On Violence

                                                                 On Violence
                                                                                                                         author: Slavoj Žižek
Description
Žižek's lecture on his book Violence at the University of Leeds. Expounds on violence in all its dimensions, he introduces aspects that got left out in the book. The lecture was organized by the International Journal of Žižek Studies.
Below is a brief chronological summary of the lecture's main themes:

Marxism and psychoanalysis - They have a problematic relationship in so far as Marxism mis-uses psychoanalysis to fill in its theoretical gaps & shortcomings. The way forward is to open up a new domain that can be described by psychoanalysis but offers the grounds for a new revolutionary subjectivity.
The possibility of a radical/revolutionary new subjectivity - a purportedly post-traumatic subjectivity typical of the 21st Century - with reference to Catherine Malabous recent book - Les nouveaux blessés (The New Wounded).
Impossible objects - The core of humanity as the drive and fascination for things we cannot do or fully understand.

Freud & Lacan - The relationship between external traumatic events/stimuli and internal psychical traumas. Sexuality is less about content and more about the form of the fantasy through which sexuality is expressed. Trauma/fantasy sexualizes sexuality itself, only through trauma can sexuality occur. Sexuality only occurs through the distortion of trauma.
Catherine Malabou's critique of the Freudian/Lacanian position - our socio-political reality today has produced so many brutal external intrusions that our traditional symbolic structures have been destroyed.

Malabou's reproach - that Freud always looks for the psychic trauma at the expense of the overwhelmingly destructive external shocks of profoundly violent events that have no rational meaning to be processed. The post-traumatic subject that results is emptied of his/her substance - there is nowhere to regress in the Freudian sense because your entire identity has been erased, you become a pure subject deprived of the symbolic content that the hermeneutics of psychoanalysis depend upon. This creates a new form of the living dead. The big political and psychoanalytical problem of today is how to think through this new traumatized subject.

Zizek's Lacanian response - the underlying function of such Lacanian categories of castration etc. is to describe this manner in which the subject is deprived of his/her substance. Similarly, in German idealism we learn that the subject is substanceless.

Psychoanalytical theory's response - The Big Other is what are you deprived of when you are subjected to this destructive violence, not as an all-knowing figure of authority but rather the Big Other as appearance. The fool and the grain of seed story (the mentally ill man who thought he was a grain of corn, returns to the asylum and is told off because he has been cured - to which he replies "yes, but does the chicken know this" ... This reveals a central component of ideology - we all need a chicken not to know. E.g. the fact that whilst drawing to the end of his life, Tito was not informed of the parlous state of Yugoslavia's economy. So huge amounts of money was borrowed to keep Tito happy till his death. Economic crisis ensued with the subsequent outbreaks of genocidal nationalism - because the chicken was not allowed to know.

Culture today - we can afford to be as cynical as we want, but we still need a chicken that doesn't know. E.g. in today's greatest remaining taboo is paedophilia and the corruption of childhood innocence - we still need a chicken, unlike the post-traumatic subjects who have lost their chicken. In cultural politics - this means we need more not less distance from our cultural neighbours. We need more codes of discretion, not more understanding.

The rise of gonzo pornography - this marks the end of engagement as the ridiculous narratives of traditional pornography have been replaced by gonzo porn where all narrative has been removed.
The basic lesson of the post-traumatic subject - the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, our innermost narratives, are ultimately lies. Psychoanalysis helps us to understand this truth.
The rise of the detached subject & a new revolutionary perspective - there are a whole new series of antagonisms that capitalism cannot solve:
1. ecological concerns 2. intellectual property rights 3. excluded populations - gated communities
These constitute 3 new forms of proletarianization in a basic philosophical sense in addition to the classic Marxist sense of exploitation. The common philosophical element of all three domains is the way in which the subject is deprived of his/her key substance. This is the grounds for the building of a new proletarianization e.g. Neo from The Matrix - deprived of his whole symbolic inner life.
The new Cartesian subjectivity - Descartes's conception of the subject is now more relevant than ever before. The conceptualization of the subject that survives his/her own death - maybe we can provide a frame that will provide us with a common denominator for the shared struggles that we have today. Proletarianization has not disappeared - it has extended its reach.