Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

by Slavoj Žižek

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 ...