Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 11 Number 1, April 2010

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Zizek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2008, 2009. 218pp. ISBN 978 1 84668 027 4. Paperback  8.99.

A review article by

John Vignaux Smyth

Portland State University

 Admired for his sense of humour and provocative polemics, the Slovenian Slavoj Zizek cannot be accused of avoiding the most serious subjects. His Violence is a case in point—only one of three recent books, the other two being a lengthy dialogue with the Catholic theologian John Millbank titled The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, plus his most recent First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. One is tempted to parody his own insistence on the “obscene underbelly” that sustains every ideology, and wonder what kind of obscenity underlies such astonishing ideological productivity! Indeed this is by no means merely a joke in reviewing a book whose final sentence seems to recommend violently doing nothing about violence: “Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent [and politically radical or liberating] thing to.”

For writing a book, let alone scores of them, can hardly be said to be doing nothing. Books are obviously acts, especially for someone dubbed “the [presumably idolized] Elvis of contemporary theory.”[i] Moreover, Zizek ran a few years ago for president of Slovenia—doing nothing indeed! Has the leopard changed his spots since his respectable defeat?

I must confess at the outset that I more or less agree with him about many things—from his insistence on the continuing importance of such writers as Hegel and Kierkegaard, for example, to his pooh-poohing of a certain sort of postmodernism and so-called political correctness (all these amply illustrated in Violence)—but it was Kierkegaard himself (Zizek is writing a book on him currently) who said that the most violent fight is not between those who say different things, but between those who say the “same thing.” I shall discuss Violence with this in mind, since while I take at face value its “blurb” that it was written as “a passionate plea for awareness” about this humanly most important of topics, I am not sure whether the same blurb’s conclusion that “this is a book poised to set a new agenda for thinking about violence” is--or should be--true.

            I have no space here to consider to what extent Zizek’s many books are (albeit dialectically) consistent with one another, or whether Violence implicitly attempts to correct some of his earlier works. As its subtitle suggests, it is not in any case the book’s straightforward theoretical architecture (which has musical and almost self-parodic epigraphs--“Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo,” etc.--for its chapters) which is particularly interesting or original. The author distinguishes between “subjective violence” (done by identifiable agents), “systemic violence” (done by systems such as capitalism) and “symbolic violence” (identified primarily with language and its effects).

             But the book’s main interest, as its subtitle suggests, lies in its “sideways” provocations, of which I can barely suggest the flavour. Its opening salvo--though openly proclaimed only in an endnote--is that Zizek finds “totally justified” the Soviet government’s expulsion of anti-communist intellectuals in 1922, an act at least indirectly associated by him with what Walter Benjamin called “divine violence” (of which more later) This stern attitude is contrasted with one of the key targets of his analysis, the “tolerant liberal” opposition to “all forms of violence.”  

        Zizek’s attack on quasi-pacifists shifts swiftly to what he calls (appropriating the ironic term, he says, from one of themselves) “liberal communists”—obviously by no means all opposed to all forms of violence—illustrated by “the usual suspects: Bill Gates, George Soros, [etc.]…as well as their court philosophers…,” whose “ideology has become all but indistinguishable from the new breed of anti-globalist leftist radicals.”  So now there are two targets, the “pseudo-radical left” and the capitalist “right” (or perhaps “less left”), merged into one. By the end of the chapter liberal democracy and totalitarianism, moreover, will be merged at their root: such is Zizek’s political dialectic. “The exemplary figures of evil today are not ordinary consumers who pollute the environment and live in a violent world…but those who, while fully engaged in creating conditions for such universal devastation… buy their way out of their own activity, living in gated communities, eating organic food, taking holidays in wildlife preserves, and so on.” Citing the filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron—“the tyranny of the twenty-first century is called ‘democracy’”—Zizek merges liberal-democratic pluralism and a sick image of quasi-fascistic sexuality: “we enter something like a Manhattan upper-class gay couple’s loft, the informally dressed [bureaucratic] official with his crippled partner at the table.”

            Unafraid of being labeled non-PC, indeed provoking it (as just seen), Zizek uses his first chapter also to lampoon liberal-democratic delusions of sexual liberation. He cites Alain Badiou to the effect that “one should insist on a focus on love” (as opposed to sex or enjoyment)—here is Zizek at his most edifying!—and he has a field-day satirizing National Masturbation Month in San Francisco, as indeed I think it fully deserves to be satirized. The chapter concludes more generally by making the “delicate liberal communist--frightened, caring, fighting violence--and the blind fundamentalist exploding in rage…two sides of the same coin.” Though this attack on the delicate liberal-democrat recalls Nietzsche (to whom he refers), Zizek concludes by citing a Brecht poem which seems to advocate shooting such liberal “good men.” Adagio ma non troppo e multo espressivo indeed--the chapter begins by approving the expulsion of anti-communist intellectuals and ends by advocating killing “good” people!

            Since the book also ends with an affirmation of “doing nothing,” we might perhaps wonder what kind of “disavowal” (to use a Zizekian locution) might be operating here, consciously or not. “Doing nothing” seems to mean, in his edifying introduction, imitating “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.” (One might also recall Adorno—the Adorno pilloried by the left-wing student rebels in Frankfurt for not advocating direct action.) But if doing nothing means thinking and reading, advocating the killing of “good” people in widely published and even idolized writing is obviously an intentionally provocative or symbolically violent way to do it. A kind of quasi-necessary disavowal occurs here, one might say, insofar as Zizek does this by way of a poem, and one that he did not write. (When Andre Breton, for example, wrote that the ideal surrealist act would be to shoot blindfolded into a crowd, he was surely not advocating this literally; the “act” was really a “poem”—but one whose form did nothing to prevent it being acted out.) When Zizek actually justifies his right to kill—in The Monstrosity of Christ—he predictably does not defend his right to kill what he calls “the usual suspects” (“good men” such as Bill Gates), but takes the much safer course of saying he would have no hesitation in killing what we might call the even more usual suspects, such as a doctor who had given medical advice to torturers, and who might otherwise get away with it. He presents this murder as a quasi-existential act, justified by no ratio or appeal to the “Big Other” (in Lacanese)--i.e. as what he regards as an authentically ethical act, whereby one takes all responsibility upon oneself. (Another of his extreme examples of ethical or at least “authentic” acts is almost tragicomic: he envisages a wife on a plane about to crash who, instead of saying “I love you” to her husband on the mobile phone, says “I have despised you for years,” or the like.) The conclusion of Violence generalizes this kind of individual violence to mass political or social phenomena, appealing as I have said to Benjamin’s notion of “divine violence”—one which is not however theological, but in Zizek’s hands militantly atheist. He likes citing not only Lenin, but Robespierre, and…Saint Paul! This he shares with Alain Badiou, who wrote an atheist book on the saint which has clearly influenced him.

            I remember years ago predicting--when he was still writing about sublime objects of ideology, woman as a “symptom” of man, and Enjoy[ing] Your Symptom--that the then thoroughly Lacanian Zizek would end up writing about Christianity, so I am not surprised to find him proclaiming here himself to be a “Pauline materialist atheist communist” (my phrase, but all four terms are explicit). What he and Badiou like about Saint Paul, among other things, is his appeal to universality—to the “violent” rejection of partiality embodied in Christ’s “What have you to do with me?” (to his mother). If I am not mistaken, Zizek is anti-postmodernist on both ethical and epistemological grounds: the claim to, or at least attempt at, universality should not be watered down by what he regards as a liberal-capitalist-democratic or “liberal communist” fake pluralism in either practice or theory. The ideology of capitalism itself is a kind of grotesque parody--first as tragedy, then as farce--of “global” universalism.

            Though not analyzed as such in Violence, the view of the crucifixion, often attributed to Paul, as the sacrifice to end sacrifice, is relevant to what is perhaps the key element of Zizek’s project: to identify the possibility of action and thought (including violent action and thought) that fall outside of what he calls “the logic of sacrifice.” Earlier in his career, in Enjoy Your Symptom, he had already cited Lacan to the effect that we should “sacrifice sacrifice”—but the Lacanian formula itself, even more than anything attributed to Paul, underlines the ambivalence of such a project. It should not surprise us, therefore, that Zizek is now writing a book on Kierkegaard—as the young Adorno also did, praising Kierkegaard for his great insight into sacrifice as the central religious (and indeed anthropological) category, but also accusing him of falling for a sacrificial mythology of his own. Zizek’s final chapter in Violence approvingly cites Kierkegaard to the effect that one should love one’s beloved enough to “hate” him or her. Love—like political liberation--seems to be what Zizek, citing Benjamin, calls “divine violence.” Love is supposedly “the domain of pure violence, the domain outside law (legal power), the domain of the violence that is neither law-founding nor law-sustaining.”  

            This atheist appropriation of religious language—here both Paul’s and Kierkegaard’s--makes John Millbank call Zizek a heterodox Christian malgre lui. (Zizek returns the compliment by calling Millbank a pagan, suggesting that the atheist legacy of Christianity is the most advanced or liberated form of it. He champions “the community of the Holy Ghost,” of “unplugged” outcasts—“with, ideally, authentic psychoanalytic and political collectives as its two main forms”!) Other critics have been less kind than Millbank, accusing Zizek of oscillating between his own polemical jokes or “populist” examples and a theoretical language that circulates among his favourite thinkers—Lacan, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, St. Paul, Badiou, Agamben, etc.—without properly grounding itself in any definite combination of them, or indeed outside them. I think Zizek could be defended against this accusation, and in a rhetoric or logic not necessarily his own; but I shall leave that task to others. My discussion will focus on “the logic of sacrifice,” since it is here that Zizek’s ideas are in my view both most suggestive and most questionable. Quite apart from more grandiose intellectual considerations, he is surely correct that current political and psychological realities (fundamentalist terrorism, etc.) make the understanding of sacrificial violence practically crucial.                   

As regards our era “that perceives itself as post-ideological,” Zizek views “the large majority of human beings [as] spontaneously ‘moral’: killing another human being is deeply traumatic for them. So, in order to make them do it, a larger, ‘sacred’ cause is needed…” On the other hand, he twists the well-known formula of Freud whereby language substitutes for violence, asking whether rather it is “language, not primitive egoistic interest, [that] is the first and greatest divider.” That is, what if the linguistic animal is the most violent of all, with a violence without limit? And if the benign (“liberal” etc.) model of “communication” merely increases violence?  In brief, language produces the “abyss” and “trauma” (the neighbour is defined as one who smells) that sustains both the subjectivity of love and the particular character of human violence.  “Symbolic” violence is the model of human violence.

            Without denying the latter, or the obvious importance of language to human symbolisms, we may wonder not only whether this justifies the highly dubious claim that “reality, in itself, in its stupid existence, is never intolerable: it is language, its symbolization, which makes it such,” but also whether this aspect of Violence doesn’t greatly underestimate the importance of symbolic behaviour among animals—the book wholly ignores this matter, which is obviously essential to any view of the history of violence that does not axiomatically posit a quasi-absolute distinction between us and animals, “history” and  “nature,” based dubiously on “language.” (Incidentally, the later Paul de Man, citing Hegel, criticized his own earlier linguistic categories as unstable and complicit with the category of the sacred; the confluence of these in Zizek is evident.[ii]) In this respect, we might compare the genealogy of violence—including the transition from animal to human violence—proposed by the Rene Girard, where the fundamental “symbolic” category is not language but imitation, which is shared by humans and animals (indeed copying of various sorts extends to plants, neurons, and genes). Girard regards both language and sacrifice as upshots of the highly developed mimetic and cognitive capacity that distinguishes humans from animals—mimetic rivalry and arbitrary scapegoating precedes and produces sacrifice, and even contributes concurrently to the origin of language--whereas Zizek seems to regard language as the precondition of human violence. The causality is crystal clear, to be frank, in neither case.  However, given the fact that Zizek regards gender and hence desire in explicitly mimetic terms--“feminine masquerade has the structure of mimicry…The status of the phallus itself is that of mimicry”[iii]—and that he furthermore links “male” and “female” “logics” to the Jewish/Christian divide, comparison with Girard’s mimetic theory of both desire and sacrifice seems to me almost essential.

Though I am neither a Girardian Christian nor one of any stripe—indeed Girard might well agree much more with Zizek about, e.g., Saint Paul than I do—I nevertheless find it remarkable that Girard is mentioned nowhere in Violence. This “violent” exclusion is all the more remarkable in that Jean-Pierre Dupuy is cited approvingly in both Violence and First as Tragedy—the same Dupuy who has written on game theory, economics, etc. and who has often vocally acknowledged his debt to Girard. Moreover, while the latter is mentioned once in The Monstrosity of Christ, it is by Millbank--who accuses Zizek of being too like Girard!

I note that whereas Millbank and Zizek stage their debate as “paradox versus dialectic”—and doubtless Girard qua Catholic might be happy with the idea of paradox—Girard qua scientist offers a quite different sort of challenge to Zizekian dialectic. In Zizek’s The Fragile Absolute; Or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? there is a single reference to Girard that concerns the view of the crucifixion usually attributed to Paul. Discussing Eric Santner, Zizek says that Santner “conceiv[es] Moses as the exemplary figure of…a last cannibal abolishing the condition of cannibalism (and, in contrast, the figure of Jesus as the last meal, the last victim to be slaughtered and eaten—following Rene Girard, who has conceived Christ’s crucifixion as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices).”         

            The interpretation of this formula, as I suggested earlier, is thus pivotal. I don’t know whether Zizek would call the Catholic Girard “pagan” as he does the Catholic Millbank—playing, as it were, the Pauline (atheist) Protestant to their Catholicism. And I will pass over here Girard’s own development on this internecine terrain, except to note that he relents on his early tendency to apply sacrificial terminology only to properly non-Christian phenomena; but he never relents on his insistence on Jesus as a scapegoat (of both Romans and Jews) rather than a sacrifice (though the set of scapegoats obviously includes sacrificial victims), let alone one performed by God-the-father. (Badiou defends Paul to the same effect, on the basis that that the trinity postdates Paul.)  Girard’s scientific position is that sacrifice is the deluded but anthropologically universal sacralization and ritualization of the (mimetically generated) scapegoat mechanism, originally neither ritualized nor sacralized. From the religious point of view, Jesus could at most be called a “self-sacrifice” which breaks with violent reciprocity (the cycle of revenge), self-directed or otherwise. Zizek talks of the famous turn-the-other-cheek Gospel passage comparably. Indeed when he appeals, on behalf of his attempt at non-sacrificial logic, to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of Homo Sacer—the “sacred” (or accursed) person who can be killed at whim but not sacrificed—this is not, to my mind, inconsistent with Girard, for whom the (originally) non-sacrificial—instead simply mimetic, quasi-unanimous—and in principle arbitrary scapegoat is precisely the “obscene underbelly,” the “repressed,” as Zizek might put it, of the ideology and practice—the law--of sacrifice. For Girard, the history of anti-sacrificial Christianity exhibits many relapses into sacrificial mythology; but the persecuted Jew, for example, is homo sacer, a scapegoat, not a sacrificial victim in the technical sense. (It is for this reason, one might add, that virulently anti-Christian Nazis could so easily adopt Christian habits.)

            Both Girard and Zizek thus attempt to articulate a critique of sacrificial logic, and both recognize that even self-sacrifice is frequently sacrificial in the pejorative sense (masochistic, etc.). But both also affirm the possibility of “good” self-sacrifice (if we permit the same term for a different thing)—indeed first-world people, according to a rather contemptuous Zizek, nowadays find it more and more difficult to imagine a universal cause for which they would die. In addition, Girard is no more strictly a pacifist than Zizek, albeit that the former does not write about killing torturers’ doctors or the like.     

            The rub of their difference, it seems to me, thus turns on Zizek’s attempt to affirm a kind of atheistic “divine” violence that is “neither law-founding nor law-sustaining.” (In Girardian terms, sacrifice is law-sustaining; it both reveals and conceals the arbitrary mimetic scapegoating that was originally law-founding). Zizek likes St. Paul because he talks about destroying the law, or affirming something that supposedly falls outside of the dialectic of law, which is founded on its own exception: illegitimate violence. Girard, on the other hand, cites Kafka: “one of the few to perceive that the absence of law is in fact identical with law run wild, and that this constitutes the chief burden of mankind” (my emphasis).[iv] In Girardian terms, “divine violence” is always sacrificial; it constitutes the ideology of scapegoating. The modern dilemma is that scapegoating continues even when its properly sacrificial expression or religious excuse has fallen into decay; in fact, for this very reason, it intensifies and becomes more visibly random. Indeed “sacred” or “divine” arbitrariness (the ultimately arbitrary character of the scapegoat) is itself the outcome of mimetic dynamics, and hence of mimetic law.

            Zizek often uses the word “law” in a rather general sense, though in the passage cited above, concerning love qua “domain of pure violence,” he specifies it to mean “legal power.” It seems to me, however, that even when its meaning is thus restricted—love, for example, certainly transcends such legal codes as marriage—his own positively affirmed examples of non-legal violence are dubious. For instance, though killing the torturer’s doctor is technically extra-judicial, Zizek specifies that he would have no hesitation in doing this (only?) when the doctor would otherwise escape justice. In other words, he mimics what he regards as a legally just outcome (execution).  (He later criticizes what he calls the “anti- (death-) penalty” lobby, so I am assuming he is not like Sade who at least pretended to advocate murder, while being in practice, for instance while a revolutionary judge, anti-capital punishment.)  Similarly, the fact that he wouldn’t—or at least doesn’t-- advocate torturing the doctor presumably mimics his beliefs about the legality (and morality) of torture. So this example does not seem to me genuinely independent of “the domain of law.” (Indeed, if the law permits capital punishment but not torture, torturing the doctor to some degree without killing him would seem a slightly more plausible candidate for “divine violence”!)

             But if this kind of objection goes for the individual case, I find it hard to see why it should not also go for Zizek’s more emphatic collective examples like mob violence. To be sure, he reiterates Benjamin’s emphasis that such “divine violence” (whose privileged examples do indeed seem to be collective and revolutionary) is never guaranteed as justified, though it may appear so in retrospect; but once again the justifiable limits of such violence seem governed by such considerations as I have just mentioned. In fact, while his emphasis on the burden of individual choice might recall such writers as Camus and Kierkegaard, I find Camus’ own discussions of concrete revolutionary violence in The Rebel more congenial and informative: less abstractly “existential.”

            When it comes to legal violence, on the other hand, Zizek seems far less radical. For example, he proposes a kind of synthesis of Judaic and Christian moralities whereby we punish the criminal (eye for an eye) and then forgive (like Christ). He even proposes that the punishment of the guilty is good for them, since to be infinitely indebted to, e.g. the all-forgiving Christ, would be intolerable for the superego! All this seems commonplace enough: shorn of its intellectual scaffolding, it appears (like the example of killing the torturer’s doctor) to represent a fairly ordinary kind of attitude—and one that might perhaps serve a presidential candidate well enough. But Zizek’s dismissive reference to the “anti- (death-) penalty” lobby never develops into, e.g., a coherent argument for or against the death penalty, or torture.   

            All in all, then, I find Zizek’s treatments of both legal and trans-legal (“divine”)

violence to be stimulating but somewhat disappointing. I have mentioned that the absence of any convincing—even “sideways”-- treatment of the relation between human and animal violence appears to me a weakness in a book titled, so generally, Violence. Moreover, even or especially if we accept that “verbal violence is not merely a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence,” the absence of any attempt to spell out the status of the sort of violent “doing nothing” that is (Zizek’s) writing also seems problematic. What, for example, is the relation between the sort of symbolic violence embodied in Brecht’s poem about shooting “good” men and that embodied in Zizek’s writing about “really” shooting the torturer’s doctor? Lack of clarity here seems not only suspicious in a book on so practically important a topic, but also, I think, fails to address the ambivalence of Zizek’s own intellectual violence (though like him, I see no reason to see this “violence” as necessarily pejorative)—or the essential difference, if any, between acting (e.g. running for president) and “doing nothing” (e.g. reading or writing and not voting), between joking and writing seriously, writing a work of political theory and a poem, or lying and telling the truth. (Does Zizek, for example, regard lying in philosophical works as a possible form of “divine violence”? Is writing itself often a form of symbolic sacrifice, as we find formulated in Adorno and Beckett for instance?) But these distinctions and questions are of the essence of symbolic violence, of symbolism, and hence of consciousness as such.     

            I conclude where we began. To take, for example, the “liberal communist” or “good man” Bill Gates as intellectual-cum-moral scapegoat seems a little cheap to me. Given Gates’ philanthropic pretensions, not to mention vast wealth, it has the predictability of a rather cruel joke. But if Zizek wants to defend his attack as embodying “the cruelty of [revolutionary] love,” of which he speaks rather grandiosely at his conclusion, this does not seem any less pretentiously (or not? Like Gates?) philanthropic. (If we were to joke even more cheaply, we might ask whether we are supposed to deduce that Zizek’s love-life must be somehow more “divinely violent” than Gates’ philanthropy!) Better, in my view, had he conducted a debate with Gates over the meaning of a formula about which they might both (along with the ironic Socrates and Hume, the latter cited approvingly by Zizek on this very subject) agree: that virtue is indeed its own reward, i.e., not sacrificial but self-interested; and that at any rate self-interest is not the true source of most human, and (I would add) also some animal, violence.

Incidentally, when Kierkegaard—whom Zizek calls “incomparably radical”—distinguishes between selfishness and true self-interest, he says that the former is a secondary phenomenon derived from mimetism, and that “the devil is essentially mimic.” It is perhaps to be hoped that Zizek’s next book, on Kierkegaard himself, takes up this topic directly. I, like so many people, find whatever he says interesting.