A review of “Violence”

There is an old joke about a husband who returns
home earlier than usual from work and finds his wife in
bed with another man. The surprised wife exclaims:
“Why have you come back early?” The husband furiously snaps back: “What are you doing in bed with another man?” The wife calmly replies: “I asked you a question first-don’t try to squeeze out of it by changing the topic! “

The same goes for violence: the task is precisely to change the topic, to move from the desperate humanitarian SOS call to stop violence to the analysis of that other SOS, the complex interaction of the three modes of violence: subjective, objective, and symbolic.

“Violence” is one of the more approachable works of Zizek. He goes through various modes of violence namely Objective, Subjective and Symbolic Violence. In his unabashed and fearless styles, he heavily draws on the works of Lacan, Kant, and Heidegger to point out the weak basis for the left-liberal approach to the problem of violence: where by a sense of urgency is deployed instead of reflection to the modus operandi of how violence intertwines with capitalism.