Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

by Slavoj Žižek

According to a well-known anecdote, 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!’ Today, many a liberal, when faced with violent outbursts such as the recent looting in the suburbs of Paris, asks the few remaining leftists who still count on a radical social transformation: ‘Isn’t it you who did this? Is this what you want?’ And we should reply, like Picasso: ‘No, you did this! This is the true result of your politics!’

Children of Men is obviously not a film about infertility as a biological problem. The infertility Cuarón’s film is about was diagnosed long ago by Friedrich Nietzsche, when he perceived how Western civilisation was moving in the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or commitment. Unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another: ‘A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end, for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. “We have discovered happiness,” – say the Last Men, and they blink.’16

Alain Badiou develops the notion of ‘atonal’ worlds – monde atone– which lack the intervention of a Master-Signifier to impose meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality.20 What is a Master-Signifier?21 In the very last pages of his monumental Second World War, Winston Churchill ponders on the enigma of a political decision: after the specialists – economic and military analysts, psychologists, meteorologists – propose their multiple, elaborated and refined analyses, somebody must assume the simple and for that very reason most difficult act of transposing this complex multitude of views, where for every reason for, there are two reasons against and vice versa, into a simple, decisive Yes or No. We shall attack or we continue to wait. None other than John F. Kennedy provided a concise description of this point: ‘the essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer – often, indeed, to the decider himself.’ This decisive gesture which can never be fully grounded in reasons is that of a Master.

We live in a society where a kind of Hegelian speculative identity of opposites exists. Certain features, attitudes and norms of life are no longer perceived as ideologically marked. They appear to be neutral, non-ideological, natural, commonsensical. We designate as ideology that which stands out from this background: extreme religious zeal or dedication to a particular political orientation. The Hegelian point here would be that it is precisely the neutralisation of some features into a spontaneously accepted background that marks out ideology at its purest and at its most effective. This is the dialectical ‘coincidence of opposites’: the actualisation of a notion or an ideology at its purest coincides with, or, more precisely, appears as its opposite, as non-ideology. Mutatis mutandis, the same holds for violence. Social-symbolic violence at its purest appears as its opposite, as the spontaneity of the milieu in which we dwell, of the air we breathe.

When, in the 1960s, Svetlana Stalin emigrated to the US through India and wrote her memoirs, she presented Stalin ‘from inside’ as a warm father and caring leader, with most of the mass murders imposed on him by his evil collaborators, Lavrenty Beria in particular. Later, Beria’s son Sergo wrote a memoir presenting his father as a warm family man who simply followed Stalin’s orders and secretly tried to limit the damage. Georgy Malenkov’s son Andrei also told his story, describing his father, Stalin’s successor, as an honest hard worker, always afraid for his life. Hannah Arendt was right: these figures were not personifications of sublime Byronesque demonic evil: the gap between their intimate experience and the horror of their acts was immense. The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie – the truth lies outside, in what we do.8

In the last years of his life, Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky lived in Stockholm, working on The Sacrifice. He was given an office in the same building in which Ingmar Bergman, who at that time still lived in Stockholm, had his. Although the two directors had deep respect and supreme mutual admiration, they never met, but carefully avoided each other, as if their direct encounter would have been too painful and doomed to fail on account of the very proximity of their universes. They invented and respected their own code of discretion.

European civilisation finds it easier to tolerate different ways of life precisely on account of what its critics usually denounce as its weakness and failure, namely the alienation of social life. One of the things alienation means is that distance is woven into the very social texture of everyday life. Even if I live side by side with others, in my normal state I ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others. I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external ‘mechanical’ rules, without sharing their inner world. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that sometimes a dose of alienation is indispensable for peaceful coexistence. Sometimes alienation is not a problem but a solution.

Traditionally, ‘essence’ refers to a stable core that guarantees the identity of a thing. For Heidegger, ‘essence’ is something that depends on the historical context, on the epochal disclosure of being that occurs in and through language. He calls this the ‘house of being’.

The sad fact that opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a meaningful utopian project, but only take the shape of a meaningless outburst, is a grave illustration of our predicament. What does our celebrated freedom of choice serve, when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?

Friedrich Hayek knew that it was much easier to accept inequalities if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force: the good thing about the ‘irrationality’ of the market and success or failure in capitalism is that it allows me precisely to perceive my failure or success as ‘undeserved’, contingent.16 Remember the old motif of the market as the modern version of an imponderable fate. The fact that capitalism is not ‘just’ is thus a key feature of what makes it acceptable to the majority. I can live with my failure much more easily if I know that it is not due to my inferior qualities, but to chance.

The Jerusalem Chalk Circle It is, however, all too easy to score points in this debate using witty reversals which can go on indefinitely; so let us stop this imagined polemical dialogue and risk a direct step into the ‘heart of darkness’ of the Middle East conflict. Many conservative (and not only conservative) political thinkers, from Blaise Pascal to Immanuel Kant and Joseph de Maistre, elaborated the notion of the illegitimate origins of power, of the ‘founding crime’ on which states are based, which is why one should offer ‘noble lies’ to people in the guise of heroic narratives of origin. With regard to such ideas, what was often said about Israel is quite true: the misfortune of Israel is that it was established as a nation-state a century or two too late, in conditions when such founding crimes are no longer acceptable. The ultimate irony here is that it was Jewish intellectual influence that contributed to the rise of this unacceptability! During my last visit to Israel, I was approached by an Israeli intellectual who, aware of my Palestinian sympathies, mockingly asked me: ‘Aren’t you ashamed to be here, in Israel, in this illegal, criminal state? Aren’t you afraid that your being here will contaminate your leftist credentials and make you an accomplice in crime?’ In all honesty I have to admit that, every time I travel to Israel, I experience that strange thrill of entering a forbidden territory of illegitimate violence. Does this mean I am (not so) secretly an ...

More than a century ago, in his Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism: ‘If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted.’ The French ‘new philosopher’ André Glucksmann applied Dostoevsky’s critique of godless nihilism to 9/11, as the title of his book – Dostoevsky in Manhattan – suggests.18 He couldn’t have been more wrong: the lesson of today’s terrorism is that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of his will, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any ‘merely human’ constraints and considerations. The ‘godless’ Stalinist communists are the ultimate proof of it: everything was permitted to them since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress towards Communism.

One of the strategies of totalitarian regimes is to have legal regulations (criminal laws) so severe that, if taken literally, everyone is guilty of something. But then their full enforcement is withdrawn. In this way, the regime can appear merciful: ‘You see, if we wanted, we could have all of you arrested and condemned, but do not be afraid, we are lenient …’ At the same time, the regime wields the permanent threat of disciplining its subjects: ‘Do not play too much with us, remember that at any moment we can …’ In the former Yugoslavia there was the infamous Article 133 of the penal code which could always be invoked to prosecute writers and journalists. It criminalised any text that falsely presented the achievements of the socialist revolution or that might arouse tension and discontent among the public for the way it dealt with political, social or other topics. This last category is obviously not only infinitely plastic, but also conveniently self-relating: doesn’t the very fact that you are accused by those in power prove the fact that you ‘aroused tension and discontent among the public’? In those years, I remember asking a Slovene politician how he justified this law. He just smiled and, with a wink, told me, ‘Well, we have to have some tool to discipline at our will those who annoy us.’ Here we have an overlap of potential total culpability (whatever you are doing may be a crime) and mercy (the fact that you are allowed to lead your life in peace is not a proof ...

This idea of Judgment Day, when all accumulated debts will be fully paid and an out-of-joint world will finally be set straight, is then taken over in secularised form by the modern leftist project. Here the agent of judgment is no longer God, but the people. Leftist political movements are like ‘banks of rage’. They collect rage investments from people and promise them large-scale revenge, the re-establishment of global justice. Since, after the revolutionary explosion of rage, full satisfaction never takes place and an inequality and hierarchy re-emerge, there always arises a push for the second – true, integral – revolution which will satisfy the disappointed and truly finish the emancipatory work: 1792 after 1789, October after February …

Robespierre put it in his speech in which he demanded the execution of Louis XVI: Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.21 This is why, as was clear to Robespierre, without the ‘faith’ in (a purely axiomatic presupposition of) the eternal idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, a revolution ‘is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime’. This faith is most poignantly expressed in Robespierre’s very last speech on 8 Thermidor 1794, the day before his arrest and execution: But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world’s first Republic.22 What this leads us to understand is that divine violence belongs to the order of Event. There are no ‘objective’ criteria enabling us to identify an act of violence as divine; the same act that, to an external observer, is merely an outburst of violence, can be divine for those engaged in i...

The same, of course, applies to Nazi Germany, where the spectacle of the brutal annihilation of millions should not deceive us. The characterisation of Hitler which would have him as a bad guy, responsible for the deaths of millions, but none the less a man with balls who pursued his ends with an iron will is not only ethically repulsive, it is also simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ really to change things. All his actions were fundamentally reactions: he acted so that nothing would really change; he acted to prevent the communist threat of a real change. His targeting of the Jews was ultimately an act of displacement in which he avoided the real enemy – the core of capitalist social relations themselves. Hitler staged a spectacle of revolution so that the capitalist order could survive. The irony was that his grand gestures of despising bourgeois self-complacency ultimately enabled this complacency to continue: far from disturbing the much-despised ‘decadent’ bourgeois order, far from awakening the Germans, Nazism was a dream which enabled them to postpone awakening. Germany only really woke up with the defeat of 1945.