BIG IDEAS // small books A PICADOR PAPERBACK ORIGINAL VIOLENCE bi - ZIZEK 7... @ oe”ISBN 0-312-42718-2 $14.00/ $15.50 CaM. PHILOSOPHER, CULTURAL CRITIC, AND AGENT PROVOCATEUR SLAVOJ ZIZEK CONSTRUCTS A FASCINATING NEW FRAMEWORK TO LOOK AT THE FORCES OF VIOLENCE IN OUR WORLD. USING HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, BOOKS, MOVIES, Lacanian psychiatry, and jokes, Slavoj Zizek examines the ways we perceive and misperceive violence. Drawing from his unique cultural vision, Zizek brings new light to ‘the Paris riots of 2005; he questions the permissiveness of violence in philanthropy; and, in daring terms, he reflects on the powerful image and determination of con- ‘temporary terrorists. Violence, Zizek states, takes three forms— subjective (crime, terror), objective (racism, hate-speech, discrimination), and systemic (the catastrophic effects of economic and political systems)—and often one form ot violence blunts our ability to see the others, raising complicated questions. Does the advent of capitalism and, indeed, civilization cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of “the neighbor”? And could the appropriate form of action against violence today simply be to contemplate, to think? Beginning with these and other equally contemplative questions, Zizek discusses the inherent violence af globalization, capitalism, fundamentalism, and language in a work that will confirm his standing as ‘one of our most erudite and incendiary modern thinkers.VIOLENCEVIOLENCE SIX SIDEWAYS REFLECTIONS Slavoj Zizek BIG IDEAS/SMALL BOOKS PICADOR New YorkVIOLENCE, Copyright © 2008 by Slavoj Zizek. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.picadorusa.com Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited. For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, please contact Picador. E-mail: readinggroupguides@picadorusa.com The poem “He Wishes for Cloths of Heaven” by W. B. Yeats is reprinted by permission of A P Watt Ltd on behalf of Grainne. Yeats. ‘The poem “The Interrogation of the Good” (Vehér der Guten) by Bertolt Brecht is reprinted by permission from Bertolt Brecht, Werke. GroBe kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Band 14: Gedichte 4, © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1993. English translation copyright © 2008 by Slavoj Zizek. ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42718-4 ISBN-10: 0-312-42718-2 Originally published in Great Britain by Profile Books Ltd. First Picador Edition: August 2008 3 9 8 7 65 4321CONTENTS Introduction: THE TYRANT’S BLOODY ROBE 1 Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo: SOS VIOLENCE Violence: Subjective and Objective The Good Men from Porto Davos A Liberal-Communist Village Sexuality in the Atonal World 2 Allegro moderato—Adagio: FEAR THY NEIGHBOUR AS THYSELF! The Politics of Fear The Neighbour Thing The Violence of Language 3 Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile: “A BLOOD-DIMMED TIDE IS LOOSED” A Strange Case of Phatic Communication Terrorist Resentment The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape 15 24 30 40 46 58 74 74 85 92vi CONTENTS 4 Presto: ANTINOMIES OF TOLERANT REASON Liberalism or Fundamentalism? A Plague on Both Their Houses! The Jerusalem Chalk Circle The Anonymous Religion of Atheism 5 Molto adagio—Andante: TOLERANCE AS AN IDEOLOGICAL CATEGORY The Culturalisation of Politics The Effective Universality Acheronta movebo: The Infernal Regions 6 Allegro: DIVINE VIOLENCE Benjamin with Hitchcock Divine Violence: What It Is Not... ... And Finally, What It Is! Epilogue: ADAGIO Notes Bibliography Index 105 105 116 129 140 140 144 158 178 178 185 196 206 219 235 241VIOLENCEIntroduction THE TYRANT’S BLOODY ROBE ‘There is an old story about a worker suspected of steal- ing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheel- barrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards can find nothing. It is always empty. Fi- nally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves ... If there is a unifying thesis that runs through the bric-a-brac of reflections on violence that follow, it is that a similar paradox holds true for violence. At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentan- gle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the con- tours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sus- tains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance. This is the starting point, perhaps even the axiom, of the present book: subjective violence is just the most vis- ible portion of a triumvirate that also includes two ob- jective kinds of violence. First, there is a “symbolic” violence embodied in language and its forms, what Heide- gger would call “our house of being.” As we shall see later, this violence is not only at work in the obvious—and exten- sively studied—cases of incitement and of the relations of2: VIOLENCE social domination reproduced in our habitual speech forms; there is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such, to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning. Second, there is what I call “systemic” violence, or the often catastrophic conse- quences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the “normal,” peaceful state of things. However, objec- tive violence is precisely the violence inherent to this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious “dark matter” of physics, the counterpart to an all-too- visible subjective violence, It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be “irrational” explosions of subjec- tive violence. When the media bombard us with those “humani- tarian crises” which seem constantly to pop up all over the world, one should always bear in mind that a partic- ular crisis only explodes into media visibility as the result of a complex struggle. Properly humanitarian considerations as a rule play a less important role here than cultural, ideologico-political, and economic con- siderations. The cover story of Time magazine on 5 June 2006, for example, was “The Deadliest War in the World.” This offered detailed documentation on howTHE TYRANTS BLOODY ROBE 13 around 4 million people died in the Democratic Repub- lic of Congo as the result of political violence over the last decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar fol- lowed, just a couple of readers’ letters—as if some kind of filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact in our symbolic space. To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hege- mony in suffering. It should have stuck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, or the families of 9/11 victims and how they have coped with their losses. The Congo today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradean “heart of darkness.” No one dares to confront it head on. The death of a West Bank Palestin- ian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese. Do we need further proof that the humanitarian sense of urgency is mediated, indeed overdetermined, by clear political considerations? And what are these considerations? To answer this, we need to step back and take a look from a different position. When the U.S. media reproached the public in foreign countries for not displaying enough sympathy for the victims of the 9/2 attacks, one was tempted to answer them in the words Robespierre addressed to those who complained about the innocent victims of revolutionary terror: “Stop shaking the tyrant’s bloody robe in my face, or 1 will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.”* Instead of confronting violence directly, the pres- ent book casts six sideways glances. There are reasons for looking at the problem of violence awry. My under- lying premise is that there is something inherently