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Aug 14, 2008

Imogen rated it:

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, bu More...

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Aug 15, 2009

Jimmy rated it:

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...

9 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 03, 2009

Kate rated it:

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.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 09, 2009

Nina rated it:

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 More...

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May 20, 2011

Marzieh rated it:

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 More...

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Mar 26, 2011

Marc rated it:

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, More...

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Jan 06, 2012

Carolyn rated it:

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...

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Apr 19, 2010

Laura Jean rated it:

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 corres More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jul 24, 2011

Brad rated it:

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. " More...

9 comments like (18 people liked it)

Sep 14, 2011

Katie rated it:

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 " More...

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Jun 01, 2010

Dylan rated it:

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 theor More...

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Apr 03, 2010

Sascha rated it:

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 be More...

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Oct 18, 2010

Zach added it

zizek thinks "the village" was a good movie

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Dec 07, 2011

Gail added it

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...

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Jul 27, 2011

Joseph added it

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...

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Jul 23, 2009

Karl rated it:

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...

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Dec 11, 2008

Vegantrav rated it:

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 summa More...

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Dec 27, 2008

Kevin rated it:

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 More...

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Aug 03, 2011

Sarah rated it:

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 More...

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Dec 30, 2009

Julie rated it:

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 More...

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May 26, 2009

Yaseen rated it:

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 More...

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Feb 10, 2009

David rated it:

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?
More...

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Jul 01, 2009

Wyatt rated it:

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 humo More...

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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...

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Nov 22, 2008

Kenneth rated it:

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 More...

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Oct 10, 2011

Gill rated it:

“I heard a one hour interview on KERA Think (90.1 Dallas) with Zizek and was really impressed with the way he thinks and expresses himself. I'd never heard of him before. When I went to look him up I see he's quite popular and has a strong presence on YouTube. I'd rather read than watch video, so I ordered the book which just came today (9/10/08).

I have mixed feelings about this book. It is a tour de force of references. But often the argument that seemed brilliant at first seems ridi More...

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Dec 29, 2011

Sepehrdad rated it:

در ستایش کمونیسم و مارکس زیاد ور می زد... به نظرم ژیژک یه روانپریشه که دلش می خاد فیلما و کتابایی که می خونه به یه زبون کج و کوله و چهار تا اسم قلمبه سلمبه و مثلن فلسفی به خورد خاننده بده و بگه من فرق می کنم... چرت و پرت می گفت... ترجمه هم افتضاح بود

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Jan 06, 2010

Justin rated it:

Zizek does Zizek, meaning he riffs on contemporary culture from countless angles, his goal not so much to create a philosophical premise as to encourage people to think critically about the world, to challenge the presumptions upon which the modern world is founded. And I feel this is extremely important, as far too often people in the world and especially America who are smart enough to know better allow themselves to fall into a foggy intellectual complacency that restricts debate and thought More...

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Dec 30, 2011

Arnoldo rated it:

Slavoj Zizek is the Octavio Paz of the international left. Paz began on the left and ended up a reactionary with an eloquent vision. Zizek is that kind of monster that knows it all, draws on literary, psycho-analysis with not too much left psycho-ness or psycho-left-babble. New age with politics. In Violence, Zizek lays out the three sources of violence (subjective, objective and I believe structural -- I am only at the beginning and read quickly during a recent commute). I consider what I've re More...

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May 19, 2009

David rated it:

In all, a tedious read with a few memorable parts. Zizek, like many cultural theorists, takes an already muddled and complicated set of ideas and makes them more muddled and more complicated, all the while acting as if he's cleared everything up. The problem, I believe, isn't so much that he doesn't think well but rather that he doesn't always write well.

Or maybe I'm too dim to follow this heady shit.

Whatever.

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