Violence by Slavoj Zizek Search Amazon for other books by or about Slavoj Zizek. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

Slavoj Zizek has developed a well-earned reputation as one of the most prominent and brilliant intellectuals of the day, especially in his areas of principal intellectual endeavour (e.g. philosophy and Lacanian psychology). He is not only profuse and prolific but his particular style, which combines extraordinary reversals of expectations with unexpected and broad use of popular culture to draw examples, is both challenging and rewarding in itself. Whether or not the reader is disposed to agree with any of his ideas or arguments, it is refreshing to be required to construct the intellectual reasoning to meet the challenge. This is especially of this book, which consists of a series of interlocking essays on the nature of violence, since it is rather less dense than some of the less penetrable works on Lacanian thought.

Zizek divides his thoughts on violence into its nature in three aspects: as subjective, linguistic and structural forms. He concludes, in part, on pp.206-7: & to chastise violence outright, to condemn it as "bad," is an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence. It is deeply symptomatic that our Western societies, which display such sensitivity to different forms of harassment, are at the same time able to mobilize a multitude of mechanisms destined to render us insensitive to the most brutal forms of violence--often, paradoxically, in the very form of humanitarian sympathy with the victims. More succinctly, he quotes Brecht as writing :what is a bank robbery compared to the founding of the bank?" Zizek locates, ultimately, the nature of violence to the presence of the other, specifically the "neighbour," whose intrusion into our lives in one way or another provokes both the violent urge and the need to restrain it which has given rise to civilization (his arguments are longer and more complex than this). This idea and its fellows are then explored through such illustrative material as the films of M Night Shyamalan, the Palestine-Israel conundrum, the anti-Danish cartoon riots and Andrew Carnegie. Many aspects of life prove to be grist to his analytical mill and, as he works his way through them, new modes of thinking emerge - at least to the non-philosopher whose normal thought patterns tend to work in different ways. On the other hand, those who are familiar with doing philosophy and related activities will be likely to have more to consider in methodological and perhaps ideological terms, since Zizek is unrepentant in his attachment to various concepts which are not uncontroversial.

The world would arguably be a better place if more people had some conception of modern philosophy and philosophers. After all, so much of western culture, such as it is, has derived from the philosophy of the ancient Greeks and one of the most prominent, Socrates, observed that the unexamined life is not worth living. As society becomes more complex, necessarily the ways of thinking about society also become more complex. Consider, for example, what is now known of the quantum nature of the universe compared to what so many of us were taught at school, with its indivisible spherical atoms and neat calculations of moles and molecules. This, in general, is a recommendation to read Zizek (who also has plenty of material available for free on the internet for those wishing to seek it out) but, specifically, this book seems to be a particularly good starting point because it is, as the book series describes it, "big ideas in small books" and, consequently, related to a set of interlinked concepts. These attributes make it more convenient to tackle Zizek's thinking and the ways in which he draws conclusions about the world.