Violence

VIOLENCE

‘As always, he combines the fruitfully combative, the densely intelligent, and the merely glib, sometimes in the same paragraph.’ Guardian

‘An exhilarating, unsettling read …’ Dubliner

‘His prose is dense but never foggy, graced by a wealth of jokes and anecdotes …’ Arena

‘Violence is nothing if not an exciting read; provocative ideas abound on every page.’ Philosophy magazine

‘Žižek’s thoughtfully provocative book examines violence, treating the reader to an enjoyable and dazzling display of intellectual pyrotechnics.’ Jewish Chronicle

‘His diagnosis of this ideology is quite delightful, producing counter-intuitive analyses that overturn what passes for common sense.’ Independent

‘Žižek’s thoughts on such a difficult subject show him to be a serious, innovative and original thinker.’ Tribune

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK is a Slovenian sociologist, postmodern philosopher and cultural critic. He is the author of over forty books and the subject of two major films: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and Žižek! In 1990 he ran for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia and is currently the international director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Birkbeck.

BIG IDEAS

General editor: Lisa Appignanesi

As the twenty-first century moves through its tumultuous first decade, we need to think about our world afresh. It’s time to revisit not only politics, but our passions and reoccupations, and our ways of seeing the world. The Big Ideas series challenges people who think about these subjects to think in public, where sound bites and polemics too often provide sound and fury but little light. These books will stir debate and continue to be important reading for years to come.

Other titles in the series include:

VIOLENCE

SIX SIDEWAYS REFLECTIONS

Slavoj Žižek

This paperback edition published in 2009

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

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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

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

INTRODUCTION

THE TYRANT’S BLOODY ROBE

There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards can find nothing. It is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves …

If there is a unifying thesis that runs through the bric-abrac 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 disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains 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 visible portion of a triumvirate that also includes two objective kinds of violence. First, there is a ‘symbolic’ violence embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call ‘our house of being’. As we shall see later, this violence is not only at work in the obvious – and extensively studied – cases of incitement and of the relations of 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 consequences 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, objective 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 subjective violence.

When the media bombard us with those ‘humanitarian crises’ which seem constantly to pop up all over the world, one should always bear in mind that a particular 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 considerations. 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 around 4 million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the result of political violence over the last decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar followed, 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 hegemony 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 Palestinian 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 US media reproached the public in foreign countries for not displaying enough sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 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 I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.’¹

Instead of confronting violence directly, the present book casts six sideways glances. There are reasons for looking at the problem of violence awry. My underlying premise is that there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with it: the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking. A dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of violence must by definition ignore its traumatic impact. Yet there is a sense in which a cold analysis of violence somehow reproduces and participates in its horror. A distinction needs to be made, as well, between (factual) truth and truthfulness: what renders a report of a raped woman (or any other narrative of a trauma) truthful is its very factual unreliability, its confusion, its inconsistency. If the victim were able to report on her painful and humiliating experience in a clear manner, with all the data arranged in a consistent order, this very quality would make us suspicious of its truth. The problem here is part of the solution: the very factual deficiencies of the traumatised subject’s report on her experience bear witness to the truthfulness of her report, since they signal that the reported content ‘contaminated’ the manner of reporting it. The same holds, of course, for the so-called unreliability of the verbal reports of Holocaust survivors: the witness able to offer a clear narrative of his camp experience would disqualify himself by virtue of that clarity.² The only appropriate approach to my subject thus seems to be one which permits variations on violence kept at a distance out of respect towards its victims.

Adorno’s famous saying, it seems, needs correction: it is not poetry that is impossible after Auschwitz, but rather prose.³ Realistic prose fails, where the poetic evocation of the unbearable atmosphere of a camp succeeds. That is to say, when Adorno declares poetry impossible (or, rather, barbaric) after Auschwitz, this impossibility is an enabling impossibility: poetry is always, by definition, ‘about’ something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to. One shouldn’t be afraid to take this a step further and refer to the old saying that music comes in when words fail. There may well be some truth in the common wisdom that, in a kind of historical premonition, the music of Schoenberg articulated the anxieties and nightmares of Auschwitz before the event took place.

In her memoirs, Anna Akhmatova describes what happened to her when, at the height of the Stalinist purges, she was waiting in the long queue in front of the Leningrad prison to learn about her arrested son Lev:

One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a young woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had of course never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there), ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said, ‘I can.’ Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.’⁴

The key question, of course, is what kind of description is intended here? Surely it is not a realistic description of the situation, but what Wallace Stevens called ‘description without place’, which is what is proper to art. This is not a description which locates its content in a historical space and time, but a description which creates, as the background of the phenomena it describes, an inexistent (virtual) space of its own, so that what appears in it is not an appearance sustained by the depth of reality behind it, but a decontextualised appearance, an appearance which fully coincides with real being. To quote Stevens again: ‘What it seems it is and in such seeming all things are.’ Such an artistic description ‘is not a sign for something that lies outside its form’.⁵ Rather, it extracts from the confused reality its own inner form in the same way that Schoenberg ‘extracted’ the inner form of totalitarian terror. He evoked the way this terror affects subjectivity.

Does this recourse to artistic description imply that we are in danger of regressing to a contemplative attitude that somehow betrays the urgency to ‘do something’ about the depicted horrors?

Let’s think about the fake sense of urgency that pervades the left-liberal humanitarian discourse on violence: in it, abstraction and graphic (pseudo)concreteness coexist in the staging of the scene of violence – against women, blacks, the homeless, gays … ‘A woman is raped every six seconds in this country’ and ‘In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, ten children will die of hunger’ are just two examples. Underlying all this is a hypocritical sentiment of moral outrage. Just this kind of pseudourgency was exploited by Starbucks a couple of years ago when, at store entrances, posters greeting customers pointed out that almost half of the chain’s profits went into health-care for the children of Guatemala, the source of their coffee, the inference being that with every cup you drink, you save a child’s life.

There is a fundamental anti-theoretical edge to these urgent injunctions. There is no time to reflect: we have to act now. Through this fake sense of urgency, the post-industrial rich, living in their secluded virtual world, not only do not deny or ignore the harsh reality outside their area – they actively refer to it all the time. As Bill Gates recently put it: ‘What do computers matter when millions are still unnecessarily dying of dysentery?’

Against this fake urgency, we might want to place Marx’s wonderful letter to Engels of 1870, when, for a brief moment, it seemed that a European revolution was again at the gates. Marx’s letter conveys his sheer panic: can’t the revolutionaries wait for a couple of years? He hasn’t yet finished his Capital.

A critical analysis of the present global constellation – one which offers no clear solution, no ‘practical’ advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us – usually meets with reproach: ‘Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?’ One should gather the courage to answer: ‘YES, precisely that!’ There are situations when the only truly ‘practical’ thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to ‘wait and see’ by means of a patient, critical analysis. Engagement seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the Resistance and fight the Germans; Sartre’s point is, of course, that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man needs to make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom and assume full responsibility for it.⁶ An obscene third way out of the dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join the Resistance, and to tell his Resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while, in reality, withdrawing to a secluded place and studying …

There is more than cheap cynicism in this advice. It brings to mind a well-known Soviet joke about Lenin. Under socialism, Lenin’s advice to young people, his answer to what they should do, was ‘Learn, learn and learn’. This was evoked at all times and displayed on all school walls. The joke goes: Marx, Engels and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, ‘A wife!’ while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. To everyone’s surprise, Lenin says, ‘I’d like to have both!’ Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No – he explains: ‘So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress, and my mistress that I have to be with my wife …’ ‘And then, what do you do?’ ‘I go to a solitary place to learn, learn and learn!’

Is this not exactly what Lenin did after the catastrophe of 1914? He withdrew to a lonely place in Switzerland, where he ‘learned, learned and learned’, reading Hegel’s logic. And this is what we should do today when we find ourselves bombarded with mediatic images of violence. We need to ‘learn, learn and learn’ what causes this violence.

1

Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo

SOS VIOLENCE

Violence: Subjective and Objective

In 1922 the Soviet government organised the forced expulsion of leading anticommunist intellectuals, from philosophers and theologians to economists and historians. They left Russia for Germany on a boat known as the Philosophy Steamer. Prior to his expulsion, Nikolai Lossky, one of those forced into exile, had enjoyed with his family the comfortable life of the haute bourgeoisie, supported by servants and nannies. He

simply couldn’t understand who would want to destroy his way of life. What had the Losskys and their kind done? His boys and their friends, as they inherited the best of what Russia had to offer, helped fill the world with talk of literature and music and art, and they led gentle lives. What was wrong with that?¹

While Lossky was without doubt a sincere and benevolent person, really caring for the poor and trying to civilise Russian life, such an attitude betrays a breathtaking insensitivity to the systemic violence that had to go on in order for such a comfortable life to be possible. We’re talking here of the violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence. The Losskys and their kind effectively ‘did nothing bad’. There was no subjective evil in their life, just the invisible background of this systemic violence. ‘Then suddenly, into this almost Proustian world … Leninism broke in. The day Andrei Lossky was born, in May 1917, the family could hear the sound of riderless horses galloping down neighboring Ivanovskaya Street.’² Such ominous intrusions multiplied. Once, in his school, Lossky’s son was brutally taunted by a working-class school-mate who shouted at him that ‘the days of him and his family are over now …’ In their benevolent-gentle innocence, the Losskys perceived such signs of the forthcoming catastrophe as emerging out of nowhere, as signals of an incomprehensibly malevolent new spirit. What they didn’t understand was that in the guise of this irrational subjective violence, they were getting back the message they themselves sent out in its inverted true form. It is this violence which seems to arise ‘out of nowhere’ that, perhaps, fits what Walter Benjamin, in his ‘Critique of Violence’, called pure, divine violence.³

Opposing all forms of violence, from direct, physical violence (mass murder, terror) to ideological violence (racism, incitement, sexual discrimination), seems to be the main preoccupation of the tolerant liberal attitude that predominates today. An SOS call sustains such talk, drowning out all other approaches: everything else can and has to wait … Is there not something suspicious, indeed symptomatic, about this focus on subjective violence – that violence which is enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds? Doesn’t it desperately try to distract our attention from the true locus of trouble, by obliterating from view other forms of violence and thus actively participating in them? According to a well-known anecdote, a German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist ‘chaos’ of the painting, asked Picasso: ‘Did you do this?’ Picasso calmly replied: ‘No, you did this!’ Today, many a liberal, when faced with violent outbursts such as the recent looting in the suburbs of Paris, asks the few remaining leftists who still count on a radical social transformation: ‘Isn’t it you who did this? Is this what you want?’ And we should reply, like Picasso: ‘No, you did this! This is the true result of your politics!’

There is an old joke about a husband who returns home earlier than usual from work and finds his wife in bed with another man. The surprised wife exclaims: ‘Why have you come back early?’ The husband furiously snaps back: ‘What are you doing in bed with another man?’ The wife calmly replies: ‘I asked you a question first – don’t try to squeeze out of it by changing the topic!’⁴ The same goes for violence: the task is precisely to change the topic, to move from the desperate humanitarian SOS call