means not having it; we are taught that we must do all in our power to reclaim what belongs to us and reject the state of dispossession into which our bodies put us:

Violence appears as a reclamation of my own being and a rejection of the shared world that dispossesses me.

Reclamation and rejection shape the relation between the body and the world, which in its radical form can turn into an annihilation of others constitutive of the relation, and thus an annihilation of the relation itself. The ‘quandary’ – whether someone (an individual, a group or a nation) has the right to reclaim their own place for oneself, which in the final instance may lead to purging the place of others – requires an unambiguous affirmation or rejection of violence. From 2001, when she suggested that responsibility involves ‘an experiment to living otherwise’ (Butler 2001b: 39), opening us towards a practice of nonviolence in an emphatically non-reciprocal way, Judith Butler's answer to this question is an unambiguous no.

Nonviolence thus appears as an active form of perseverance in cohabitation. To persevere in cohabitation – a having that is not having, a having that is sharing – is to claim responsibility for the liveable world and commitment to the equality of lives. To persevere is to sustain an affirmation of the social relation in the force field of violence, because nonviolence only becomes possible at the moment when to strike or strike back appears an obvious or desirable reaction.