For the cultural theorist and critic Slavoj Žižek, characteristically and controversially, violence and humanity are inextricably linked. What is ethical is essentially violent. Žižek hurls himself against many contemporary notions of peace-making and peace-keeping. Committed to a Marxist-Lacanian perspective, he not only attacks the Right in fairly predictable ways, but also maintains a critical distance from what remains of the fragmented and exhausted Left in the post-political scene of the new century. He wants to look at violence awry – taking a sideways glance, as at the old picture postcard displaying a beautifully dressed woman, who become undressed when looked at from the side. 

Around the time of the Iraq war in 2003, a psychoanalytic colleague declared that, ‘he was against violence as a means of solving problems. Civilised people should not have to resort to violence anymore. Instead, we should talk out our differences’. Against this common advice, Žižek would argue that our use of language itself constitutes violent, as language forces (our) meanings on the raw organic unity of the Real; furthermore, civilisations, the context out of which we speak, are themselves founded by violence!  Symbolic violence, as Žižek refers to it, is the violence due to language itself and its imposition of a whole universe of conscious and unconscious significances, behaviours and customs involving implicit racism and social domination. Lacan has suggested that a given symbolic field is held together by a Master-Signifier, implying a (violent) mastery of meaning, itself mythic and irrational. So Žižek turns around the common notion that we should talk to overcome our differences, eschewing bestial violence: ‘What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak’. (p55).

In this important and timely book, Žižek delineates three types or domains of violence, subjective and objective violence, the latter being split into symbolic violence and systemic violence. All three types, according to Žižek, are inter-related. Subjective violence consists of ‘evil’ acts carried out by individuals or agents on innocent civilians. The shocking terror of these incidents tends to blind us to the normative objective violence of (our) culture. Žižek uses the joke about the husband returning home early to find his wife in bed with another man. In his immediate disbelief, he is attacked by her demanding to know why he has come home early. What are you doing in bed with another man, he insists. No! No! insists the wife, don’t try and change the topic. Tell me why you came home early. Focusing on individual evil violent acts and the urgent need to prevent them by humanitarian interventions for instance, misses the larger picture of symbolic violence and the violence of the (capitalist) system itself.   

What passes for ‘tolerance’ and easy-going multiculturalism in the West is revealed by Žižek to be intensely ideological and alienating: ‘an extremely violent process of being torn out of a particular life world, of being cut-off from one’s roots’ (p124). Consider the difference between a Chinese farmer eating a Chinese meal because his village has done so for centuries and a modern Western consumer in a city who decides to have dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. Or a Muslim woman, who wears a veil as traditionally ordained, and the same woman who wears a veil to express her Western individuality. Tradition – once a socially binding force - in the West becomes a matter of just another autonomous choice! Attendance at Mass for Irish Catholics was close to 95% a few decades ago, whereas now it becomes a matter of choice or expediency to obtain a school place for their child. Their ‘choosing’ in effect is their consent to their own life-world marginalisation. The Cartesian subject, especially in the Kantian version, is conceived of as being fully autonomous and universal, where ethnic roots and national identity are simply not a category of truth.

Racism may be the key problem of our time (‘the era in which new walls emerge everywhere’) (p87) and Žižek has an interesting take on it, starting with Lacan’s example of the jealous husband. Even if his wife is indeed sleeping around, says Lacan, the patient’s jealousy still has to be treated as a pathological phenomenon! It is the same with racism. Even if it’s factually and statistically true that blacks, gays, etc. do ‘x’, our apparently legitimate critical attitude towards them still requires analysis because of our ‘disavowed libidinal investment’ in the figure of the Other – ie. we are secretly just a bit too fascinated, fixated and envious of the other’s enjoyment, which seems different or better than ours! Hence the multicultural need to ‘decaffeinate the Other, to deprive him or her of their raw substance of jouissance’, (p49) as we must now live side-by-side with the other, but separated in our own symbolic spaces. Žižek insists: ‘What motivated these [critical] stories was not facts, but racial prejudices’ (p85). You are a racist but you don’t know it.

But political correctness is not the answer. The trouble with political correctness, according to Žižek, is that it imposes a set of rules as to how we can speak without changing our subjective position. The question not answered by Žižek is precisely, when do you ‘know’ that you have changed your subjective position? It is not because you say: ‘Well I’m not a racist…’, as this could be just more of the same negation. How can any criticism of the other (or the wife who sleeps around), not be deemed prejudiced and in need of analysis? In the non-judgement universe, any criticism must be racist. Jonah Goldberg has termed this intolerance of criticism of the Other ‘liberal fascism’.

Against the ethics of Christian love for our neighbour, or the Buddhist gesture of solidarity with every living thing, Žižek posits an interesting reversal of the current vogue for Levinas. Instead of infinite respect for the radical alterity of the other, the other in his very proximity, because he is our neighbour, becomes our enemy, who is absolutely other, whose culture is foreign to us. So when Freud questions the Christian injunction, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, is he not alluding to the idea that our love of all humanity is governed by our own preconceived values, and as Žižek says, ‘what resists universality is the properly inhuman dimension of the Neighbour’ (p48). What he has in mind is the otherness of the other’s enjoyment, which, on the one hand excites us and on the other causes fear and paranoia. In our post-political world, all we have now is fear – fear of the neighbour, and the whole rhetoric of victimisation and harassment.

Žižek’s special rage is reserved for the eminently cool figure of the ‘liberal communist’, a Bill Gates, George Soros, CEOs of big corporations who combine ruthless capitalism with anti-capitalist pretensions – Give everything away for free/ Change the world/ Be transparent/ Trigger new forms of social organisation/ Fair trade, and so on. Here Left and Right have formed a ‘smart’ alliance, where exploitative capitalism (the objective violence of the system) accumulates vast wealth then in a self-negating gesture gives it back in a way that the old left could have hardly dreamed about, without the old misery of enforced state redistribution! What properly angers Žižek here is the new form of the old trope of the generous humanitarian mask of economic exploitation. But, as Žižek must know, we are all up to speed on this – so what? This neutralisation, this self-abnegating gesture of the aggressive capitalist in the morning and the meditating Buddhist philanthropist in the afternoon, who lives in a gated mansion, eating organic food, holidaying in wild-life preserves, renders our critique impotent. He is a difficult figure to really hate which possibly redoubles Žižek’s rage, especially as these figures are often embraced by what remains of the Left! 

Žižek is more than ready to castigate the Western Left’s ‘hypocrisy’ in believing the truth of the Stalinist system and the validity of its deployment of systemic violence, as well their belief in the authenticity of the cultural products of socialist realism. And for those Leftists who were prepared to go to prison in defence of their Communist convictions, Žižek has this to say: ‘The miserable reality of the Stalinist Soviet Union gives their innermost conviction a fragile beauty’ (p44). But then he asks the most important question. Perhaps their blind faith in the Communist system, their refusal to see what was so plain to see, what he calls their ‘violent exclusionary gesture’, their, ‘I know very well that things are horrible in the Soviet Union, but I still believe nonetheless in Soviet socialism’, represents the inner core of every ethical stance. He asks: ‘Does every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal’? (p45). For Žižek’s central point is that every power structure, in which one might believe and give support to, has its ‘obscene violent supplement’, that one can only live with by disavowal.

Systemic violence chiefly occurs via an overwhelming combination of ‘capitalism combined with the hegemony of scientific discourse’. (p70) In Europe, there was time to adjust over several centuries to the modernising process, but some other societies – notably Muslim ones – were exposed to this impact directly and their symbolic universe was perturbed more brutally. They lost their symbolic ground. With the impact of globalisation, it is not surprising, argues Žižek, ‘that the only way for some of these societies to avoid total breakdown was to erect in panic the shield of fundamentalism that psychotic-delirious-incestuous reassertion of religion…including the obscene superego divinity demanding sacrifices’. (p70).

For Žižek, capitalism ‘detotalises meaning’, ‘accommodating itself to all civilisations’. (p68). Even the very notion of civilisation itself is abstracting in this sense: ‘In a society in which commodity exchange predominates, individuals themselves…relate to themselves, as well as to objects they encounter, as to contingent embodiments of abstract-universal notions’. (p127). For instance, everyone is a member of a profession – a lecturer, a teacher, a plumber and electrician, and so on. We are not ‘born into’ our social roles. What I become occurs as a combination of both accident and free choice, quite unlike a medieval peasant, who did not become so by choice. Clearly being a peasant is not a profession. And it was a Marxist-Hegelian insight that such an abstraction process becomes autonomous and ‘for itself’, insofar as individuals no longer identify with the kernel of their being, remaining therefore, for ever a little ‘out-of-joint’ and dislocated. This is systemic violence, ‘disupting a preceding organic poise’ (p128). 

Here, we come to another illustrative joke. The story is about a worker suspected of stealing. Every evening as he leaves the factory, his wheelbarrow is carefully inspected, but the guards can find nothing. The wheelbarrow is always empty. Finally, when the penny drops, they realise that what the worker is stealing is the wheelbarrows themselves. So what Žižek is asking us to do is to step back from the most visible subjective violence and see that in McLuhan’s terms – ‘The medium is the message’. This is no more than the standard Left analysis of violence: all violence stems from this objective violence, the ‘Military Industrial Complex’ as Marcuse said half a century ago.

Although Žižek does not mention any of the benefits of capitalism as such and the adaptability of the market mechanism and its delivery of the goods to an increasing number, he does refer to Orwell’s ironic take on egalitarianism and class difference. He quotes Orwell to the effect that every revolutionary secretly believes that nothing can be changed: ‘to abolish class distinctions mean abolishing part of yourself. It is easy for me to say I want to get rid of class distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class distinction’ (cited on p140). Orwell unearths a secret conservative core at the heart of every radicalism – a fear that what one has spent one’s whole life doing and believing in might all taken away if we actually succeeded! Žižek also has ironic regard for the unfair contingencies of capitalism. If we lived in a true meritocracy, who would be blame for our failures? For this reason, no one really wants an equal society. At present it’s easy to blame and ‘to accept inequalities if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force’ (p76).

Žižek follows Freud and Nietzsche in ascribing the libidinal roots of the socialist demand for justice and equality to envy. Here again, incidentally, values such as these – justice and equality – just like, as above, the necessity to criticise the Other, are in great danger of being undermined by psycho-analysis itself. It is not so much the key value per se (equality, justice, free speech, etc.) that you want to promulgate, but your own secret base motives, of envy, omnipotence, etc. Why are you so pre-occupied with justice and equality? Oh! It’s because secretly you are envious and embittered!

Wild psychoanalysis has always been handy for attacking the ‘base motives’ of your opponent. And Žižek cites the contemporary master in this respect, namely, the German postmodern philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, in Rage and Time (Zorn und Seit), unfortunately not yet translated into English. Sloterdijk’s central notion is what he terms the ‘Messianic logic of rage concentration’. Here he gives an alternative history of the West as ‘a history of rage’. In the ancient world rage could be expressed directly – the Iliad begins with rage. With the coming of Judeo-Christianity, rage was deferred, postponed, sublimated and God would settle the accounts. With the rise of secularism and the modern Left, God’s judgement is taken over by the people and Leftist movements become ‘banks of rage’. They collect rage and promise large scale revenge and global justice. After revolutionary rage, full revenge is never quite quenched and a second integral revolution may be required. It is possible to ‘combine’ rages – national and cultural to give more impetus. In fascism, for instance, national rage predominated, in reaction to the earlier Communist rage events. Mao’s Communism exploited the rage of poor peasant farmers.

With the emancipatory rage of the Left now largely exhausted, it is suggested that rage resides primarily in Islam, but also in disparate victims of globalisation poorly expressed in the uncoordinated anti-capitalist rages, as well as the random rage of alienated youth. Rage is also part of Latin American populism, ecological movements, even the rage (concealed) in academia and cultural theory to which Žižek concedes he contributes.

Sloterdijk wants us to move beyond envious resentment into the quieter waters of liberal meritocracy with resentment replaced by respect for personal rights, and so on, like his rival Habermas. Žižek, on the other hand, seeks to affirm ‘the right to resentment’, and the ‘unremitting denunciation of injustice, and the refusal to ‘normalise’ crime. He sees these bubbling-up rages as revealing, what he calls, ‘the miracle of ethical universality’, (p165) which cannot and must not be reduced to a generalised envious libidinal impulse. Maybe, muses Žižek, Sloterdijk has a secret embittered envy all of his own – of the whole emancipatory project!

Speaking of rage, Žižek returns to Lacan’s citing of Antigone and her pure Kantian ethical act, which escapes the normal psychoanalytic ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, because she acts on her pure desire, and claims her absolute freedom. Herein lies our trauma – ‘the fact that freedom IS possible’ (p166). But, contra Žižek, here also lies the whole inescapable problematic of psychoanalysis and the impetus it has given to this ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, which relativises all truth claims, including the oldest foundational Judeo-Christian claim to truth itself, now so often cast in the role of being most violent of all believe systems. Once you suspect everything and trust nothing and follow Nietzsche who claimed, ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’, you are left only with an ultimate ‘ethics’ of pure desire. For Lacan, famously – ‘following one’s desire [without compromise] overlaps with doing one’s duty’ (p166). This is the only pure, unsullied domain that is free of the ever present suspect underbelly of Freudian slippages and suspicions. Every other activity, however noble, is not what it seems; it is a compromise formation.

Therefore, Žižek’s ‘answer’ to the three domains of violence is to see them all as interlinked, as invisible systemic and symbolic violence give rise to the totally shocking visibility of subjective violence. Objective violence makes subjective violence ‘understandable’, once we stand back. He asks: ‘Couldn’t the entire history of humanity be seen as a growing normalisation of injustice, entailing the nameless and faceless suffering of millions’? (p152). Not for Žižek, the Fukuyamian ‘End of History’ scenario of liberal democracies following peaceful change. Quite the reverse: he envisages God himself, noting all the hidden injustices due to violence mounting up until the tension becomes unbearable, at which point God loses His neutrality and falls into the world, brutally intervening, delivering justice. Žižek is grappling here with Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘Divine violence’.

This is the opposite, Žižek emphasises, of the consoling God who ‘guarantees’ a ‘deeper meaning’ to catastrophes: everything however bad it now seems is part of God’s plan! Referring to the Holocaust or the Congo, for instance, Žižek asks, ‘is it not obscene to claim that these stains have a deeper meaning through which they contribute to the harmony of the whole’? (p153). And Žižek is quick to dissociate divine violence from religious fundamentalism, but not from mob lynchings or organised revolutionary terror, where ‘the agent of judgement is no longer God but the people’. (p158). He turns around the liberal critique of the death penalty, which says we have no to right to take life only God has that right, by pointing out that we have no right to grant mercy either, especially as we are not the victims of the crime! Not to punish crime, Žižek says, ‘entails the true blasphemy of elevating oneself to the level of God, of acting with his authority’ (p164).

But what might this divine violence look like? Well Žižek cites, the revoloutionary terror of 1792-94, the Red Terror of 1919. For Žižek it is ‘the domain of sovereignty…within which killing is neither an expression of personal pathology…nor a crime (or its punishment), nor a sacred sacrifice. It neither aesthetic, nor ethical, nor religious’ (p168). It is not of this world. It has no meaning, as such. ‘It is just a sign of the injustice of the world, of the world being ethically, ‘out-of-joint’’ (p169). It is a pure Event (Badiou). Just as we are urged against finding any ‘deeper’ meaning in it, and there is no guarantee as to its ‘divine’ nature, there can be no retrospective ‘justification’. It should not be understood as God punishing mankind, or as a rehearsal for the Last Judgement, nor some sacred decent into madness.

Instead, it is an expression of God’s impotence. ‘It is decision (to kill, to risk losing one’s own life) made in absolute solitude’ (p171). Žižek cites the example of the poor from the favelas in Rio descending into the rich parts of the city looting and burning supermarkets. To an outside observer, this may be judged as simply destructive. Žižek cites Robespierre’s last speech before execution when he asserts that there are souls, magnanimous hearts who perceive, ‘that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland…without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime’ (p172).

With divine violence, we have reached the most sublime coalescence of murder (sometimes) being a proof of love! Divine violence can never be understood, as it lies outside the humanly constituted world. It is ‘pure’ and undivided within itself. However, once it happens, it is immediately taken up into that same human universe where it will be judged without end. It will be seized by an existing ideology. It will be immediately politicised and rendered impure. However, there is one difference between divine violence and mere destructiveness, according to Žižek. Divine violence is guided by ‘vision’.

If the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ has been spread, like an infection belonging and intrinsic to Modernity, to all values; if all values are now questionable, relative, contingent and unreliable; if any ideological power is fatally undermined by its secret obscene supplement, then the West has become openly and fatally violent to itself, through its devastating self-deconstruction. The drive for transparency, the drive to ‘out’ every value, save only the value of outing for its own sake, leaves only one ultimate ethical recourse – divine violence - the violence that is pure.

The field is now open wide and gaping. Here is an urgent current example for us to contemplate. Surely a case of divine violence? In a recent issue of the Washington Times, Roger Chapin discusses a congressionally authorised EMP (Electro-magnetic-pulse) Commission report (April, 2008):

An EMP could be generated by detonating a single nuclear-armed missile some 200 miles above America’s heartland. Such a missile could be launched from a freighter off the US’s Gulf coast. Such an EMP attack would render most computers inoperable, thus knocking out 70 percent or more of our electric grid system and leaving most of the country without light, heat, power, running water, communication, mechanized agriculture or transportation. Simply stated, the United States would be put back into the early 19th century, with most of our population dying from starvation and disease.

Was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alluding to an EMP attack, as Chapin suggests, when he declared that, ‘A world without America is conceivable’?