Violence and its Viccisitudes

The sixth chapter of Zizek's new book, Violence (which, incidentally, is not a major work but could work well in undergraduate courses or as an entry point for non-academics) takes up divine violence. Some of the initial moves in the argument are interesting. Reading it, I had the sense that, yes, I've read this before, but it doesn't feel like I've read this before. It affects me differently, now, in this context.

First, ressentiment. Zizek defends it (drawing from W.G. Sebald's discussion of Jean Amery's 'confrontation with the trauma of the Nazi concentration camps.' Zizek cites a passage from Sebald:

The spur of resentment which Amery conveys to us in his polemic demands recognition of the right to resentment, entailing no less than a programmatic attempt to sensitize the consciousness of a people 'already rehabilitated by time.'

Zizek argues that there is a devastation such that both reconciliation and revenge are ridiculously inadequate:

the only thing that remains is to persist in the 'unremitting denunciation of injustice.' One should give this stance its full anti-Nietzschean weight here: resentment has nothing to do with the slave morality. It stands rather for a refusal to 'normalise' the crime, to make it part of the ordinary/explicable/accountable flow of things, to integrate it into a consistent and meaningful life-narrative; after all possible explanations, it returns with its question: "Yes, I got all this, but nevertheless, how could you have done it? Your story about it doesn't make sense!" In other words, the resentment for which Sebald pleads is a Nietzschean heroic resentment, a refusal to compromise, an insistence 'against all odds.'

What Zizek omits, though, is the creative, productive dimension of resentment. It can create power relations invested in refusal (an acquaintance of mine once used the expression 'anti-war profiteers'). Differently put, even heroic resentment can become ordinary and normalized, ultimately exhausting itself and rendering the heroic feeble and pathetic. The challenge, then, of heroic resentment is this very risk, this unavoidable uncertainty.

Zizek situates resentment as the fourth term in the triad punishment (revenge), forgiveness, and forgetting. There are some crimes that cannot be punished, forgiven, or forgotten. The accusation of resentment, then, is not some kind of totally damnable criticism, precisely because there are times when it is necessary and appropriate. With this point, Zizek can then move to ask what motivates the impulse to dismiss ethical and political projects as mere resentment (the target of his critique here is Sloterdijk):

What if this very urge is sustained by a disavowed envy and resentment of its own, the envy of the universal emancipatory position, which is why one HAS to find some dirt in its foundation which would deprive it of its purity? The object of envy here is the MIRACLE of ethical universality which cannot be reduced to a distorted effect of 'lower' libidinal processes.

This is also the key insight of Lacan as he reverses the Kantian hermeneutic of suspicion (in the worry that even our most ethical acts are stained by pathological motivates):

What is truly traumatic for the subject is not the fact that a pure ethical act is (perhaps) impossible, that freedom is (perhaps) an appearance, based on our ignorance of the true motivations of our acts; what is truly traumatic is freedom itself, the fact that freedom IS possible and we desperately search for some 'pathological' determinations in order to avoid this fact.

So what does this have to do with divine violence? At the simplest level, it is an aspect of Zizek's attempt to wrest violence away from leftist pacifist denunciations of all violence as wrong, bad, and unjustified. Divine violence, then, is a kind of sovereign violence that comes neither from God nor the state; it is non-sacrificial (its victims are guilty but cannot be sacrified); it not the underside of law (not state-founding violence). It is not covered by the big Other: there is no meaning, no justification, no explanation. Zizek associates it, then, with drive, with the Act, and with love. One of the paragraphs on divine violence in fact seems to rely on a search: the Act; replace: divine violence:

mythic violence belongs to the order of Being, while 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 it--there is no big Other guaranteeing its divine nature; the risk of reading and assuming it as divine is fully the subject's own.

For those who risk taking state power, divine violence is not an option. It cannot be subsumed under law. It remains unjustified even as it is an unavoidable element of an unjust world.

Comments

[Barret]

Hi Jodi, thanks for these notes. They are helpful. I have one question, if you are still thinking about the book: what implications does your discussion of Zizek's 'omission' have? Is your insight here one of your own, or something that you are claiming Zizek misses in the terms of his own argument? Or, perhaps, an omision that enables Zizek to discuss a further set of explorations, for example the sense of resentiment that Sloterdijk puts forth? I hope that makes some sense.

[Jodi]

Omission was my critical observation that I then tried to recuperate by considering how it works.

[Dennis J Figueroa]

You do realize, of course, that it is exactly this kind of positioning that has worked to condemn the Left to irrelevance. Zizek wants to, what? Campaign on a platform of envy and bitterness?

Let me ask you this: in your personal dealings with people, have you ever managed to win political ground, after beginning from such a starting point?

[Joe Clement]

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zizek+violence+interview&search_type=&aq=1&oq=Zizek+Vio

Here's a great interview about the book and its subject matter, which you may or may-not know about being that it's done through IJZS. I was very interested in his discussion in Part 3 of the 5-Part series of videos, which is another engagement with his opposition to multi-culturalism. What's so interesting is how he uses an example from contemporary German politics to illustrate the kind of stance towards a diverse world he is advocating.

Simply put, the argument of a certain conservative group is that we [Germans] need some kind of predominant culture, with the caveat, of course, that this culture should be constituted by the values of said group. Zizek likes this as an approach to multi-culturalism with a caveat of his own: instead of values, like tolerance, he thinks the mechanism(s) of civility (as part of a general Leftist movement) should be encoded not as values but as "everyday customs".