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Violence, By Slavoj Zizek
A dream of divine violence
Reviewed, Simon Critchley · Friday 11 January 2008 01:00 GMT · Comments
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The philosopher Slavoj Zizek enjoys a good joke. Here's one of my
favourites: two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theatre, where
they become thoroughly bored with the play. One feels a pressing need to
urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet.
"I think I saw one down the corridor outside," says his friend. The man
wanders down the corridor, but finds no WC. Wandering further, he walks
through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it, he
returns to his seat. His friend says, "What a pity! You missed the best part.
Some fellow just came on the stage and pissed in that plant pot."
This gag perfectly describes the argument of Zizek's new book on
violence. Drunkenly watching the boring spectacle of the world stage, we
might feel an overwhelming need to follow the call of nature somewhere
discreet. Yet, in our bladder-straining self-interest, we lose sight of the
objective reality of the play and our implication in its action. We are
oblivious to the fact that we are pissing on stage for the world to see.
:
So it is with violence. Our subjective outrage at the facts of violence – a
suicide bombing, a terrorist attack, the assassination of a political figure –
blinds us to the objective violence of the world, a violence where we are
perpetrators and not just innocent bystanders. All we see are apparently
inexplicable acts that disturb the supposed peace of everyday life. We
consistently overlook the objective or what Zizek calls "systemic" violence,
endemic to our socio-economic order.
The main ambition of this book is to bring together subjective violence
with the objective violence that is its underside and precondition.
"Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious 'dark matter' of
:
physics," Zizek writes: invisible to naked eye. Zizek offers a rather cool and
at times cruel analysis of the varieties of objective violence. He asks
tolerant multicultural Western liberals to suspend our outraged responses
to acts of violence and turn instead to the real substance of the global
situation. In order to understand violence, we need some good old-
fashioned dispassionate materialist critique.
At the heart of Zizek's book is an argument about ideology that has been a
powerful, constant feature of his work since he burst onto the intellectual
scene in the late 1980s. Far from existing in some post-ideological world at
the end of history where all problems can be diagnosed with neo-liberal
economics and self-serving assertions of human rights, ideology
completely structures our lived reality. This ideology might be subjectively
invisible, but it is objectively real. Each of us is onstage, pissing in that
plant pot. The great ideological illusion of the present is that there is no
time to reflect and we have to act now. Zizek asks us to step back from the
false urgency of the present with its multiple injunctions to intervene like
good humanitarians.
His diagnosis of this ideology is quite delightful, producing counter-
intuitive analyses that overturn what passes for common sense. Zizek
rages against the reduction of love to masturbatory self-interest, the
multiple hypocrisies of the Israel/Palestine conflict and the supposed
liberal philanthropy of Bill Gates and George Soros. There is a fascinating
analysis of the scenes of torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, which display,
Zizek rightly contends, nothing more than the obscene underside of
American culture.
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But whither all this dialectical brio? Ay, there's the rub. Zizek concludes
with an apology for what he calls, following Walter Benjamin, "divine
violence". The latter is understood theoretically as "the heroic assumption
of the solitude of the sovereign decision". Practically, Zizek illustrates this
with the Jacobin violence of Robespierre in France in the 1790s and the
invasion of the dispossessed, a decade or so ago, descending from the
slum favelas in Rio de Janeiro to disturb the peace of bourgeois
neighbourhoods. But, in a final twist, Zizek counsels us to do nothing in
the face of the objective, systemic violence of the world. We should "just
sit and wait" and have the courage to do nothing: "Sometimes, doing
nothing is the most violent thing to do".
True enough, but what can this possibly mean? At the core of Zizek's
relentless, indeed manic, production of books, articles and lectures is a
fantasy, I think: what psychoanalysts would call an obsessional fantasy. On
the one hand, the only authentic stance to take in dark times is to do
nothing, to refuse all commitment, to be paralysed like Melville's Bartleby,
the true hero of this book and others by Zizek. On the other hand, Zizek
dreams of a divine violence, a cataclysmic, purifying violence of the
sovereign ethical deed, something like that of Sophocles' Antigone.
:
But Shakespearean tragedy is a more illuminating guide here than its
ancient Greek predecessor. For Zizek is a Slovenian Hamlet, utterly
paralysed but dreaming of an avenging violent act for which, finally, he
lacks the courage. In short, behind its shimmering inversions, Zizek's work
leaves us in a fearful and fateful deadlock: the only thing to do is to do
nothing. We should just sit and wait. As the great Dane says, "Readiness is
all". But the truth is that Zizek is never ready. His work lingers in endless
postponement and over-production. He ridicules others' attempts at
thinking about commitment, resistance and action (we have crossed
swords recently) while doing nothing himself. What sustains his work is a
dream of divine violence, cruelty and force. I hope that one day his dreams
come true.
Simon Critchley is professor of philosophy at the New School for Social
Research in New York. His 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' will be
published by Granta in June
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