Violent Thoughts About Slavoj Zizek by Simon Critchley
Slavoj Zizek has been
telling lies about me. He attacked a recent book of mine, Infinitely
Demanding, in the London Review of Books. Since then, things have gone from
bad to worse, but I will spare the reader the grisly details. What I would like
to do here is to use this debate as a lever for trying to think about the
difficult question of the nature and plausibility of a politics of non-violence
and try and explore what I see as the complex dialectic of violence and
non-violence. Those with an eye for detail might notice that the following
represents both a clarification and a shift in the position on violence and
non-violence presented in Infinitely Demanding.
I would like to begin
by discussing Zizek’s recently published book Violence and
then expand and deepen my focus by way of a reading of Walter Benjamin’s
‘Critique of Violence’. This will lead to a thinking through of the idea of
divine violence and an interpretation of the Biblical commandment ‘Thou shalt
not kill’, the injunction to non-violence. In
conclusion, I will turn to the specifics of the political disagreement between
myself and Zizek, which turn on the question of the relation between
authoritarianism and anarchism.
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 of them
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 W.C. Wandering ever
further into the recesses of the theatre, he walks through a door and sees a
plant pot. After copiously urinating into it, he returns to his seat and his
friend says to him, ‘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 book on violence. Drunkenly watching the
rather boring spectacle of the world stage, we might feel an overwhelming
subjective 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 whole 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 seemingly innocent 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 of violence that disturb the supposed peace and normal flow
of everyday life. We consistently overlook the objective or what
Zizek calls ‘systemic’ violence that is endemic to our socio-economic order.
The main ambition of
Zizek’s book is to refer subjective violence to the objective violence that is
its underside and enabling precondition. ‘Systemic violence is thus something
like the notorious “dark matter” of physics’(p.2), Zizek writes, which is
invisible to naked eye. In the ‘Six Sideways Reflections’ into which Violence is
divided, Zizek offers a rather cool and at times cruel analysis of the
varieties of objective violence. He asks good, tolerant multicultural Western
liberals like you, like us, like them (delete where appropriate) to suspend our
outraged and impassioned responses to acts of violence (what he later calls,
with Nietzsche, a reactive rather than active force) and turn instead to the
real substance of the global situation. In order to understand violence, we
need some good old-fashioned dispassionate Marxist 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 The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first
book in English from 1989. Far
from existing in some sort of 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 and falsely sutures
our lived reality. This ideology might be subjectively invisible, but it is
objectively real. Each of us is onstage pissing in that plant pot. Ideology
structures or, better, sutures experience, masking what the early Zizek – at
the time much, much closer to Laclau than now – saw as the basic antagonism,
the political antagonism that structures social relations.
The great ideological
illusion of the present is that there is no time to reflect and we have to
act now. On the contrary, Zizek asks us to step back from the false
reactive urgency of the present with its multiple injunctions to intervene like
good humanitarians. In the face of this fake urgency, we should be more like
Marx who, with a potential revolution at the gates in 1870, complained to
Engels that the activists should wait a couple more years until he had
finished Das Capital.
Zizek’s diagnosis of this
ideology is, as ever, quite delightful, producing counter-intuitive inversions
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 and
humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, which display, Zizek rightly contends,
nothing more than the obscene underside of American culture, the culture of
incarceration.
But whither all this
dialectical brio? Ay, there’s the rub. Zizek concludes the book with an apology
for what he calls, following Walter Benjamin, ‘divine violence’. I shall come
back to this in some detail below. Divine violence is understood theoretically
as, ‘the heroic assumption of the solitude of the sovereign decision’.
Practically, Zizek illustrates this with the questionable examples of the
radical Jacobin violence of Robespierre in France in the 1790s and the invasion
of the dispossessed, a decade or so ago, descending from the favelas in
Rio de Janeiro to disturb the peace of the bourgeois neighbourhoods which
border them.
http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/39
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