Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

3.92 of 5 stars 3.92 · rating details · 1,200 ratings · 105 reviews

Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Slavoj Žižek constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in our world.

Using history, philosophy, books, movies, Lacanian psychiatry, and jokes, Slavoj Žižek examines the ways we perceive and misperceive violence.Drawing from hisunique cultural vision, Žižek brings new light to the Paris riots...more

Paperback, 272 pages

Published July 22nd 2008 by Picador (first published 2007)

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

More…

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Best Books To Frame Thinking

33rd out of 283 books — 176 voters

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić

Best Serbian, Croatian, Slovene Literature

110th out of 126 books — 69 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 2,451)

filter | sort: default (?) | rating details

Aug 14, 2008 Imogen rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: hipster assholes

I don't want to assert that 'the rock star of cultural theory' is full of shit, but y'know, Slavoj Žižek seems to me to be kind of full of shit.

Me: Hey Mr Žižek! What did you think of the last season of Lost?

Žižek: Well, in the context of a Hegelian dialectic, this work must be considered ultimately a usurpation/derivation of Freud's pathetic "death drive" mythos, if you get me. By which I mean, it's opposed to Nietzsche's ironic reading of the story of Job, but only in letter; not so much in s...more I don't want to assert that 'the rock star of cultural theory' is full of shit, but y'know, Slavoj Žižek seems to me to be kind of full of shit.

Me: Hey Mr Žižek! What did you think of the last season of Lost?

Žižek: Well, in the context of a Hegelian dialectic, this work must be considered ultimately a usurpation/derivation of Freud's pathetic "death drive" mythos, if you get me. By which I mean, it's opposed to Nietzsche's ironic reading of the story of Job, but only in letter; not so much in spirit.

Me: Are you saying that you think that TV show is stupid?

Žižek: Well yes, but I am saying it a lot more complicatedly.

I mean, I don't really read philosophy, so what the fuck do I know, right? I read this in the back seat of a car on a two-day trip from Oakland to Camp Trans Michigan, and then on the two-day trip back, with an adorable little dog bouncing around the car and a bunch of Atmosphere on Micah's iPod. But I mostly tuned the other stuff out because what's the point of reading a dense book of cultural theory if you can't really take it in, right? (Well, except for the joke where the dog is sleeping and you pretend that passages from said cultural theory are a bedtime story and you read them out loud to her.) Mostly I followed it, and mostly, what Zizek was doing was going, 'here is the complicated place where this phenomenon is situated, and here is why it is stupid.' So, whatever.

There were a couple highlights, like when he asserted that the commonality in human culture is mostly the struggle against human culture, instead of any kind of altruism or anything. But for every really good moment like that, there's at least one moment where he goes, 'hey guys, masturbation is stupid,' or talks kind of aimlessly and pointlessly (and briefly) about the plasticity of gender in the context of "sex-change operations" (nice terminology, rock star) and you think that maybe he's saying transsexuality is stupid (since he thinks everything else is stupid [except, annoyingly, atheism; since the explosion of angry books espousing atheism in the last couple years, I am very over having people shove atheism down my throat], so probably), so you get pissed at him for just touching on it instead of really saying anything about it. Y'know?

(Nice sentence structure there, Imogen. Way to mock the professionals.)

Anyway, whatever. I was engaged and I get why folks are so stoked about him and yes: heck of erudite. But ultimately, y'know, so what?(less)

like 12 likes · see review

Aug 15, 2009 Jimmy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: cultural-studies, political-science, western-philosophy

Here is a slightly patronizing way of summarizing the methodology of Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek; address a relevant social issue (such as violence) and certain ideological perspectives that have been applied to it, cut and paste seemingly disparate examples of high and low culture arbitrarily throughout the text, draw reaching connections between the two, and hopefully attempt to arrive at an intelligible conclusion or thesis. This became apparent during my reading of Violence, part of...more Here is a slightly patronizing way of summarizing the methodology of Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek; address a relevant social issue (such as violence) and certain ideological perspectives that have been applied to it, cut and paste seemingly disparate examples of high and low culture arbitrarily throughout the text, draw reaching connections between the two, and hopefully attempt to arrive at an intelligible conclusion or thesis. This became apparent during my reading of Violence, part of Picador's BIG IDEA'S/small books series and what is, more or less, Zizek's most accessible work to date.

It starts out with the relatively lucid premise or distinction of three types of violence; subjective (clearly identifiable, direct), symbolic (language or forms of), and systemic (objective; political and economic). After the groundwork is laid out for this commentary on violence, Zizek then starts in on his typical fugue-like series of a variety of subchapters. In each of these, he'll be bringing up a good deal of Lacan, Hegel, and Marx. Approaching surface-level, logical assessments of violence with paradoxical and ironic reasoning, Zizek rambles on about subjects such as the Paris riots of 2005, Bill Gates and subversive entrepreneurship, torture, religious fundamentalism, atheism, and Benjamin's concept of Divine Violence.

I'm not even going to attempt to paraphrase the respective chapters of Violence, and I'll take the deserved criticism for my own lazy criticism here. However, I must say that I do this out of a dismissive attitude toward Zizek's writing style. He is like a kid in the candy store of cultural theory; too excited by the endless possibility of example and analogy at hand to really make a focused point. One second he is criticizing Sam Harris and his controversial, but rational, opinions on political torture, then he suddenly makes the transition into the "Judeo-Christian-Freudian" (ugh) weight of the concept of the Lacanian notion of the Neighbor and the significance of the physical distance and proximity of this Neighbor (the Other being tortured) to the level of ease with which one is able to torture. Granted, he is still following Harris (sort of), but his "point" here is so utterly bloated, and the ones that follow are even more digressive and trivial.

The man basically needs to stick to public lectures and debates, and even those can be interminable. Maybe I'm not even making the greatest point about what is wrong with his writing, but at around page 170, I was about to throw this book against the wall. He's good for an occasional, cultural-studies-type joke, but as I've said before, the man is a completely shallow thinker. (less)

like 4 likes · see review

Mar 03, 2009 Kate rated it 5 of 5 stars

If you're ready to go along with Zizek for the ride...this book is sure to take you out of whatever box you're currently in and do to your box exactly what the cover of this book portrays.

He may be self-indulgent, but it's a nice blend of psych, linguistics and philosophy that makes his case complete.

like 2 likes · see review

Mar 09, 2009 Nina rated it 2 of 5 stars

Considering all the praise Zizek is getting these years, I was very disappointed with this book. This book is structured around six 'sideways glances on violence', supposedly beccause there is something inherently obscure about the nature of violence - fair enough, but Zizeks points are either fairly commonplace - You know he's not the first to talk about "violence inherit in the system", Monty Python did that as well only funnier - or else obscure and overthought. I really don't know how Zizek...more

like 1 like · see review

Mar 08, 2012 Sitharthan Sriharan rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: No one

Recommended to Sitharthan by: a random internet forum

Shelves: philosophy, psychology-and-psychoanalysis, cultural-studies, politics

This is my second book I have read by Slavoj Zizek. My first was "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce". I have to say I was attracted to Zizek for his style a bit, but also because I've been wanting to read some work by contemporary continental philosophers. I have to say though, after this book, I'm already getting tired of Zizek's "shitty political interventions", to use his own words from a guardian interview a couple years ago. If you're trying to look for philosophical substance in Zizek, I don...more

like · see review

Feb 17, 2012 David Rush rated it 2 of 5 stars

This review is a bit of a confessional since I think the major failing of this book is me reading it, sorry about that.

I learned a lot by reading this, one thing I just now realized is why I was never a good student in school. It is so much clearer now, but on any assignment I would become focused on individual bits and not step back and take in the big picture.

This relates since with this book I could never get past Žižek's colorful quirks to get a feel for his grand scheme of society.

It star...more

like 1 like · see review

May 20, 2011 Marzieh rasouli rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

خیلی باهاش خوش گذشت. تو عنوان اصلی اومده که کتاب شیش تا نگاه مختلف به خشونت کرده اما ما تو فارسی "پنج نگاه زیر چشمی" می‌خونیم. مترجم هم توضیحی نداده که اون یه نگاه کجا رفته و چرا حذف شده. من نگاه ژیژک رو دوست دارم که از همه چی آشنایی‌زدایی می‌کنه. ایرادش اینه که با رندی از غفلت و احتمالن دانش کم خواننده‌ش استفاده می‌کنه که مبهوتش کنه. یعنی می‌بینی یه جاهای از یه موضوع کمترین اطلاعات رو می‌ده، و اینطوری وانمود می‌کنه که این اطلاعت کل اطلاعات و داشته‌هاست و بر اساس همون اطلاعات نظریه‌ش رو مطرح می‌...more

like 5 likes · see review

Mar 26, 2011 Marc Chéhab rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Zizek's account rests firmly on the assumption that humans commit more intra-species violence than animals. From there onwards he puts language in the centre of his attention and argues, what is really a very very common theme in conflict research, that we are more violent because we have available language symbols of absolute Evil. That is, a Nazi beating up a Jew beats not the actual Jewish person in front of him, but the projection of the word or symbol "Jew" (whose content is evil, cockroach...more

like · see review

Mar 03, 2013 Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars

While shopping at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon with my friend, fellow philosopher, and ministerial colleague Dan Morrow, he brought up Zizek. I said that I had never read any of his stuff, but that I needed to since I kept seeing him quoted in books and blogs I read. Dan recommended Violence as the best introduction to his thinking.

And I read the book in a day and a half. I couldn't put it down. The initial chapters left me thinking this might be one of those books one reads that transform...more

like · see review

Jan 06, 2012 Carolyn rated it 1 of 5 stars

Last year I grew inexcusably lazy with philosophy, favoring watered-down texts infused with psychobabble and sociological schemata. Zizek was the worst offender on my bad-philosophers list. The sole purpose behind my absolute enamour with his writings was the potpurrian style of combining popular culture with historical philosophy. As my reading within his realm of work progressed, I realized that Zizek in fact does very little philosophizing of his own, aside from condemning marginalized groups...more

like 2 likes · see review

Apr 19, 2010 Laura Jean rated it 5 of 5 stars

Thought provoking must-read. Here's a longer review I wrote, once upon a time:

Review: On Violence

Slavoj Žižek's book On Violence is a modern treatise on injustice that seeks to demystify the motivations behind subjective violence—e.g. hitting, shooting, rioting, bombing, warring—by examining the systemic and objective violence inherent in capitalism, liberal ideals of selfhood, and order. The book is broken into six parts designated by italian subtitles that correspond to the tempo and mood in...more Thought provoking must-read. Here's a longer review I wrote, once upon a time:

Review: On Violence

Slavoj Žižek's book On Violence is a modern treatise on injustice that seeks to demystify the motivations behind subjective violence—e.g. hitting, shooting, rioting, bombing, warring—by examining the systemic and objective violence inherent in capitalism, liberal ideals of selfhood, and order. The book is broken into six parts designated by italian subtitles that correspond to the tempo and mood instructions of different movements in a Beethoven quartet. Like such music for the strings, Žižek's chapters feature sharp changes in mood and pace, shifting from the philosophy of Hegel and Lacan to anecdotes about pop culture and modern politics, then back again. He is chiefly concerned with the false belief that all is well in the world as long as no one is harmed by war or riots or other forms of physical harm. In asserting that this violence is only the periodic eruption of pervasive and systemic violence throughout the world, he depends on the reader to understand that the everyday usage of the word violence is a gloss which obscures greater injustices being done in the name of order and peace.

Whether one agrees with Žižek's presupposition or not (that physical peace, a freedom from subjective violence, is not enough), he raises important points about how a definition of violence restricted to the domain of physical harm allows the most privileged of society to fool themselves into complacency as long as war or rioting or any other form of subjective violence is not occurring. To shock the reader and these privileged from their complacency, Žižek spends the majority of his book looking at objective violence: “Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”1 His first chapter focuses on rich philanthropists like Bill Gates and George Soros, who have benefited from the pyramidal wealth and power structure of capitalism, but who, late in their careers, try to provide a kind of balance to society by giving back through charity. Žižek compares these modern wealthy with the Robber Barons of the 19th and 20th century who achieved great riches by discouraging competition and exploiting labor, and who then created foundations, libraries, museums, and universities as a way to reinvest in the society from which they took. Such benefactors of capitalism are called “liberal communists,” and Žižek sees them as the perpetrators of objective violence on the poor. Obliquely, but not so subtlely, he allows Brecht's poem “The Interrogation of the Good” say what should be done about these figures.2 In a surprising move, this answer-by-poem is practically a call to arms of revolutionary subjective violence as a response to the systemic violence of capitalism's most successful figures.

In the second chapter, Žižek examines the Other, and very concretely, the Neighbor, as an object to be recognized in order to create an identity of the self. He uses the examples of anti-immigration politics, torture in the War on Terror, Western sympathizers of the Soviet Union, and the recent protests against cartoon images of Muhammad to illustrate his point that a definition of who is human, who is deserving of respect, and how the Other and the Self are to react to each other, is dependent on the culturally defined categories within language:
“What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? As Hegel was already well aware, there is something violent in the very symbolisation of a thing...Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the things, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it.”3

Like Hegel, he does not see a way for the Other to encounter the self without violence being born from the encounter. This view is at odds with a belief that violence is spontaneous. Žižek is asserting, instead, that violence is unavoidable, because “there is never a balanced reciprocity in my encountering another subject.”4 Despite identifying language as the obscuring force in any attempts at an understanding of the self and the Other (be the Other a foreigner, person of a different religion, sex, race, what have you), he also sees language as the only mode for investigating the other, and coming to know the “abyss of another subject.”5 This play on words, quite literally, is an unsatisfying answer to the universal conundrum between two subjects (how to know each other), but it is relevant nonetheless, because it asks philosophers, citizens, and politicians to reflect on the power of the very medium in which they make their arguments, and to recognize that language is not a panacea to understanding the self, the Other, or the world.

If Žižek may be said to have an obsession, it seems to be this preoccupation with limits: the limits of peace, of language, and in his later chapters, of meaning itself. When looking at the 2005 protests in the suburbs of Paris, his most radical observation is their lack of meaning. This is violence in and for itself, without a plan or revolution. It is the result of a internalized hierarchy of values that cannot be reconciled with one's social station, be it in the neighborhood, or world. He draws a parallel to Muslim fundamentalists: “The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them.”6 This controversial and ego-centric assertion assumes that insecurity is the primary motivating force behind eruptions of subjective violence. In such a worldview, the tension between the capitalist, “individualist competition, of ruthless self-assertion” is at odds with law and order itself.7 In other words, in the modern world, we are always on the brink of this eruption. This thesis is further born out in Žižek's analysis of how the U.S. media portrayed black citizens in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He sees the media hype about violence among those who were most victimized by the disaster as evidence of the way in which we, in the name of order, construe the Other as a subject worthy of derision. He concludes this section with a call for social reordering, one in which each society is changed so that “people no longer desperately try to escape their own world.”8 He takes a question about injustice and violence, and refuses to say that “tolerance” is the answer. Instead, he proposes an uncommon solution: improving a society's quality of life. Grounded in his constant criticism of the capitalist system, this solution endorses a leveling of the inequalities between classes, be those classes within a nation or between nations, cultures, and religions.

Since the Enlightenment, many Western philosophers and modern day ideologues have advocated for liberal reason as the solution to problems of multiculturalism. While Žižek acknowledges that his very profession, and critical perspective, could only come from this tradition, he is skeptical of “tolerant reason” and its “respect” as an unbiased judge on the world stage. 9 Reason, and by extension, a multiculturalist struggle against racism, is covertly concerned with renaming a religion or culture's political actions as separate from their underlying beliefs.10 This illogical act, an act which the Western world would never do to itself, is, on its own, an imperialism of thought: attributing the Other with irrational motivations in the name of respecting their beliefs. However, Žižek is equally as skeptical of adhering to a particular tradition of religious thought because of how that alignment can influence one's political motivations. As an example, he looks at the Zionist movement of Israel and determines that, at it's core, Zionism is an attempt to right violence by violence.11 To Zizek there are no nation states that have been founded without violence, there is only a gradual acceptance and rewriting of that violence over time between a nation's founding and the present.

After advocating for the individualist perspective of atheism as a viable and necessary alternative to enchanted belief,12 in the next chapter (5) Žižek calls into question the privileging of particular, individualized experience over cultural adherence and identity. This seemingly about-face is motivated by a recognition that the very act of becoming a “Cartesian subject...capable of stepping outside his particular cultural/social roots and asserting his full autonomy and universality” is an act of violence, a wrenching tear from “a particular lifeworld.”13 This rejection of essentialism, of any notion that cultural categories are substantive, loci of truth, and that we, as subjects, are free to re-imagine ourselves, is profoundly Hegelian. However, Žižek does not make a value assertion of whether the free subject is better than the culturally determined subject. He sees both as viable choices, but choices that are always at odds with each other. To keep these opposite motivations from overtaking each other, each society has its rule of law to maintain order. However, Žižek asserts that order comes about through habit, not law, and the true nature of an organization or government is what is normative within, not what is said to be accepted or prohibited. Because of this, different groups do not necessarily clash because of their different beliefs, but because of their different ways of ordering the world, i.e. their different ways of dealing with accepted and prohibited behavior.14

Lastly, Žižek makes a distinction between “divine violence” and other forms of subjective violence. This divine violence is a “pure sign of the injustice of the world.”15 The victims are not sacrificed or punished, but are victims solely because they are the recipients of the violent act. Though Žižek uses the term “divine,” he is not referring to the intervention of a god, but to the intervention of the people's will on the whole society, in act that is not “law-founding or law-sustaining.”16 Shockingly, Žižek construes this kind of violence as an act of love, one of life's excess, of a society undermining its own law, its own order.17 Being careful not to affirm acts of violence done in the name of divinity, divine violence is only thus because of its proportion and purity, coming out of what injustices are in a society and not what that society may become. Divine violence is, therefore, unproductive. It is a symptom only, an outward manifestation of an inward imbalance in the law, not a founding act of a new order.

While firmly rooted in the academic, including the theory of Lacan, Hegel, Nietzsche, Butler, and Levinas, Žižek's analysis of violence relies equally on a criticism of current events and pop culture. Because of this practical grounding, On Violence is more accessible to the non-academic reader than say, Kojeve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Žižek is able to illustrate the Hegelian encounter of the self and Other through the lens of violence, while also illuminating the ways in which violence is part of the very system in which we live. Ultimately he asks more questions about our current capitalist system and class inequalities than he provides alternatives, but the questions he is asking are a necessary step to founding a better world. Considering Žižek's criticisms, it is surprising that violence remains surprising at all.(less)

like 3 likes · see review

Jul 24, 2011 Brad rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: philosophy, about-violence, political, meta-review

One doesn't go to Slavoj Žižek for answers. One goes to him for questions. He raises them, then raises some more, and asks us to raise questions for every answer we get. That is his genius, and that's what makes him worth while. The interrogatives -- Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? -- are his and our most powerful tools, and he challenges us to use them.

When I was a 4 year old boy, I wore a helmet for a year because I fractured my skull. That's the story I grew up with. "I" fractured my s...more

like 18 likes · see review

Sep 14, 2011 Katie Brennan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

this better be better than his long-form argument about the perniciousness of "kung fu panda."

ok, finished.
- starts strong with his breakdown of subjective/objective violence. subjective being the violence we're most familiar with, physically violent acts like a riot, a war, or a terrorist attack -- these are products or symptoms of objective violence, or systemic violence, which we largely ignore.
- has a great discussion of the "porto davos" crowd, the "liberal communists" like soros or gates w...more

like · see review

Jun 01, 2010 Dylan rated it 4 of 5 stars

I know it might sound cliche, but this book changed the way that I interpret violence that I learn and have learned about in this world of ours. Zizek goes a little overboard, occasionally, seeing links and identifying convergences in places where there might not be any, but when you're reading it, you can't help but think he's right about, well, just about everything.

He provides explanations for some of the big violent events of my lifetime, and uses these events to provide a theoretical underp...more

like 1 like · see review

Apr 03, 2010 Sascha rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: politics-society

In seiner unnachahmlichen Art reflektiert Slavoj Zizek in Form dieser Gedankensymphonie "sideways" über das Thema der Gewalt. Dabei durchstreift er die gängigen geistesgeschichtlichen Konzeptionen und unterfüttert, kontrastiert oder würzt sie mit Beispielen aus Geschichte, Psychoanalyse, Populärkultur und Kunst. Allein die Art der Darstellung bzw. Zizeks Stil macht das Buch zu einem Genuss, der durch seine leidenschaftliche Art der Argumentation noch gesteigert wird.
Inhaltlich beschäftigt er sic...more In seiner unnachahmlichen Art reflektiert Slavoj Zizek in Form dieser Gedankensymphonie "sideways" über das Thema der Gewalt. Dabei durchstreift er die gängigen geistesgeschichtlichen Konzeptionen und unterfüttert, kontrastiert oder würzt sie mit Beispielen aus Geschichte, Psychoanalyse, Populärkultur und Kunst. Allein die Art der Darstellung bzw. Zizeks Stil macht das Buch zu einem Genuss, der durch seine leidenschaftliche Art der Argumentation noch gesteigert wird.
Inhaltlich beschäftigt er sich mit geistigen Konzepten von Gewalt, beschreibt Formen von Gewaltlosigkeit, systemischer und subjektiver Gewalt sowie den Formen medial inszenierter Gewaltakte und der Repräsentation von Gewalt durch deren vermeintlichem Überwindungswerkzeug, der Sprache. Weiter geht er auf die Rolle von Vorstellungen des "Anderen" und deren Bezug zur Sphäre der Gewalt ein und analysiert die Grenzen der Toleranz als vorherrschender Ideologieform. Schließlich beschreibt Zizek in Anlehnung an Walter Benjamin die Rolle der emanzipatorischen Komponente von Gewalt und schließt seine Symphonie mit einer Dreigliedrigen Lektion, welche, erstens, die Ausgrenzung von Gewalt aus den vorherrschenden Diskursen bzw. deren Brandmarkung als ideologischen Akt charakterisiert, der die fundamentalen Formen sozialer bzw. systemischer Gewalt mystifiziert und verschleiert, zweitens, die Rolle der Gewalt als eine basale Strukturen attackierende Kraft beschreibt, die oft in der Form einer "indirekten Selbstreinigung" sich manifestiert und, drittens, der Lektion über das Beziehungsgeflecht zwischen Aktivität und Inaktivität, zwischen Akt und Kontext, welche das Buch mittels einer Variation über das Thema abschließt.
Sicherlich gibt es fundiertere und auch besser aufgebaute Werke zu diesem Thema, wie z.B. das zitierte Werk von Jean Améry, Heinrich Popitz oder auch Trutz v. Trotha. Dennoch bietet Zizeks Beitrag zum Thema aufgrund seiner indirekten ("sideways") Betrachtungsweise das Potential zu neuen Einblicken in bekannte Phänomene.(less)

like · see review

Mar 07, 2013 LeeFrances rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: knowledge

This is the first Zizek book I attempted to read. I got most of the way through it before deciding that it wasn't worth it to finish. The way he writes was incredibly difficult to understand, and I have an English Lit/Anthropology degree so "difficult to understand" is something I'm well practiced in. It felt like he didn't have one, or even two or three, main thesis. The work felt scattered and incoherent. Every 30 or 40 pages, I would find an argument that made sense and I felt akin to but see...more

like · see review

Sep 14, 2010 Zach added it · review of another edition

zizek thinks "the village" was a good movie

like 5 likes · see review

Dec 07, 2011 Gail added it · review of another edition

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active', to 'participate', to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, 'do something'; academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a 'critical' participation, a dialogue, to silence - just to engage us in 'dialogue', to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The voters' abstention [in Saramago...more

like · see review

Jul 27, 2011 Joseph Sverker added it · review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy

I'm a little disappoionted with this book. It doesn't turn the perspectives inside out as Welcome to the desert of reality although it does have some insights on conflicts and violence of course. It real downside is its naïve analysis of religions' role in conflicts. He takes a very mainstream leftist view where religions seem to be the cause of most wars. If he is going to argue that religions is a main cause in many conflicts (which is very debatable) he also need to bring up the importance of...more

like · see review

Jul 23, 2009 Karl Steel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: theory

Worth rereading. Much of this has likely been said elsewhere (and not only in Zizek's works--e.g., his point from The Parallax View that not poetry but prose is impossible after Auschwitz, pace Adorno--but also in places like Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' or, for that matter, cracks like 'a language is a dialect w/ an army' or in the ancient anecdote about the captured pirate who declared that all that differentiated him from Julius Caesar (or Alexander the Great) was the number of victims a...more

like · see review

Dec 11, 2008 Vegantrav rated it 5 of 5 stars

What is violence? What are the sources of violence? The Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek, presents a series of witty and insightful essays on violence. This is not a typical leftist, politically correct critique: although Zizek is a Marxist, he is anything but a traditional liberal social democrat: in this work, he savages both left and right and presents the paradoxical and ultimate conclusion that sometimes doing nothing can be the most violent act of all. To summarize t...more

like · see review

Dec 27, 2008 Kevin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Finally finished Zizek's Violence after having started it late summer or fall. Zizek offers the provocative arguments that instead of acting in response to global crises and violence, we need to "learn, learn, learn" and not perpetuate "our" academic activism of dialogue and critical inquiry. Seems a little contradictory that he supports learn, learn, learn but not dialogue. That said, I do continue to find Zizek compelling and interesting, a leftist McLuhan, a joker, but each joke a serious sta...more

like · see review

Aug 05, 2012 Guillermo Jiménez rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

No logro comprender por qué en la escuela nunca me hablaron de Žižek. Lo puedo comprender en la prepa, pero, en la carrera. En la Filosofía y Letras. Sí, sí, vimos a otros autores, de acuerdo, pero, ¿por qué este no?

Me imagino como haber vivido y “estudiado” ciencias entre los siglos XVII y XVIII en Alemania y no haber escuchado nada de Leibniz. Nada.

Lo primero que supe de Žižek fue su The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) en donde apoyado por las imágenes de filmes clásicos o sumamente populares...more

like · see review

Apr 26, 2011 Sarah rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: philosophy, central-europe-russia

This is the most linearly coherent of the three books by Zizek I have read. I don't know that if you read it on its own you could buy into the arguments he makes as well as if you know that he spells out his points in other works. All the usual stylistic flourishes, literary and philosophical references, crushing criticisms of right and left, and delightful pop-culture anecdotes are there, despite the small nature of the book (273 pages).

Recently, in response to me saying that I was patiently w...more

like · see review

Aug 13, 2009 Julie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Allright. This book should be paired with the work of Michael Haneke's cinema of disturbance in which Haneke deftly frustrates the viewers ability to see the full view of the violence alluded to in his film(s). This is what Zizek is talking about in this rambler. Additionally, a reading or a critique with passages pulled out of Rand's The Fountainhead would be an illustrative divergence on the ways subjectivity and objectivity are made and/or masked as the individual is rendered with clarity and...more

like · see review

May 26, 2009 Yaseen Lagardien rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, own, political-academic

Slavoj Zizek is a radioactive intellect, with the ability to threaten the integrity of those well accepted notions in society, such as politeness and love. He emits radical particles of ideas that have to be read and understood if one is to assume a legitimate understanding of the things, notions, ideas and ideals we espouse in our daily lives.

Violence is a book which confronts the notion of violence as an external force acting to dislodge our assumed sensible cultural and political institutions...more

like · see review

Feb 10, 2009 David rated it 3 of 5 stars

It feels more than a little strange to be reading and enjoying a book calling for the violent overthrow of capitalism and liberal democracy when my most fervent political hope of the moment is that Barack Obama will re-start the American economy by passing an effective stimulus bill, and humanize American capitalism by re-regulating big business and enacting some form of universal health care legislation. But I did enjoy the book and that is what Zizek is calling for here isn't it? Or is it?

The...more It feels more than a little strange to be reading and enjoying a book calling for the violent overthrow of capitalism and liberal democracy when my most fervent political hope of the moment is that Barack Obama will re-start the American economy by passing an effective stimulus bill, and humanize American capitalism by re-regulating big business and enacting some form of universal health care legislation. But I did enjoy the book and that is what Zizek is calling for here isn't it? Or is it?

The fact is he's a little cagey about that. On the one hand the book takes the idea that capitalism desperately needs to be abolished as its premise. There's no attempt to argue with those who believe that it really needs to be reformed, perhaps drastically so, but reformed nevertheless. Zizek takes it's irredeemability as a given, and for the most part he's preaching to a choir of readers who hold the same conviction. But this reader was left with some confusion as to just what he means by violence and just when it might be justified. And just what kind of society is to follow in its wake.

Zizek claims that there are two kinds of violence: objective and subjective. Counterintuitively, Zizek terms physical violence subjective violence, while objective violence is the set of invisible but nonetheless coercive social/cultural/political structures (norms, habits, laws, conventions etc.) that govern the way we think and act. All people, in other words, are subject to coercion, to "violence," all the time. All of us are forced, or strongly encouraged, to act and think a certain way "against our will," not in the sense that we consciously and openly object to the way things are, but because we are thrown into a world not of our own making, and are unable to imagine, much less bring into being, a radically different state of things. We can't see beyond the limits set by ideology, and indeed our very subjectivities (which are as fluid as they are fixed) are created and defined by ideology. Physical/subjective violence is just the tip of the iceberg. By declaring physical violence the only form of violence worthy of the name, ideology masks all the other more fundamental forms of coercion, of violence, that we are all subject to every moment of our lives.

So, in other words, Zizek defines violence quite broadly, and this does three things: 1) softens the readers resistance to his claim that violence is a legitimate, indeed necessary, political tactic 2) allows him to call lots of things violence that one wouldn't necessarily think of as violence--like "nonviolently" withdrawing consent from a given political regime and 3) blurs the line between nonviolent resistance and the kind of violence that leads to the direct loss of human life, or that has the taking of human life as one of its primary tactics (although, admittedly, classic forms of nonviolence rely on the willingness of their opponents to use violence as part of their political effectiveness).

If I'm reading him correctly (and I'm by no means sure I am, so someone correct me if I'm wrong), Zizek endorses "emancipatory" violence, by which he means violence that aims at "a radical upheaval of the basic social relations." He cites the terror that followed the French Revolution and the killings carried out by Che Guevara during and after the Cuban Revolution as acceptable instances of genuinely revolutionary violence. Hitler's and Stalin's killings, by contrast, do not qualify as revolutionary violence because they don't effect "a radical upheaval of the basic social relations" (though I think at one point he says that Stalin's forced collectivization was closer to genuine revolutionary violence than the terror that accompanied the Moscow show trials). At the same time he seems to argue that the most effective form of violence at the moment is some form of passive violence, some form of withdrawal of consent from the system. He cites the Saramago novel Seeing, where the majority of the citizens of a country cast blank ballots, creating a crisis of legitimacy. He quotes Lenin to the effect that the best thing to do is not to act but to hunker down and study, to "learn, learn and learn." The final paragraph of the book reads: "If one means by violence a radical upheaval of the basic social relations, then, crazy and tasteless as it may sound, the problem with historical monsters who slaughtered millions was that they were not violent enough. Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do."

How does one read this statement? Does it mean that if Hitler and Stalin had slaughtered millions AND effected a "radical upheaval of the basic social relations", then those deaths would be justified? Because, theoretically at least, one could abolish capitalism AND kill 6 million Jews. The two are not mutually exclusive. Or does it mean that more classically nonviolent means are a more effective form of "violence"?

There's lots of dazzling analysis in Zizek, but if one treats it as something more than just a politics of the academy, as a call to action of sorts, it becomes extremely problematic. The first and most obvious objection is that if the main criteria for the use of violence is that it aim at a "radical upheaval of the basic social relations", then violence deployed in the service of dystopian political aims is just as justifiable as violence deployed for laudable aims. Zizek argues that Hitler did not actually aim at a "radical upheaval of the basic social relations", but in principle there's no reason why one can't imagine a fundamentally reordered society based on white supremacy, or some other equally despicable ideology. This criteria is too value neutral about the society that is to follow.

Next, if everyone's psyche/self is fundamentally distorted by ideology, then everyone is both guilty and innocent at the same time. Zizek is fond of chiding leftists who believe that you can make a revolutionary omelette without breaking a few counterrevolutionary eggs. So he's a bit more honest than the revolutionary beautiful souls who believe you can have a total socio-economic transformation without some equivalent of the secret police. But if we are all more or less bamboozled by ideology all the time, it would be well nigh impossible to sort out the guilty from the innocent in any event.

Zizek seems to be striving for something more than a politics of the academy, but for a social democrat like me his writings are interesting as literature, but less than useful as a spur to political action. Maybe the best way to describe his appeal, to me at any rate, is that he is a useful person to think against. Personally I am morally committed to an extremely pragmatic politics focused on technocratic and incremental solutions to small and manageable problems. Or more sweeping solutions to not-so-small and manageable problems, as in the case of the current economic collapse, or larger injustices like botched wars of choice, or equal rights for gay people. I think the individual dignity and flourishing of ordinary people should be the main goal of governing, and that people ought to be able to decide for themselves what the conditions of their dignity and flourishing are (one way Zizek is useful is in exploring the psychological and ideological barriers to even imagining such conditions). And I think that too often political theorists of a certain stripe are intoxicated by ideas of total emancipation, and individual lives, and the modest expectations that govern them, get discounted in favor of totalizing visions of the good society. I enjoy reading Zizek, but I don't think I'd want him running the world.

On the other hand, what's probably more accurate is that when people like Zizek start running the world, they necessarily become pragmatists!(less)

like 2 likes · see review

Jul 01, 2009 Wyatt rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a premature review since I'm still reading but Zizek is one to provoke reaction so I'll react while it's fresh.

I was wrong to assume that this would not only be a deconstruction of the nature of violence but also a proposed remedy. Not so.:) In the first chapter, Zizek infers that the solution for what to do with the "liberal communists" (George Soros, Bill Gates, and the lot) is to put them in the ground....!.....

So I understand he has a sense of humor but...I'm not sure I'm laughing. D...more

like · see review

Feb 04, 2009 Ken added it

A must re-read. After a dissertation+ worth of writing on the subject of violence, I read through this text fast and realized about halfway through that this was going to require a much slower and more careful read. While the general trajectory of his treatment of violence is familiar to us: i) it is part of life and not something we should moralize about; ii) we are caught up in contradictory relations of violence - on the one hand we consider our 'civilization' to be an order that opposes viol...more

like · see review

Nov 22, 2008 Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: philosophy, cultural-studies-and-social-critics

Another arresting & provocative book by Zizek. Are terrorist fundamentalists, as well as religious fundamentalists in general, "really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term?" Zizek asks. "If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to the truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them?" On the Muslim uprising against the cartoons depicting Muhammad: "How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels thre...more Another arresting & provocative book by Zizek. Are terrorist fundamentalists, as well as religious fundamentalists in general, "really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term?" Zizek asks. "If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to the truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them?" On the Muslim uprising against the cartoons depicting Muhammad: "How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation newspaper."

Zizek critiques the East and the West, the conservative and liberal, with equal force, and often in Hegelian, Lacanian, and Marxist terms, but his thoughts, outspoken and brutally honest, are all his own. One wonders, so often, if Zizek goes too far at times (if either Israelites and Palestinians really cared about Jerusalem, they would give it up to the Other in lieu of having it a place of destruction; a real revolution requires a Bartlebian stance, the threat to change being "not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active,' to 'participate,' to mask the nothingness of what goes on"; the problem today is not intolerance but tolerance itself), but Zizek is most interested in asking questions (or making claims) so that we'll ask questions, and he turns our most cherished and accepted notions on their heads: "Liberalism itself thus privileges a certain culture: the modern Western one. As to freedom of choice, liberalism is also marked by a strong bias. It is intolerant when individuals of other cultures are not given freedom of choice--as is evident in issues such as clitoridectomy, child brideship, infanticide, polygamy, and incest. However, it ignores the tremendous pressure which, for example, compels women in our liberal society to undergo such procedures as plastic surgery, cosmetic implants, and Botox injections in order to remain competitive in the sex market."

There's quite a lot to mull over in Zizek's Violence--and I especially appreciate his insights regarding subjective vs. systemic violence: we cannot tolerate individual violence up close, while we ignore the systemic violence that, indeed, makes Western culture and civilization possible. And Zizek's critique of the systemic problems of capitalism are striking. (Of note, his remarks about Bill Gates: the obscenely wealthy entrepeneur who, by virtue of monopoly, exploitation, and the raping of the planet, "gives back" as a humanitarian, thus perpetuating the problematic cycle.) Also discussed: globalization, Abu Ghraib, chocolate laxatives & "fart-free" beans, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, Stalin, Schumann's "Humoresque," Kant, atheism as a virtue, the Congo, poetry & Auschwitz, the Catholic Church, Walter Benjamin, masturbation, Heidegger, GITMO, Freud, and more than a fair share of pop culture, literary, and film references: fun.(less)

like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 81 82 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

Recommend it | Stats | Recent status updates

combine
Other Editions (15)

More editions...

Genres

Philosophy

109 users

Non Fiction

33 users

Politics

20 users

Philosophy > Theory

16 users

Sociology

6 users

Psychology

5 users

Culture > Cultural Studies

5 users

History

5 users

Criticism

4 users

Writing > Essays

3 users

See top shelves...

Readers also enjoyed similar books

About Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.

He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for P...more

More about Slavoj Žižek...

Books by Slavoj Žižek

Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture

More…

Share This Book

Facebook Twitter Your website

Trivia About Violence: Six Sid...

No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »

Quotes from Violence: Six Sideways...

“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!»” — 16 people liked it

“What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? who among us would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting a factory farm in which pigs are half-blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed? And what about, say, torture and suffering of millions we know about, but choose to ignore? Imagine the effect of having to watch a snuff movie portraying what goes on thousands of times a day around the world: brutal acts of torture, the picking out of eyes, the crushing of testicles -the list cannot bear recounting. Would the watcher be able to continue going on as usual? Yes, but only if he or she were able somehow to forget -in an act which suspended symbolic efficiency -what had been witnessed. This forgetting entails a gesture of what is called fetishist disavowal: "I know it, but I don't want to know that I know, so I don't know." I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don't know it.” — 7 people liked it

More quotes…

title link	preview: Violence: Six Sideways Reflections
avg rating	preview: Violence: Six Sideways Reflections Goodreads rating: 3.92 (1200 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2638701-violence?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344316147l/2638701.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2638701-violence?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Violence: Six Sideways Reflections by Slavoj Žižek[/url]

Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

Friend Reviews

Community Reviews

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website