The Banal

Zizek: The premise of Zizek’s theory is that the subjective violence we see – violence with a clear identifiable agent – is only the tip of an iceberg made up of ‘systemic’ violence, which is essentially the catastrophic consequence of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.

Divisions are identified that seem to define the world ‘as it really is’.  These sorts of divisions are decisive - we believe - because they refer us to what is familiar.  But Zizek’s remarks here merely follow the same old sorry pattern of yore.  This is the pattern that sticks to contrite academia’s formal pieties.  Philosophy has been apologising for itself ever since Bertrand Russell.   The defining terms make academia plausible in the context of the ‘real world’ it seems; it has to prove itself relevant to the world; therefore this must be the world that everyone is familiar with and takes for granted: even if is the very acceptance of this world that is itself part of the problem.  We have something that is basically just a pat-a-cake incantation: something that is as categorically fantasised as Tolkein’s ’good’ and ‘evil’: life as rendered according to an image of ’science’; with what is ‘human’ within this being mere ’subjectivity’.   The objective is regarded as the ’systemic’ truth of impersonal hard fact.

… So, let’s ask anyway.  What is violence with “a clear identifiable agent”?  What makes it ’subjective’?  Is it the agent or the clarity that does this?  Is the violence without a perceptible agent to be called ‘objective violence’?  (For instance, because it is less ‘resented’ in seeming ‘natural’.)

My criticism is this.  That the impulse to identify fact and objectivity in this simple, clear way is like the rictus of a smile adopted to keep in with a certain crowd; it merely confirms the prejudices of the crowd being sucked up to.

For the genuinely revolutionary we have to look further afield.

Tags: The Banal, Zizek