By Robert Young
Whose headless body is this
Whose scarlet shroud
Whose torn and wounded cloak
Whose broken voice? (1)
I Meditations on violence
The macho encounter between Simon Critchley and Slavoj Zizek over competing ethics of violence staged in the recent Naked Punch Supplement left me with the distinct feeling that violence is too important a matter to be left to philosophers. The problem with violence is that it is not just a concept, or a representation, or a problem of epistemology (though it is a problem for epistemology): violence changes the world, in its various ways, and always violently. Amidst the violence of the various late-Bush invasions of the last month of 2008, I tried running a test to see how Critchley and Zizek would help me both to understand the situation and to transform it. Zizek would deride those leftist liberals and even non-leftist liberals who simply deplored the use of violence without seeking to change the system that sustained it. That left me with very little, however, for even if I had wanted to change the system, and had been able to do so single-handedly, what exactly was ‘the system’ here for me to change, and how would I change it all at once? World revolution? What is the relation of the state to ‘the system’? Can we have a revolutionary practice, even internationalist, that is not tied to the nation state? On the other hand, Critchley’s account of the prohibition against violence as a guiding idea, rather than an absolute prohibition, on which to ground ethical behaviour however attractive as a maxim for personal practice would at the same time seem too open to utilization as a defence for its use by the state—‘it’s justified this time’, as the perpetrators and supporters of recent violence duly claimed.
As Critchley suggests, the problem with Zizek’s account of violence, in his book called simply On Violence, is the way that an emancipatory revolutionary violence is equated with Benjamin’s ‘divine violence’ or power and that nothing less will do. All other forms of political action seem to be collapsed into Zizek’s favourite trope, that opposing views are simply the two sides of the same coin. So, according to Zizek, the subjective reaction of those left-liberals who deplore the violence of suicide bombings are simply the other side of the same coin as those who carry them out, for the liberals fail to recognise the underlying systemic violence of the system that sustains their own (interrupted) peaceful existence. When, though, is an opposition a genuine dialectical opposition and when is it merely the other side of the same coin? Only, it seems, when violence sets itself against the system tout court. Yet will Zizek’s emancipatory violence change the entire global system at once? Moreover, does Zizek’s revolution promise to remove all forms of violence subsequent to the revolution? Neither seems likely or possible. The cost of Zizek’s espousal of a Leninist emancipatory violence comes with the assertion that all other forms of violence that happen around the world are simply not worth our attention: disregard them, for they are mere symptoms, not the cause. But isn’t this exclusive emphasis on revolutionary violence just the other side of the coin of the time-honoured Marxist-Leninist devaluation of all non-statist forms of struggle? Its vanguardism devalues the very involvement of the population in the violence of the system which Zizek accuses the liberal of ignoring. Whether the other side of the same coin or not, it is certainly the case that human violence operates within aggressively dialectical relationships.
Naked Punch for more