Three stars purely for some interesting insights about the banlieue riots, and a nice little observation about the Abu Ghraib pictures as making us think more of a performance art piece in a NY gallery than torture. Even that is outrageously generous. I have had enough of Zizek's books at this point. If you have read one, you have read them all. From now on I'm only going to bother with his occasional essays and journalism, the effort expended on his books is simply not worth it.

Longer review here: Zizek as a dirty old librarian and other analogies. ( )

More a series of jabs and body blows than a choreographed diplay of sytemic rigour, Zizke succeeds in provoking thought, often after fomenting outrage. It certainly works. His thoughts on Israel and the Palestinian Authority were sage. Snaring ontological love in the mesh of institutional violence was a bit beyond me. ( )

More Zizekian goodness. Used the wrong terms for things sometimes ( translation problem ? ) Says ' superego ' when it should be ' id ' , etc. ( )

I felt obliged to give this book five stars, simply due to my desire to give it less. It is a powerful book of short essays confronting the concept of violence - and extends beyond mere ideological interpretation, but rather a deconstruction of typical forms of criticism violence which lends it its vigor. He attacks turns around the negative judgements of violence as its perpetrators, and reduces violence as a quasi-positive homini sacer action in its most purified form at the end: of active abstention. The most intriguing idea of all for me being that of the post-modern bourgeoisie being the Nietzschean last man. This book is raw in its criticism, offensive to both those who would like to justify violence and those who would like to de-legitimize it. It is for this reason that, although one might not agree with all his essays, that it is such a provocative read. It screams of self-reevaluation. ( )

As I write this, Hamas is lobbing rockets into Israel and Israel is returning with air strikes and a ground offensive. As I write this the Ukranian government is trying desperately to reclaim sovereignty over the East which is increasingly controlled by pro-Russian militants. Somehow during this outbreak of violence, a passenger jet was shot down killing 298 passengers and crew. Violence is alive and well in our world.

For Žižek, this explosive "subjective" violence is only the violence we see on the surface. Below the subjective violence is objective violence, the violence inherent in language which influences our thoughts and attitudes. Also below subjective violence is systemic violence—the effect of living in our modern economic and political systems. Any understanding of what's happening in the world today must take into account all the causes of violence.

Žižek (as you might expect) has many profound things to say about the subject, complete with regular references to Marx, Hegel, and Lacan. He wanders through many diverse cultural and political landscapes. He tackles the problem in the Middle East with an accusing look at the Germans (who, in his mind, offered restitution to the Jews by giving away someone else's land). He looks at the uproar over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. He delves into Alfred Hitchkcock's films. He even considers the shaming of prisoners in Abu Ghraib This is one of the joys of Žižek—you never know where he's going next.

My difficulty with this book was that Žižek almost always takes a contrarian view. After a while it feels like he plays devil's advocate just for the sake of being different—as if it was a game. He takes a radically counter-intuitive idea then tries to argue for it. His arguments are inventive and brilliant, but they're far from infallible. Take for example, the prisoner abuse photos that came from Abu Ghraib. For Žižek, this obscene act of shaming was more like an initiation ritual into American culture. It was a hazing.

Žižek's Violence is an intellectual, political, and cultural look at the violence that permeates our world. You can agree or disagree with him, but you can't stay neutral. ( )