Zizek on Violence

Violence, a book by Zizek, articulates a divide between subjective and objective violence. Subjective violence is felt violence intended to be felt.  Objective violence is unintended violence entailed by (in) the situation.  After this, our psyche plays tricks on us – the holocaust and 9/11  are subjective violence.  The eighty year slave trade in which slaves were collected from Africa, shipped in hellish, murderous conditions to the Sugar islands of the carribean and worked to death because it was cheaper to replace them than to feed and rest them, is objective violence produced by markets that badly wanted sugar.  In Iraq, all the collateral damage, including the descent into civil warfare, seem to be objective violence – just some bad luck, on the same level with natural disasters. The punishing lives of sweatshop workers that enable me to buy jeans that fit badly for $30 are, again, objective violence.  Zizek has no patience with this blindness to structural violence. The subjective / objective divide is just a manifestation of the Fundamental Attribution Error (my point, not his). It may be naturally occurring, but it isn’t unrecognizable, and we could always respond if we wanted.

Zizek makes a point that the relationship of sign to signified is one in which the signified is easily, even casually obliterated – an objective violence we all collude in to maintain the subject-object distinction and insulate ourselves from finitude and thingness. This practice of violence enables us to mis-recognize people as things.

The final section of this book discusses Divine violence, in dialogue with Walter Benjamin. Divine violence is unstoppable re-ordering of the real world.  I’m not sure, but it may have been developed to talk about the genocidal wars of early Israelites, and the later echoes in God’s wrath against his son.  This section is a little obscure.

In 2002 I remember arguing with some friends in church that this planned invasion of Iraq was just how things fall out when a USA is inflamed and belligerent.  I wanted to say it was objective violence, not a moral question, partly because I was in the armed forces at the time, partly because I was drinking the ‘Saddam is a very naughty man’ Kool-Aid.  This is why philosophy in the psychoanalytic tradition is worth hearing. To make you think.