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Secret machines. Suicide bombings, riots and international conflicts are, according to self-proclaimed “old-fashioned” Marxist theorist Salvoj Žižek, “subjective” forms of violence. But behind these obvious expressions of the concept, he asserts, lie deeper, hidden forms of systemic violence with which supposedly peace-loving western democracies are irrevocably complicit. Moving from the Jacobins in 1790s France to the recent eruptions of the banlieues, Hurricane Katrina and the works of M Night Shyamalan and Hitchcock, Žižek’s culturally diverse arguments are always engaging. His conclusion, however, that the logical response in the face of a system that secretly feeds on violence is to do nothing disregards the fact that for many – multi-tenured professors excepted – doing nothing isn’t an option. That said, Žižek isn’t so much in the solutions business as he is an agent provocateur always willing to provoke controversy. At a time when cultural theory is still spinning in the wake of postmodernist relativism, his exhilarating determination to revive old arguments in exciting ways, rather than summon new ones for the sake of mere novelty, is valuable. Violence by Slavoj Žižek, out now published by Profile.
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