Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

by Slavoj Žižek

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.