Abstract
The chapter “Divine Violence? Radical Ethics and Politics of Nonviolence” brings to the fore two recurrences of an idea—as a mode of an ethical temporality within the very relation between politics and ethics. Here we tackle Badiou’s and Žižek’s ontological claims concerning violence, also accompanied with two complementary remarks on the dissipation of violence. A difficult relation of ethics and politics in Lévinas is also analysed in this context. Against both constellations we argue for another recurrence, which, by excluding the logic of competition or force—which still remains a part of even Lévinas’ political legacies—concludes this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
English and Serbo-Croatian tr. appeared in 2009 under the title Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of State-Truth (2009b).
- 2.
For English translation see Violence (Žižek 2008).
- 3.
I refer here to an essay of Cornelius Castoriadis “Done and To Be Done” (1997, 361): “The idea that an ontology, or a cosmology, might be able to save the revolution belongs to Hegelo-Marxism—that is, to a conception as far removed as possible from my own.”
- 4.
On Nancy’s community see my “On progressive alternative: Unger versus Žižek” (Škof 2010).
- 5.
For the Communist hypothesis see his “L’hypothese communiste” (Badiou 2009a, 181–205).
- 6.
This appears only in Slovenian version of his essay “To begin from the Beginning” (Žižek 2011, 438).
- 7.
The chapters of the book originally appeared in Italian journal Il Divenire sociale in 1905 and 1906 and were later published in a book in 1908.
- 8.
Here I cannot fully explore this topic but according to Tahmasebi (2006, 184), Benjamin’s divine violence affirms “to the possibility of an alternative communal space-time separate from the state power and, more specifically, from the Hobbesian liberal capitalist state.” It would be necessary at some other place to show the ethical consequences of a such reading of Levinas together with Benjamin. According to Levinas (2006a, 90): “If self-defence is a problem, the executioner is the one who threatens my neighbour and, in this sense, calls for violence and no longer has a Face.” On the topic of violence in Levinas see also the essay “Judaism and Revolution” (Levinas 1994) from Nine Talmudic Readings and Derrida’s essay “Violence and Metaphysics” (2009) from his Writing and Difference.
- 9.
About the perception of violence in Islam: generally in Islam there is a kind of consensus that violence is to be avoided except for “just cause”—but that can be interpreted in a very narrow or broad sense, and its often a matter of perception as much as dispassionate reasoning. There is a preponderance of seeing Jihad in “defensive” terms; radical Islamists would be able to condone 9/11 because of their perception of the Muslim world being under siege of the West, and the attacks could then be interpreted as a defensive posture (e.g. as an act of divine violence), while other Muslims (the vast majority) condemn it as a terrorist act, not just “un-Islamic,” but putting the perpetrators beyond the pale of Islam altogether. I thank Carool Kersten for this explanation.
- 10.
Cit. after Fred Dallmayr (2011, 18). Dewey’s words are from his essay “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” from 1939.
- 11.
“Enemies, there are no enemies!” (Nietzsche 1986, 149).
- 12.
The first to elaborate on this paradox was Paul Ricoeur in his 1974 essay “The Political Paradox.” See on this in Die politische Differenz (Marchart 2010).
- 13.
Jacques Rancière (2011, 79f), for example, is also very clear about this: “I am not the thinker of the event … I believe there are traditions of emancipation. The one I try to work on, or work in, is different from the one that got confiscated by the strategic visionaries, Lenin and the like. I’ve always fought against the idea of historical necessity.” In this Rancière is close to Dewey’s or Habermas’ model of universal pragmatics: he affirms there were some historical “events” that opened up temporalities, but more importantly, democracies also grow in an “ongoing effort to create forms of the common different from ones on offer from the state” (79f). Benhabib, on the other side, pleads for the deliberative model of democracy.
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Škof, L. (2015). Divine Violence? Radical Ethics and Politics of Nonviolence. In: Breath of Proximity: Intersubjectivity, Ethics and Peace. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9738-2_8
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