Notes: Zizek's On Violence

p.8 - joke: Marx wants wife, Engels wants mistress
Lenin wants both mistress or wife, lie to each other, to be alone, in solitude to learn, learn and learn!!

p.137 - on doing good and the rewards: 'in the course of Crusade King St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked what she was doing, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them,'Becuase I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God.' The only thing to add to this is: so why not erase God himself and just do good for the sake of it? No wonder that, today this properly Christian ethical stance survives mostly in
atheism.

p.143 - private reason, opposition between Kant and Rorty

'To put it in precise Kantain terms, when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions, that is, we act as "immature" individuals, not as free human beings who dwell in the dimension of universality of reason. The opposition between Kant and Richard Rorty with regard ti this distinction of public and private is rarely noted, but none the less crucial: they both sharply distinguish between the two domains, but in opposed ways. For Rorty, the great contemporary liberal... the private is the space of idiosyncrasies, where creativity and wild imagination rule and moral considerations are (almost) suspended, while the public is the space of social interaction, where we should obey the rules so that we do not hurt others... For Kant, however, the public space of 'world-civil-society' designates the paradox of the universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, by-passing the mediation of the particular, directly participates in the universal. This is what Kant, in the famous passage of his "What is Enlightenment?" means by "public" as opposed to "private." "Private" is not one's individual as opposed to communal ties, bu tthe very communal -institutional order of one's particulae identification; while "public" is the transnational universality of the exercise of one's reason.

p.152 - the rise of universality out of particular lifeworld:

'the key moment of any theoretical - and indeed ethical, political, and, as Badiou demonstrated, even aesthetic - struggle is the rise of universality out of particular lifeworld. The commonplace according to which we are all thoroughly grounded in a particular, contingent lifeworld, so that all universality is irreducibly coloured by and embedded in that lifeworld, needs to be turned around. The authentic moment of discovery, the break through, occurs when a properly universal dimension explodes from within a particular context and becomes "for-itself," and is directly expereinced as universal. This universality-for-itself is not simply external to or above its particular context: it is inscribed within it. It perturbs and affects it from within so that the , so that the identity of the particular is split into its particular and its universal aspects. Surely Marx already pointed out how the true problem with homer was not to explain the roots of his epics in early Greek society, but to account for the fact that, although clearly roooted in their historical context, they were able to transcend their historical origin and speak to all epochs.

p. 196 - Benjamin, divine violence

p. 203 - 204: Che Guevara "Hay que endurecerse sin perder jamas la ternura." (One must endure-become hard, toughen oneself- without losing tenderness.)

p.211- Agatha Christie's suicide as murder (crime) story, staged instead of covered up 'instead of being concealed, a crime is created as a lure.'

p.217 - 'The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be "active," to "participate," to mask the nothingness of what goes on.... academics participate in meaningless debates, and so sn. The truly difficult this ins to step back, to withdraw.'

mentioned Badiou's theses on contemporary art, last thesis on doing nothing than conrtibute to the visible of imperial/empire

The Ticklish Subject - p. 59 Zizek (Verso: London, 1999)

The paradox thus lies in the fact that 'false' appearance is comprised within the 'thing itself'. And, incidentally, therein lies the dialectical 'unity of essence and appearance' completely missed by the textbook platitudes on how 'essence must appear', and so on: the approximate 'view from afar' which ignores all the details and limits itself to the 'mere appearance', is paradoxically constitutes itself through the very removal of the 'false' appearance from the Real in its immediacy. We thus have three elements, not only essence and its appearing: first, there is reality; within it, there is the 'interface'-screen of appearances; finally, on this screen, essence appears. The catch is thus that appearance is literally the appearing/emerging of the essence - that is, the only place for the essence to dwell. The standard Idealist reduction of reality as such, in its entirety, to the mere appearance of some hidden Essence falls short here: within the domain of 'reality' itself, a line must be drawn which separates 'raw' reality from the screen thorugh which the hidden Essence of reality appears, so that if we take away this medium of appearance, we lose the very 'essence' which appears in it...

Necessity and Contingency

This reversal is homologous to the one that characterizes the Hegelian dialectics of necessity and contingency. In a first approach, it appears that their encompassing unity is necessity, i.e., that necessity itself posits and mediates contingency as the external field in which it expresses – actualizes itself – contingency itself is necessary, the result of the self-externalization and self-mediation of the notional necessity. However, it is crucial to supplement this unity with the opposite one, with contingency as the encompassing unity of itself and necessity: the very elevation of a necessity into the structuring principle of the contingent field of multiplicity is a contingent act, one can almost say: the outcome of a contingent (“open”) struggle for hegemony. This shift corresponds to the shift from S to S, from Substance to Subject. The starting point is a contingent multitude; through its self-mediation (“spontaneous self-organization”), contingency engenders – posits its immanent necessity, in the same way that Essence is the result of the self-mediation of Being. Once Essence emerges, it retroactively “posits its own presupposition,” i.e., it sublates its presuppositions into subordinated moments of its self-reproduction (Being is transubstantiated into Appearance); this positing, however, is retroactive.

Slavoj Žižek