Zizek on Violence- or shitting

Zizek writes- 

In his “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin raises the question: “Is any non-violent resolution of conflict possible?”

All resolution of conflict is non-violent. One side desists either because it is beaten or has been paid off or won over with kisses or found something more interesting to do. By contrast, we don't say that a conflict has been resolved while people are still getting beaten or killed.  

His answer is that such a non-violent resolution of conflict is indeed possible in what he calls “relationships among private persons,” in courtesy, sympathy and trust: “there is a sphere of human agreement that is non-violent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of ‘understanding,’ language.’

Sadly, Walter Benjamin killed himself because he understood what would happen to him once the Nazis got hold of him. This is why he stopped being capable of participating in relationships among private persons or contributing to language based activities like talking or writing. 

This thesis of Benjamin belongs to the mainstream tradition in which the prevalent idea of language and the symbolic order is that of the medium of reconciliation and mediation, of peaceful co-existence, as opposed to a violent medium of immediate and raw confrontation.

This is mere pi-jaw worthy of a bureaucrat or pedant. Language is about communication and commerce and creativity of different types.  

In language, instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we are meant to debate, to exchange words, and such an exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimum recognition of the other.

No. Language is about telling peeps who want to fight to stay the fuck away from each other on pain of being sent to jail.  

We don't think the would be rapist or murderer should get to argue with his victim as to why she is a worthless piece of shit and should be treated as such. 

The entry into language and the renunciation of violence are often understood as two aspects of one and the same gesture: ‘Speaking is the foundation and structure of socialization, and happens to be characterized by the renunciation of violence,’ as a text by Jean-Marie Muller written for UNESCO tells us. 

This tells us that UNESCO is shit. Israel and the US were right to quit.  This Muller dude is a French philosopher- i.e. a shithead- who has specialized in Gandhian shite. 

Since man is a ‘speaking animal,’ this means that the renunciation of violence defines the very core of being-human: ‘it is actually the principles and methods of non-violence … that constitute the humanity of human beings, the coherence and relevance of moral standards based both on convictions and a sense of responsibility,’ so that violence is ‘indeed a radical perversion of humanity.’

In the view of a cretin. Why not say 'man is a shitting animal. But one can't take a comfortable dump while engaged in a knife fight. Thus non-violence is the foundation of shitting. This proves that violence is a radical perversion of shitting.' 

Insofar as language

or shitting 

gets infected by violence, this occurs under the influence of contingent ‘pathological’ circumstances which distort the inherent logic of symbolic communication.

or shitting. 

What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak?

or shit? 

 When we perceive something as an act of violence,

for example if your opponent shits into his cupped hands and flings his feces in your face 

we measure it by a presupposed standard of what the “normal” non-violent situation is –

the guy should shit on the boss's desk, like a normal person 

and the highest form of violence is the imposition of this standard with reference to which some events appear as “violent.”

in which case the highest form of shitting into one's hands and flinging one's feces into the face of an opponent is to classify the act of so doing as 'violent'. 

In other words, if a guy flings his shit at you and you call the police coz that's fucking assault with a stinky weapon innit? the police should arrest you, not the shit-flinger, coz you described his action as premeditated violence rather than just an alternative style of excretion and waste disposal. 

This is why language itself,

or shitting itself 

the very medium of non-violence,

coz you don't want to be knifing peeps or getting knifed by peeps while taking a dump 

of mutual recognition,

you can tell I'm in the next stall coz my shit smells of curry 

involves unconditional violence.

Which is why everybody should be arrested the moment they start taking a dump. OMG! That's why the Government has installed cameras in toilets! It isn't just to watch us poop, it is to convict us as violent terrorists once Zizek's theory has been accepted and the laws have been suitably amended.

Incidentally, Gandhi was constantly getting and giving enemas. He was worse than Hitler or Stalin! They went in for mere conditional violence. Gandhi's violence was unconditional! So is the baby's. Every filled diaper represents worse violence than the H-Bomb! 

So, perhaps, the fact that reason (ratio) and race have the same root tells us something:

they don't have the same root. Reason has a Latin root but 'race' has a Norse root and is ultimately related to something swift flowing.  

language,

or shitting 

not primitive egotistic interests, is the first and greatest divider, it is because of language

or shitting 

that we and our neighbors (can) “live in different worlds” even when we live on the same street.

but shit in solitude  

What this means is that verbal violence

or shitting 

is not a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence.

because all violence is shitting except that greater violence involved in describing as violent an attack by an opponent who is throwing his turds at you or smearing his feces on you or forcing it down your throat.  

Take the example of anti-Semitic pogroms, which can stand in for all racist violence.

If you are a thug of a certain sort- sure, I suppose so.  

What the perpetrators of pogroms find intolerable and rage-provoking, what they react to, is not the immediate reality of Jews, but to the image/figure of the ‘Jew’ which circulates and has been constructed in their tradition.

Which is why anti-semites keep slaughtering each other when they get together. It is also the reason the Nazi party collapsed immediately with Hitler knifing Himmler in his rage against the image/figure of the Jew just as Himmler was stabbing Goebbels who was shooting Goering and so on and so forth.  

The catch, of course, is that one single individual cannot distinguish in any simple way between real Jews and their anti-Semitic image: this image overdetermines the way I experience real Jews themselves and, furthermore, it affects the way Jews experience themselves.

Zizek may be accurately describing himself. Yet, the fact is, had he been violent to Jews he'd have been locked up or else Mossad would have made an example of him.  

What makes a real Jew that an anti-Semite encounters on the street “intolerable,” what the anti-Semite tries to destroy when he attacks the Jew, the true target of his fury, is this fantasmatic dimension.

There is no evidence of this. Jews were attacked when it was safe, and it appeared profitable, to do so.  Violence is costly. Long run, the thing has to pay for itself. The Economic dimension matters. One can increase or decrease different types of violence through 'mechanism design'. 'Fantasmatic dimensions' are only important in a comic book world. 

The same principle applies to every political protest: when workers protest their exploitation, they do not protest a simple reality, but an experience of their real predicament made meaningful through language.

No. Their reality is simple. Zizek's language would make it meaningless which is why workers don't invite him to represent them.  

Reality in itself, in its stupid being there, is never intolerable:

Which is why Zizek sleeps naked in the snow during the depths of winter.  

it is language, its symbolization, which makes it such.

We tell intolerable bores to fuck off or else ourselves find somewhere else to take a ruminative dump.  

So precisely when we are dealing with the scene of a furious crowd, attacking and burning buildings and cars, lynching people, etc., we should never forget the placards they are carrying and the words which sustain and justify their acts.

Nor should we run away till we have read every one of their placards and heard all the slogans they raise as they beat us to death or string us up from the nearest lamp-post.  

It was Heidegger who elaborated this feature at the formal-ontological level, when, in his reading of essence /Wesen/ as a verb (“essencing”), he provided a de-essentialized notion of essence.

In the same way that Hitler provided a de-victorized notion of victory which involved Heidi's Fatherland being defeated and shorn of territory and partitioned and forced to pay reparations. 

Traditionally, “essence” refers to a stable core that guarantees the identity of a thing.

Nope. It is merely that which is true of it in all possible worlds. But this means having no identity or other type of existence in most of them.  

For Heidegger, “essence” is something that depends on the historical context, on the epochal disclosure of being that occurs in and through language;

The German language would have been suppressed if Heidi had been believed. However, it was obvious that you don't have to change language or hermeneutics or anything else to get a people to behave. It is sufficient to punish them if they do wrong while letting them prosper if they work hard and don't get up to any monkey tricks.  

his expression “Wesen der Sprache” does not mean “the essence of language,” but its “essencing,”

which it can do to itself. Thus Heidi's expression does mean 'the essence of language' even when it doesn't. 

the making of essences that is the work of language, “language bringing things into their essence, language ‘moving us’ so that things matter to us in a particular kind of way, so that paths are made within which we can move among entities, and so that entities can bear on each other as the entities they are. … We share an originary language when the world is articulated in the same style for us, when we ‘listen to language,’ when we ‘let it say its saying to us.’”

Heidi was wrong. Only incentives matter. Language does not.  

For a medieval Christian, the essence of gold resides in its incorruptibility and divine sheen which make it a divine metal.

No. Some stupid pedants have made up this shit and attributed it to medieval Christians. The truth is they understood well enough that what was true of gold in all possible worlds was that it possessed all the qualities necessary and sufficient to function as a good store of value and unit of exchange etc.  

For us, it is either a flexible resource to be used for industrial purposes or the stuff appropriate for aesthetic purposes.

It is still a store of value.  

Or, for Catholics, the castrato voice was once the very voice of angels prior to the Fall.

Nope. There was some ambiguity about Matthew 19.12 'some made themselves eunuchs &c'. However, the same condition can occur naturally by reason of an endocrine deficiency. Radu Marian is an example. 

For us today, it is a monstrosity.

No. Radu Marian is a great artist. He worked very hard to attain virtuosity.

This change in our sensitivity is sustained by language; it hinges on the shift in our symbolic universe.

No it doesn't. Economic and geopolitical forces change laws and norms and tastes. Language does not matter at all.  Still, if Zizek can make a living by pretending otherwise- good luck to him. It is only in a metaphorical sense that he is shitting into his cupped hands and flinging his feces about for the entertainment of wealthy Americans wot went to Collidge. This isn't either violence or non-violence or a philosophical reflection on either. It's just monkeys doing what monkeys get rewarded with bananas for doing so the Zoo's paying customers get their money's worth.