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La Violenza Invisibile (2007)

by Slavoj Žižek(Favorite Author)

3.9 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

8817019534 (ISBN13: 9788817019538)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Rizzoli

review 1: Slavoj Žižek is the most destructive philosopher but perhaps the most fearless and honest. Now I know why he is being called as 'Elvis Presley of social philosophy.' His provocative and original defence for communism to resolve environmental crisis would elevate him to be the important voice of our century among future historians. This book is truly a masterpiece and made idea of writing another book on violence more useless.
review 2: Nobody is subject to such diminishing returns as Zizek, in large part because by the time I've finished this review he'll have published two books. 'Violence' makes a great point about how difficult it is to write about violence: if you don't make a big show about how sympathetic you are to victims of (what we usually call) vi... moreolence, you look like a psychopath; if you do put on that show, you're unlikely to say anything interesting. So, he argues, you have to write about violence obliquely. He proceeds to do this in six fairly uninteresting 'digressions.' There's good analysis, nonetheless: he distinguishes subjective violence (roughly, when a known agent perpetuates a discrete act, like shooting someone), objective violence (roughly, injustice that can't be blamed on an individual agent; structural violence and so on), and symbolic violence, which I assume is linked to Lacan's 'symbolic', but that doesn't come up in the book after the introduction. That's probably for the best. In the conclusion, Zizek suggests three lessons that can be taken from the book. First, the mere chastising of violence ('Mandela is a terrorist!') is pure ideology that ignores whatever a specific act of subjective violence is responding to (i.e., usually objective violence). Second, true violence disturbs the basic parameters of social life (= the symbolic?); this is almost impossible. Finally, the violence of an act is always contextual. For instance, in Saramago's 'Seeing,' the mere act of abstaining from the vote is 'violent', in the sense that it disturbs the way things have been going. This leads Zizek to claim that "doing nothing is the most violent thing to do." But that is almost never true, no matter how you define violence. In between the analysis and the conclusion, there's a bunch of stuff you can get less painlessly from Zizek's other books. I can't be the only one for whom all the cultural analogies are getting both boring and intrusive. Can I? less

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