The Critique of Nonviolence

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How does Martin Luther King, Jr. understand race philosophically, and how does this understanding shape his view of racist police violence? In this significant work, Mark Christian Thompson explores these questions by examining ontology in King's philosophy. The analysis engages with 1920s German academic debates involving thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann, and Hannah Arendt on topics such as Being, gnosticism, and political theology. It also considers King's dissertation on Paul Tillich and key texts from his writings, sermons, and speeches, proposing that King's notion of divine love reflects a Heideggerian ontology expressed through the concept of a beloved community. By tracing the influence of twentieth-century German philosophy and theology in King's thought, the work contextualizes his ontology within the framework of nonviolent protest. Notably, it analyzes King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" alongside Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" to uncover the depth of King's political-theological critique of police violence as an illegitimate exercise of the racialized state of exception. Thompson argues that King's ontology, informed by German philosophical traditions, critiques the ongoing American state of racial exception that facilitates unchecked police violence against Black lives.