Divine Violence

7/29/2019 Divine Violence

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www.ipa.org.au6 IPA Review | June 2010


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www.ipa.org.au 7IPA Review | June 2010

Nearly hal a centuryater 1968, Europeis again seized

by sporadic outburstso anarchic, seemingly-purposeless violence.Te extraordinary violence in Greece brought about bythat countrys sovereign debt crisis is both unocused andunjustiable. In May, three people died, trapped in a

bank that had been rebombed by rioters.Its been less than two years since the December 2008Greek riots over the police shooting o a teenager, whichalso involved rebombs, the overturning o cars, theburning o hotels, shops and banks, and violent clasheswith the police. Across the continent in France, torchingcars has almost become a tradition in the Parisian ban-lieues. Te strikes and protests over the French economicsituation in January 2009 turned quickly violent. In Bul-garia, Latvia and Lithuania, there were 10,000 personstrong mass protests over the economic climatebeorethe global nancial crisis, mind youand all have been

characterised by violence.According to Slavoj iek, the radical academys

new superstar philosopher and cultural critic, thats goodviolence. Or, more specically, its divine.

iek is the next Noam Chomsky. Hes been a vis-iting proessor at seemingly every top-tier university:Columbia, Princeton, Chicago, and New York. Hes theauthor o nearly 60 books, and the star o hal a dozenawning documentaries.

He is studied in symposiums at Melbourne University, in

cultural studies and social theory subjects at Monash University,in lm screenings at Sydney University, and in cinema studiesat the University o Queensland. ieks name pops up in TeCanberra imes, Te Sun Herald, and Te Australian. He evenmade Te Ages Green Guide V supplement. He appeared lastyear at a Melbourne architecture conerence, and has philosophysymposiums dedicated to his writing. Clive Hamilton, the ormerGreens celebrity candidate or Peter Costellos ormer seat o Hig-gins, quoted him approvingly in a column earlier this year.

Te imes Literary Supplement calls him one o the mostinnovative and exciting contemporary thinkers o the let. TeChronicle o Higher Education describes him as Te Elvis o Cul-

tural Teory, but his stage presencewith academic superstarsit is air to describe their perormancesis more like Robin Wil-liams with a thick Eastern European drawl.

Indeed, iek has a taste or the theatrical. His 2006 docu-mentary where he applies psychoanalytic philosophy to popularmovies titledA Perverts Guide to Cinema: Cinema, iek claims,is the ultimate pervert art. He has written introductions to col-lections o writings by rotsky and Robespierre, including in bothcases partial apologies or both the men and their methods. Andthe cover o a recent book, In Deence o Lost Causes, is illustratedwith a picture o a guillotine.

Such publicity-consciousness has its rewards. Te Slovenianpsychoanalytic philosopher is as close to a cult gure as the acad-emys post-modernist community can produce.

iek has a habit o throwing broad and shocking statementsthat slam down on the table, then quietly adding caveats, beorenally and condently arguing the opposite.

Good showmanship, sure, but it has a theoretical basis. iekis a ollower o the French psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan, who washimsel a ollower o Freud. iek uses Lacans concepts o theSymbolic, the Real, and the Imaginarythey all require capi-talisationto describe, not things which are real, symbolic, orimaginary, but things which are true to themselves, or symbolic

Chris Bergis the Editor o theIPA Review.

The divine violence

of Slavoj iekLooking for a reason to riot? Look no further than this publicity-

conscious Marxist philosopher, writes Chris Berg.


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in the realm o pure language.Tats only the hal o it.Lacanian psychoanalytic philoso-

phy is inamously impenetrable. AlanSheridan, who rst translated Lacan intoEnglish described this lack o clarity aswilul. Lacan, Sheridan argued, doesntintend to be understood... He designshis seminars so that you cant, in act,grasp them.

For all the complexity o postmod-ernism, when you read such post-mod-

ern luminaries such as Lacan, you canthelp but get a nagging eeling that it isan elaborate prank.

iek wears the clothes o postmod-ernism, and that parodic sensation ismore overt. Tere is the same wordplaywith jarringly capitalised adjectives, andreerence to the master-signier pat-tern that controls history, but it eels likecriticising iek does nothing more thanbroadcast that you have missed his joke.

One could not describe the Disney mov-ie Kung-Fu Pandaas the best descriptiono contemporary political ideology with-out some degree o ironic detachment.

Nevertheless, or all o ieks movieanalogies, his blurry theory and his post-modern theatricality, they have a largelysimple message.

More openly than his academicrockstar predecessors Chomsky, Foucaultand Sartre, iek is an unashamed andunremitting revolutionary Marxist. As

Johann Hari wrote in the New Statesmanin 2007, When you peel back the patinao postmodernism, there is old-ashionedphilo-tyrannical nonsense here.

According to iek, capitalism is vi-olence: the sel-propelling metaphysicaldance o capital runs the show, provid-ing the undamental systemic violenceo capitalism this violence is no longerattributable to concrete individuals andtheir evil intentions, but is purely ob-

jective, systemic, and anonymous.Te market economy may seem

like a web o peaceul interactions ormutual benet, but really it is supportedby aggression and oppression. When thegovernment o a nominally capitalistcountry goes to war, the marketplace isto blame.

Te awul events that occurred inAbu Ghraib were not crimes, but mani-estations o the American economicsystem: Iraqi prisoners were efectivelyinitiated into American culture.

So, or iek, the clash between Is-lamist terrorism and the Western worldis not a clash between barbarism andcivilisation, but between two types obarbarism, a clash between anonymousbrutal torture and torture as a mediaspectacle. ieks 2009 book, First asragedy, Ten as Farce, expands on thistheme. Te two big events o the rstdecade o the twenty-rst centurythe

destruction o the win owers, and theGlobal Financial Crisisspell the endo the liberal order, destroyed once bythe violence o radical Islam, and thenagain by the violence o the collapsingshare market.

What is striking about ieks ar-gument so ar is how common this viewis.

iek is clearer than most, but themoral equivalence o capitalism andbarbarism has been one o the radical

lets primary themes since well beoreSeptember 2001.

Michael Leunig wrote in Te Agein March this year that Our culturehas thrived on the stabbing impulse I schoolboys stopped being violent,the empire and the ree market wouldsurely crumble Our unique brand ocivilisation depends as much upon con-fict and annihilation as it does uponco-operation.

When we read that the ever-repeat-ed claim that the Iraq War was a war oroil we are being told that maintainingthe system o trade and globalisation,by denition, requires the occasionalviolent invasion o other countries.

Never mind that a much cheaperway to acquire Iraqi oil would havebeen to do the capitalist thing and justbuy it. Te cost o the Iraq war is nowwell over one trillion dollars.

Still: in the minds o many in the

radical let, warare is not only a neces-sary condition or the existence o capi-talism, but its most pertinent eature.

iek and his co-ideologists use theliteral violence o the wars in Aghani-stan and Iraq, to damn what they imag-ine is the more perverse violence o thecompetitive marketplace.

Tese belies allow writers likeJohn Pilger to claim, as he did in NewStatesman in May, that the Internation-

al Monetary Fund and neoliberalism isan occupying orce, writing that theGreek protestors are clear who the en-emy is and regard themselves as onceagain under oreign occupation. Andonce again, they are rising up, withcourage.

It is in those protests that iek de-tects divine violence. Divine violenceis an act o violence not or revenge, orto achieve a political goal, but an acto violence so extreme that it upsets

the abric o the social order; terror de-ployed or political purpose, but withno political goals, outside the disestab-lishment o the status quo. Te erroro the French Revolution was divine vi-olencea radical break with the pastas the revolutionaries who rejected thesocial norms and habits o society.

It is only through extreme vio-lencewhich is gasping out in con-temporary Europethat the world can

In the minds of many in the radical left, warfare is a not only a

necessary condition for the existence of capitalism, but its most

pertinent feature.


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earn its redemption, and the break romcapitalism can nally be made.

Tis distinction between violentacts and divinely violent acts is iekskey to history, allowing him to dismiss

the monsters he dislikes, and deendthose whose aims he supports.

Adol Hitler may have been abrute, but he was a brute in ieks eyes,because his Holocaust was undamen-tally conservativeit sought to deenda status quo rather than traumatise theworld into a higher level. In Violence,iek writes:

I one means by violence othe basic social relations, then

as crazy or tasteless as it maysound, the problem with histor-ical monsters who slaughteredmillions was that they were notviolent enough.

In In Deence o Lost Causes, he writes:

crazy, tasteless even, as it maysound, the problem with Hit-ler was that he was not violentenough, that his violence wasnot essential enough. Nazism

was not radical enough, it didnot dare to disturb the basicstructure o the modern capital-ist social space (which is why ithad to ocus on destroying an

invented external enemy, Jews). Hitler did not have the

courage to really change things;he did not really act, all his ac-tions were undamentally reac-tions, that is, he acted so thatnothing would really change, hestaged a great spectre o Revolu-tion so that the capitalist ordercould survive.

Tis is, incidentally, a charge he appar-

ently also lays at the eet o Pol Pot inhis upcoming book, Living in the Endimesthat Pot did not go ar enough.(Te moral contrast with John Pilger,who played the major role in exposingthe murderous Pol Pot regime to theWest, could not be stronger.)

o those who might object, iekquotes Robespierres denunciation ocritics o divine violence who ocus onthe victims o terror: A sensibility thatwails almost exclusively over the en-

emies o liberty seems suspect to me.Stop shaking the tyrants bloody robe inmy ace, or I will believe that you wishto put Rome in chains.

Tat, certainly, is the message sent

by the anarchist action o the Greekrioters, whose response to their govern-ments austerity measures was to murderthree bank workers. Writing o the mobviolence o Haiti under Jean-BertrandAristide, iek says:

Although we are dealing withwhat can only appear as im-moral acts o killing, one has nopolitical right to condemn them,because they are a response to

years, centuries even, o system-atic state and economic violenceand exploitation.

For those Greek rioters, this makessense.

I James Bond is granted a licenceto kill by the state, the mob is granteda licence to indiscriminate terror bySlavoj iek.

Riots in Athens in December 2008

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