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"In 1918-19, Trotsky was much harsher than Stalin. And I do like this in him. But I will never forgive him for how he screwed it up in the mid-’20s. He was so stupid and arrogant. You know what he would do? He would come to party meetings carrying French classics like Flaubert, Stendhal, to signal to others: 'Fuck you, I am civilized!'" Slavoj Zizek.
noxe reblogged
Interpreting Žižek on this or any issue is not without difficulties. There is his inordinate prolixity, the stream of texts that no one could read in their entirety, if only because the torrent never ceases flowing. There is his use of a type of academic jargon featuring allusive references to other thinkers, which has the effect of enabling him to use language in an artful, hermetic way. As he acknowledges, Žižek borrows the term “divine violence” from Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921). It is doubtful whether Benjamin—a thinker who had important affinities with the Frankfurt School of humanistic Marxism—would have described the destructive frenzy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge as divine.
But this is beside the point, for by using Benjamin’s construction Žižek is able to praise violence and at the same time claim that he is speaking of violence in a special, recondite sense—a sense in which Gandhi can be described as being more violent than Hitler. (…)
John Gray, “The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek”, July 12, 2012, The New York Review of Books.
Msodradek wrote a short summary and commented on Zizek’s half-baked and irresponsible discourse on violence here.
(via msodradek)