Violence - Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Zizek is certainly no stranger to controversy. I remember the first time that I was introduced to this divisive figure. I was a junior in college taking a course on political theology, and my professor assigned one of his articles, along with a scene from one of his lecture-style documentaries, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. My professor, giving us a quick peek at his cards, told us that he couldn’t decide whether Zizek was completely brilliant or a total quack. Over the years since I first encountered his work, I’ve fallen on both sides of this divide, vacillating between eye-rolling repulsion to rabid fascination. Through his distillation of Marxist and Hegelian thought, coupled with crude jokes and cultural commentary, the Slovenian philosopher has become quite the infamous figure in both academic and popular philosophical discourse. Divise of a figure as he is, one cannot ignore the impact that he has within recent continental philosophy. As such, while browsing a local bookstore by the North Carolina coast, I couldn’t help but to pick up this small, portable book emblazoned in these simple black letters: Violence- Slavoj Zizek.

At its core, this work is focused on understanding violence and its relation to the world around us. Zizek distinguishes between several forms of violence, including objective, subjective, and divine violence. Subjective violence is perpetrated by a clearly identifiable agent or individual, such as a terrorist attack or a criminal robbery. Objective violence, on the other hand, seeps into the background of the normal consciousness of everyday life, and is thus more difficult to identify and address. Violence on an objective level becomes systemic and anonymous, which Zizek blames on “frictionless capitalism” and modern liberal attitudes towards violence. In typical Zizekian fashion, he refuses to back down in his polemical attacks against both traditional conservative and Western liberal attitudes toward a wide array of issues, including immigration, responses to violent protests, multicultural tolerance, divine violence, and the Middle Eastern conflicts between Israel and Palestine. Throughout this work, Zizek contends that the standard left-liberal discourse on violence is pervaded by a fake sense of urgency, in which theory takes a backseat to praxis while they continue to perpetuate the very violence they verbally disavow. Zizek, in his stereotypically unsparing and sometimes callous fashion, calls us to reexamine our common reactionary responses to the explosions of subjective violence that often serve to mask the deeper, more penetrating objective violence that seethes just beneath the surface.

One of the core strengths of Zizek’s materialist critique is his insistence on the pervasive nature of ideology, which structures our very experience of subjectivity (a theme which has remained constant throughout most of his work since he burst headfirst into the academic battlefield in the late 1980s). Zizek excels in disturbing and disrupting our common, liberally-educated, post-ideological assumptions regarding the ways in which violence is viewed in the general social consciousness, and how we can begin to develop a truly radical, emancipatory politic. On the other hand, Zizek also proposes a resurgence of Walter Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence,”  which serves as a sign of God’s (aka. the big Other’s) own impotence. In the absence of such a Big Other, our actions our solely our own responsibility, as we have no recourse to an overarching, external force or law. As such, our decisions then serve as our own, “made in absolute solitude, with no cover from the big Other” (202). Only such a law-destroying divine violence, in Zizek estimation, can be the domain of love, separated from mere sentimentality.

Yet, in a final twist, Zizek suggests that the truly radical move is to literally do nothing. He writes, “better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts the ultimate function of which is to make the system run more smoothly...The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active,’ to ‘participate,’ to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, ‘do something;’ academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw.” (217). Zizek, in his final line, suggests that sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do. In my own estimation, while I ultimately see his point and agree to a certain extent, it also seems like a glib and unsatisfactory solution for someone who, arguably, has no skin in the game of emancipatory politics. We are ultimately left in a deadlock, paralyzed in our commitments to action, yet forever dreaming of (and yet postponing) the ultimate divine violence of the emancipatory Event. As such, while I again agree with his premise, I’m not convinced that the ultimate answer is to let the system eat itself alive and eventually collapse. I’m all for slow, measured, and deliberate responses to the social and economic crises of our own time. Yet, in my humble estimation, too many lives are at stake for such everlasting, perpetually postponed passivity.

Ultimately, this work serves as a rewarding and challenging reminder of our own presuppositions when it comes to addressing violence in our complex, multi-layered geopolitical context. Although written in 2008, Zizek’s definitions of violence continue to be incredibly useful in understanding our own cultural moment. Even though some of his practical applications may seem to be untenable and perhaps cruel, Zizek’s analysis still serves as a thoughtful investigation into the ways in which politics and social consciousness intersect.

Notable quotes:

This is why the delicate liberal- communist-frightened, caring, fighting violence- and the blind fundamentalist exploding in rage are two sides of the same coin. While they fight subjective violence, liberal communists are the very agents of the structural violence which creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence....We should be under no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every progressive struggle today. (36-37)

Today’s liberal tolerance towards others, the respect of otherness and openness towards it, is counterpointed by an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the Other is just fine, but only insofar as this Other is not really Other...My duty to be tolerant towards the Other effectively means that I should not get too close to him, intrude on his space. In other words, I should respect his intolerance of my over-proximity. What increasingly emerges as a central human right in late-capitalist society is the right not the be harassed, which is a right to remain at a safe distance from others. (41)

This is a clear sign of the limit of multiculturalist “tolerant” approach, which preaches open borders and acceptance of others. If one were to open the borders, the first to rebel would be the local working classes. It is thus becoming clear that the solution is not “tear down the walls and let them all in,” the easy empty demand of the soft-hearted liberal “radicals.” The only true solution is to tear down the true wall, not the Immigration Department one, but the socio-economic one: to change society so that people will no longer desperately try to escape their own world. (103-104)

This idea of Judgement Day, when all accumulated debts will finally be paid and an out-of-joint world will finally be set straight, is then taken over in a secularized form by the modern leftist project. Here the agent of judgement is no longer God, but the people. Leftist political movements are like “banks of rage.” They collect rage investments from people and promise them large-scale revenge, the re-establishment of global justice. Since after the revolutionary explosion of rage, full satisfaction never takes place and an inequality and hierarchy re-emerge, there always arises a push for the second- true, integral- revolution which will satisfy the disappointed and truly finish the emancipatory work...The problem is that there is never enough rage capital. This is why it is necessary to borrow from or combine with other rages: national or cultural...Fascism is ultimately a secondary variation of (and reaction to) the properly leftist project of emancipatory rage. (187)

Love without cruelty is powerless; cruelty without love is blind, a short-lived passion which loses its persistent edge. The underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable and pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence- it is this link which raises it “over and beyond the natural limitations of man” and thus transforms it into unconditional drive...The notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight: the domain of pure violence, the domain outside law (legal power), the domain of the violence which is neither law-founding nor law-sustaining, is the domain of love. (204-205).

Destroying old monuments proved not to be a true negation of the past. Rather it was a impotent passage a l’acte, an acting out which bore witness to the failure to get rid of the past. (209)