(Ir)religiosity

Conclusion: Critical Repetition

What, then, is the criterion for critical, liberative theo-political praxis today in the face of global neoliberal Empire? It is quite obvious that such an eschatology, reliant on the logic of downturn, involves incarnate bodies but what is its phenomenological structure? In his enigmatic work Repetition, Søren Kierkeegard provides, I claim, a solid heuristic through which an incarnational eschatology can generate critical theo-political praxis by modeling the gesture of the incarnation itself.  For Kierkegaard, repetition is not the simple reproduction of the past as if events could be simple carbon-copies of one another, but rather a means of recollection into the future.  He writes, “repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite direction, for what is recollected as been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.”¹ For Kierkegaard a true, non-identical repetition, by virtue of the absurd (or the impossible as Derrida would have it), is still open to the singularity of events themselves, yet still rooted in memory, in a recollection of the past.  Repetition is therefore a way of interacting with memory, of remembering, of re-membering, with an eye for the future.  As Slavoj Žižek puts it, this process involves a “repetitive movement of repeating the beginning again and again”² through a process of future-oriented recollection that is fundamentally rooted in the galvanizing memory of past history which becomes intrinsic to the present.  It is in this way that Johann Baptist Metz, following the lead of Walter Benjamin, can speak of the “dangerous memory” of the church, insofar as it serves as a catalyst for critical theo-political praxis, as “the public witness and bearer of the tradition of a dangerous memory of freedom in the ‘systems’ [Empire] of our emancipative society.”³  These memories are dangerous to Empire precisely because they inspire non-identical repetition into the future. In terms of incarnational eschatology this means that, in the face of Empire, one must enact a non-identical repetition of the incarnation.  In other words, this logic of downturn at the heart of an incarnational eschatology involves returning to the beginning once again, not to merely reproduce the past, but to repeat the incarnational gesture down and out toward the margins, toward the victims and the collateral damage of Empire and, in so doing, to the coming reign of God.

The task of the faith collective, then, is to, like Christ, be fully present and incarnate in the world such that the reign of God is being realized in the very presence of the violence of Empire, to be the eschatological sign of the impossible, of that which is “to-come” in the face of totalization and in the very bowels of illegitimate power.  In this way, Žižek provocatively speaks of the incarnation not as an act of sterile emptying of the divine, but an act in which God “identified himself with his own shit”⁴ and through genuine kenotic love for the Other — that is humanity — became fully present in the suffering and anguish of the world — and did so on the fringes of Empire.  In other words, God rolled up God’s sleeves and entered into the muck, the mire, and the messiness of the finite world as the ultimate expression of divine love and the initial inauguration of the reign of God. An incarnational eschatology enacts a critical repetition of this gesture; here persons are not reliant on the ahistorical other-worldly ideals of Empire but are fully present in the evil and violence of the world, bearing faithful witness to the incoming of the impossible and the advent of divine transcendence which pierces and violates the immanent normalcy of the status quo.  Indeed, rather than an eschatology, one might speak of an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology that is so invested in the material world that is it committed to identifying with its own shit, the shit of Empire, of being incarnate amidst the messiness and ordure of the world as the sign of another possible reality that is within yet not fully realized, absent in its very presence, a reality that is always already here yet always already “to-come” in the future, a future which transforms the present and ruptures the mundane.

In the final pages of their sequel to Empire, Hardt and Negri note the difference between linear chronos time and its unexpected fissure with the arrival of káiros, the moment in which an emancipatory politics is initiated through the ambivalances and antagonisms of Empire.

Káiros is the moment when the arrow is shot by the bowstring, the moment when a decision of action is made.  Revolutionary politics must grasp, in the movement of the multitudes and through the accumulation of common and cooperative decisions, the moment of rupture or clinamen that can create a new world.  […] The bowstring shoots the arrow of a new temporality, inaugurating a new future. […] We can already recognize that today times is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living—and the yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous.  In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future.   This will be the real political act of love.⁵

It is hard to overlook the theological tone permeating Hardt and Negri’s prose here.  Indeed, their description of the revolutionary future is not at all unlike the hope of an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology.  There is, however, a crucial difference — and this is why Kierkegaard notion of repetition is so vitally important.  For theology, the event that Hardt and Negri believe will propel us into the living future as already happened, indeed it was the Christ Event!  We are living and participating in the future of which they speak.  By repeating the gesture of the incarnation, by following the logic of downturn, the theo-political subject lives in the liminal space between what Hardt and Negri call the “dead present” and the “living future,” what Paul calls the already and the not yet, even in the bowels of Empire.  It is in this way that an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology, perhaps more effectively than Hardt and Negri’s multitude, summons the rupture of the present chronos with káiros, of the violation of Empire’s socio-political fabric with the liberative incoming of the reign of God through intentional and tangible movement toward the fringes, toward those the Empire itself has violated…“for such a time as this” (Es. 4:14).

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1. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: Kierkegaard’s Writings Vol. VI, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 131. Emphasis mine. [↩]
2. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 87. [↩]
3. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (New York, New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 89-90. [↩]
4. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 187.  This phrase need not be read as complicit with a negative, essentialist theological anthropology.  Rather it involves reliance on the logic of downturn, a gesture toward the margins where one finds herself wholly present in the world amidst the pain and the mundane, the suffering and the profane.  This does not mean that God created shit to begin with, rather it asserts that wherever shit is there is God siding with those who have no way out.  An incarnational eschatology enacts a critical repetition of this gesture. [↩]
5. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 357-58. [↩]

If God in Christ dies for real on the cross then what is the meaning of the resurrection?

My contention would be that Good Friday is not superseded by Easter Sunday, that the resurrection does not supplant the crucifixion.

The problem, I think, is that we are too quick to separate Pentecost from the Resurrection.  Pentecost marks the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the faith collective, the arrival of a new signifier which, after Christ’s death on the cross, is immanent to the collective itself.

The collective, then, is one that is deprived of its support from the Big other, as Zizek would put it.  Christ is raised in the community of believers through the liberative power of the Holy Spirit.  The entrance of the Spirit as the life of the collective spells the end of God as transcendental signified and the beginning of God as emancipatory event.

The resurrection of Christ does not involve a mere return or reduplication of his prior presence.  Rather, it involves the repetition of that presence with critical difference (i.e., the Spirit).  The logic of resurrection is in fact the logic of repetition.  The absence of God qua Big other, of God qua transcendental signified is overcome (that is, repeated, resurrected) with the presence of the Spirit, with the entrance of a new liberative signifier immanent and intrinsic to the community.

Under this sign, with the power of the Spirit, and the galvanizing memory of God’s crucified body, the community of believers perpetually enacts a non-identical repetition of Christ’s gesture under the conviction that Empire can never repress such a memory absolutely.  Indeed, there will always remain a liberative surplus, an emancipatory kernel, which opens up the space for crucial theo-political praxis and social antagonism.  It is here, in this tear in the ontological fabric of Empire, where God’s event pierces and violates its supposed immanence, that Christ is indeed resurrected.  And it is incumbent on the community, on its participation and repetition.

Shortly before he was martyred, Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote, “If I am killed I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people.”  Similarly, in an important scene of V for Vendetta, V states that “ideas are bulletproof.”  When Easter is celebrated in anticipation of Pentecost one can properly claim that the most important and liberative idea of all is in fact crucifixion-proof.  While God as transcendental signified may have died on the cross, the idea of God’s kin-dom surely did not.  The instruments of torture and state-sponsored terrorism cannot hold it because Empire can never maintain absolute hegemonic control.  Even as God is dead, even as God is eclipsed, Christ is risen, made present in the community through the power of the Spirit.  And it is through this dangerous, galvanizing memory that the church enacts critical repetition, in (e)sc(h)atological anticipation of the consummation of the (in/re)surrection.

“Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?”

There are basically two reactions to the notion of Good Friday.  On the one hand, some claim that the goodness lies in God’s redemptive work in Christ, of “saving” through the world the violent, bloody sacrifice.  Suffering is intrinsically redemptive.  This is, of course, the main thrust of most atonement theories.  A less popular reaction, on the other hand, is to question whether the label itself and to note irony of naming this day “Good” Friday.  How can there be goodness in an execution, in a state-sponsored act of terrorism?

I find both of these positions lacking.

Today, as I am increasingly inclined to do, I want to riff on the minor chord, on what has been repressed in our dominant understandings of the cross.

What if the goodness of Good Friday lies not in the presuppositions of classical theology but in the other side of the binary that has not been privileged in dominant discourse?  What if the goodness about this day is not that Christ dies in anticipation of Sunday, but that Christ dies for real, that God, as evidenced in Christ’s death cry on the cross, is forever eclipsed?

And what if in that event the power of God is revealed as God’s powerlessness, as God’s weakness?

Good Friday, or so I would want to argue, needs a recovered sense of kenosis. Or, better yet, we need to take kenosis more seriously.  The logic of the cross — and the incarnation — is that of immanent transcendence.  In this event, God’s transcendence is rendered immanent, transcendence is reifed not as that which is somewhere “out there” but that which transcends a particular form of immanence (e.g. state violence or, more generally, the state itself).

What is at stake is how radical we are willing to be, indeed, how Christian we are willing to be in our theology of the cross.

John Caputo puts it quite well (it is a long quote but worth the read):

Is Jesus really unable to come down from the cross, or does he only seem to be (dokein)?  Remember, the world is what is there, in all its violence and strength.  Are we to think that being this helpless mortal frame, he holding his infinite power in check.  Are we to think that he can come down but that he just does not want to because he is trying to make a point?  Is he really nailed there, or is that just an appearance or semblance (dokesis)?  Is his weakness voluntary, in which case it is a mask for strength, an even greater show of strength?  In the world, there are real (Roman) nails and real (Roman) crosses and real imperial power.  The Romans are real.  If the kingdom Jesus preached were a kingdom of real power, he could, by a might roar — nay better, by a soft word — from this mouth, spring that nails from his hands, thrust away the spears from the hands of the soldiers, heal the wounds of his flesh, and shatter the cross into a million splinters in a dazzling display of sheer might.  But his kingdom did not belong to the world, to the realm of meeting power with power.  His strength was the weak power of powerlessness — my God, my God, why have you abandoned me? — not the real power of the world, and so he was killed, quite against his will and against the will of his Father.  But in the powerlessness of that death the word of God rose up in majesty as a word of contradiction, as the Spirit of God, as a specter, as a ghostly even that haunts us, but not as a spectacular presence.

That is God’s transcendence.

On the classical account of strong theology, Jesus was holding back his divine power in order to let his human nature suffer.  He freely chose to check his power because the Father had a plan to redeem the world with his blood.  But if his Father had changed his mind, those Roman soldiers would rue the day they were born, as they will certainly rue it in eternity.  On my accounting, that is to misconstrue this scene solely in terms of power, mundane power pitted against celestial power.  On my accounting, Jesus was being crucified, not holding back; he was nailed there and being executed very much against his will and the will of God.  And he never heard of Christianity’s novel idea that he was redeeming the world with his blood.  His approach to evil was forgiveness, not paying off a debt due the Father, or the devil, with suffering or anything else.  His suffering was not a coin of the realm in economy of the kingdom.  The kingdom is not an economy, and God is not in attendance at this scene as an accountant of divine debts or as a higher power watching the whole thing from up there and freely holding in check his infinite power to intervene.  This is more rouged theology, weakness fantasizing about an orgasm of power — if not power now, then power later, when we can really get even with those hateful Romans.  This is not the weakness of God that I am here defending.  God, the event harbored by the name of God, is present at the crucifixion, as the power of powerlessness of Jesus, in and as the protest against the injustice that rises up from the cross, in and as the words of forgiveness, not a deferred power that will be visited upon one’s enemies at a later time.  God is in attendance as the weak force of the call that cries out from Calvary and calls across the epochs, that cries out from every corpse created by every cruel and unjust power.  The logos of the cross is a call to renounce violence, not to conceal and defer it and then, in a stunning act that takes the enemy by surprise, to lay them low with real power, which shows the enemy who really has power.

The effect of situating God on the side of vulnerability and unjust suffering is not, of course, to glorify suffering and misery, but to prophetically protest it, to give divine depth and meaning to resistance to unjust suffering, to attach the coefficient of divine resistance to unjust suffering, which is why suffering is the stuff of dangerous memories.  The call, the cry, that plaint that rises up from the cross is a a great divine “no” to injustice, an infinite lamentation over unjust suffering and innocent victims.  God is with Jesus on the cross, and in standing with Jesus rather than with the imperial power of Roman, God stands with an innocent persecuted for calling the power that be to task.  The name o God is the name of a divine “no” to persecution, violence, and victimization.  Accordingly, as we have just argued, God’s traditional top-down “transcendence” must be re-conceived in such a way that all of its resources are deployed on behalf of lowliness and the despised.  The effect of speaking of God’s transcendence is not to support and top off presence with a hyper-presence, but to disturb presence with difference and to allow the lowliest to rise in divine splendor.

The Weakness of God, 43-45.

Interestingly, this logos of the cross brings together Caputo and Zizek, two thinkers that are otherwise theoretically in-congruent.  Zizek maintains that God dies in Christ for real, that in Jesus’ claim of disbelief on the cross God as “Big other” is unmasked.

Similarly, Caputo holds that on the cross, God is revealed as event, as the site of resistance against illegitimate power — that power is reifed in terms of weakness.  The binary itself is short-circuited.

For me, the goodness of Good Friday lies in the dangerous, galvanizing memory of Christ’s crucified body on an instrument of state torture and repression and the revelation that God as transcendental signified, the arbiter of cosmic meaning from above, does not exist.  Rather, God is revealed as event, as an event of subversion and social antagonism, an irruption in the privileging of pure presence.  As God dies in Christ I am reminded that God is forever eclipsed and I am left with the faith collective to wrestle with the aftermath, with the reality that God is revealed in the repressed, the forsaken, that site of marginality is the very site of divinity.

I was inspired to revist some of Zizek’s work last week.  I ran across this passage in The Puppet and the Dwarf on epistemology.

The site of truth is not the way “things really are in themselves,” beyond their perspectival distortions, but the very gap, passage, that separates one perspective from another, the gap (in this case social antagonism) that makes the two perspectives radically incommensurable. The “Real as impossible” is the cause of the impossibility of ever attaining the “neutral” nonperspectival view of the object. There is a truth; everything is not relative—but this truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not the truth distorted by the partial view from a one-sided perspective. So when Nietzsche affirms that truth is a perspective, this assertion is to be read together with Lenin’s notion of the partisan/partial character of knowledge (the (in)famous partij’nost): in a class society, “true” objective knowledge is possible only from the “interested” revolutionary standpoint. This means neither an epistemologically “naive” reliance on the “objective knowledge” available when we get rid of our partial prejudices and preconceptions, and adopt a “neutral” view, nor the (complementary) relativist view that there is no ultimate truth, only multiple subjective perspectives. Both terms have to be fully asserted: there is, among the multitude of opinions, a true knowledge, and this knowledge is accessible only from an “interested” partial position.”

I gotta say, that makes a lot of sense to me.  Then we can only talk about better and worse “interested, partial positions” and never The Complete Position.

What would really interest me now is juxtaposing this with Caputo’s notion of truth as a happening or a event, a facere veritatem in his words.  Both positions seem to avoid the sinkholes of both objectivity and complete nihilistic relativism to a place beyond truth as disembodied proposition and toward truth as particular way of being in the world — a way of transformation.

There is a really interesting post over at the Church Postmodern Culture blog contesting Peter Rollins’s claim that Slavoj Žižek is a “dialectical materialist theologian.”  Geoffrey Holsclaw suggests that to call Žižek a theologian is to “misunderstand Žižek’s project” as an atheist (albeit a certain type of atheist which should be carefully distinguished from the new atheist fundamentalists a la “Ditchkins“) and to “seriously downgrade theology.”

Interesting. And strong.

Which raises the question: what does it take to be a theologian?  What are the qualifications, prerequisites, and prior philosophical convictions to which one must assent in order to claim the title theologian?

In the case of Žižek, I find it a bit odd to dismiss him as theologian purely on his being an atheist and possibly tainting theology.  First, such a stance supposes an unvarying notion of atheism.  Žižek is not your normal (modern) atheist and would undoubtedly detest the idea of being grouped together with the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in the same way that progressive Christians dislike being painted with the same brush as Christian fundamentalists.  So I think that charge lacks the proper nuance and care.  Furthermore, aren’t we all atheists of some sort?  Don’t we all reject certain gods?

Second, the accusation that naming Žižek as a theologian does the theological enterprise itself a disservice supposes a very rigid definition of theology and may give Žižek more credit than is due.  As far as I can tell, Žižek rejects any notion of transcendence, a tenet that Holsclaw believes to be central to the aim of theology.  He writes:

If theology is merely the sociology or anthropology of religion run through the Lacanian registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, then I might as well become a stock broker.  If theology is merely explication of the immanent infinitude of human subjectivity, the void of the cosmos, the height and depth of reality, then let’s own up to that (which I believe Žižek has).

Why should these things be off the table?  I for one would like to keep the channels of conversation open here rather than demanding that all theologizing acceptance some idea of transcendence.    Here is a question:  does a theologian need to choose between the two, between transcendence and immanence?  Is one acceptable and the other out of bounds?  Does one need to accept a certain definition of God and ultimate reality before being allowed a place at the table that is theology?

Setting Žižek aside, I’d like to go back to that original question.  What does it take to be a theologian? Who qualifies?  At the superficial level, I’m tempted to say that everyone is a theologian whether he or she realizes it or not.  Our mode of being in the world will always already be emblematic of our belief(s) about God and ultimate reality whether we overtly confess that belief or not.   But I understand the need to zero in on something more precise.  I just wonder if placing superfluous limitations on what it means to be a theologian is more of a reflection on our own notions about God, religion, and divinity than the larger enterprise itself.  I become deeply suspicious once we start taking things off the table for questioning.

I’m interesting in your thoughts on this.  How would you define a theologian?  What does it take to be one?

So Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank have made several public appearances/debates promoting their book The Monstrosity of Christ:  Paradox of Dialectic.  I missed the Boston date earlier this year and have been looking for some audio/video of the debate since then.  I finally found a good link.  Žižek and Milbank made an appearance at the ICA in London a few days ago (ht Peter Rollins) and someone managed to capture some audio Mariborchan (a wonderful new blog I discovered with some really great audio/video links of Žižek and others) recorded the entire event.   If you haven’t bought the book already and don’t particularly like shelling out cash for brand new hardbacks like me, then you might be interesting in this.

Here’s an interesting quote from the Žižekian perspective from Kester Brewin:

The radical kernel that is left at this death, which Zizek sees as the death of God – Father and Son, is the ‘Holy Ghost community.’ Our separation from God, our abandonment by God – in Job and in Christ’s death – means that we end up actually in the same place as God in Christ: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ And, according to Zizek, those who are thus true Christians are those who have embraced this abandonment by God and gathered as the church, the ‘Holy Ghost community’ to live out the radical implications of that death… it is this human community that is the resurrection of God.

I haven’t been able to listen to much of the audio yet, but Kester’s take on it really makes me want to listen…and then jump into the book.

I had every intention of reading through Žižek’s latest book on violence and relating it to my thoughts in the previous posts.  But I’ve been super busy and had some trouble getting my hands on the book (trouble with Amazon, but that is a different story).

Incidentally, I was reading through Caputo and Derrida‘s Deconstruction in a Nutshell last night for a totally different project and ran across a provocative quote.  I thought I float it and see what your reactions are.

A little background.  The book has two parts.  Part I is the transcript of a round table discussion that took place at Villanova University in 1995 between Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and others.  The point of the discussion was to dispel many of myths and false understanding of Derrida’s thought and the project of deconstruction.  The book is fascinating in that respect.  If you’ve ever tried to read Derrida you know that he is not the easy thinker to understand.  The discussion provided a rare moment of transparency.  Part II is an extended commentary on the discussion by John Caputo.

The immediate context of this quote has to do with the setting and format of the discussion.  Captuo notes that the discussion is, in a way, violent towards Derrida.  Derrida, a native French speaker, was asked to spontaneously and succinctly answer, in English, questions regarding a philosophy that he has not only dedicated his life toward, but one that he repeatedly insists defies short, sound-byte type definitions.  Captuo playfully asks forgives for the “multiple violence” placed on Derrida, for forcing him to answer in a foreign language (OK, I have to admit that I find Derrida’s English to be much better than mine!) questions about his thought that simply cannot be adequately expressed in an hour and a half.

Ok, enough of that.  Here’s the quote.

“There is no pure non-violence, but only degrees and economies of violence, some of which are more fruitful than others.”

Interesting.  No doubt he is right.  I find it particularly interesting — and I’ll probably pick this up in a later post — that many of us tend to focus on nonviolence only apropos to physical violence.  Which is ironic considering most of us will never have a real chance to exercise that nonviolence by choosing not to act physically violent towards the other.  We do, however, have all sorts of chance to act nonviolently and fail to do so.  In fact, I would argue that most times we simply fail to recognize the violence in which we participate or perpetrate.  It never shows up on our radar screen.

I’m not saying this to suggest that I am categorically against nonviolence.  Quite the opposite.  I am, for all intents and purposes, a theoretical pacifist, falling just shy of absolute pacifism (I’ll take this up later on too).  I use the word theoretical here to point toward the absurdity of my calling myself a nonviolent person in reference to a specific type of violence (physical) while simultaneously engaging and participating in numerous other forms of violence.  It could even be argued that nonviolence, in terms of its opposition only to physical violence, serves as a sort of religious fetish that precludes us from confronting the other forms of violence in which we participate.  If that is true then perhaps we should hold our physically nonviolent dogma a bit more loosely in order to become more holistically nonviolent.

But I’m already getting ahead of myself.  I’m interesting in what you think of the quote.  Agree?  Disagree?  Don’t care?  What are your thoughts?

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In response to my last post, Andrew offers what I a think is a good working definition for violence.

For me, and I suspect for others, violence is most easily described the way the concept Force is described bythe formula “force equals mass times acceleration.” Another way to state this is to say “force is the quantity that, when applied to a mass, produces acceleration.” In this way, I think it is both simplest and most comprehensive to describe violence by its effect rather than its myriad causes.

Violence is that property which, when applied to an entity (be it an entelechy, social structure, or any other kind of object) through some action or process, produces injury or damage.

I agree.  Violence — be it subjective, systemic, or symbolic — is that which causes injury or damage to, and demands the subjugation of, a particular autonomous entity.

I would also want to draw attention to the fact that this definition allows some emphases that have — at least in Christian theology — often been ignored.  Here I am thinking particularly of the violence of language and the violence of ideology especially as it pertains to certain Christian concepts (e.g. evangelism, missiology, nonviolence, etc.).  It would seem, if we are to accept this definition, that insisting upon ideological and linguistic conformity — as these ideas at lest in there more traditional forms tend to do — would be to do violence to the other and thus undermine the Christian project altogether.

I say this only to return to another question:  I wonder, can these concepts be freed from ideology and re-appropriated in such a way that does not perpetuate violence against seemingly potential ideological converts?  I want to suggest that somehow they can.  This will be something I explore in another post.  For now I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about violence lately and I think I may do a series of posts on the subject.  To begin I want to simply pose a question: what is violence?  This seems simple to answer but I want to intentionally suspend for a moment the Christian preoccupation — I daresay a fetish — with nonviolence and pacifism as a response only to overtly physical violence.  My reasoning  here is simple.  The Christian doctrine of nonviolence, its goodness notwithstanding, seems to ignore other, perhaps more dangerous forms of violence from which physical violence may or may not be derived.  With that in mind it would be interesting to consider what it might mean to be, in our world, a truly nonviolent person, that is one who denounces more than overt acts of physical violence.  Indeed, expanding our definition of violence calls into question the viability of nonviolence as a normative form of behavior.

So again, without resorting to the more myopic definitions that all to often dominate theological discourse, I ask what is violence broadly defined?

To get the ball rolling, here is a quote from an interview with Slavoj Žižek whose latest book addresses this very subject.

We should shift the perspective and ask, what if some kind of violence needs to go on to keep things the way they are? What if what we think of as violence is a distraction? To understand this, we must distinguish between subjective violence, systemic violence and symbolic violence.

Subjective violence is violence that is actively done, which can be attributed to a certain subject, such as a murderer, the police, a mob, terrorists – you can see who did it.

Systemic violence is anonymous violence. An example is George Soros. He has done wonderful things with his foundation, but if you look at his market speculation with currencies 10 years ago, what was the effect? Hundreds of thousands losing their jobs in south-east Asia. It was a social tsunami. This is anonymous, systemic violence.

And then you have symbolic violence. Today in the West, there is an obsession with harassment. Anything that another person does to you can be harassment. There is something very violent in this extreme sensitivity to another person’s proximity. I’m opposed to the ideology of tolerance, because what we call tolerance is a form of intolerance. (Link)

So let’s developing a working definition of violence.  How would you define it?  Do you agree that it involves more than overt acts of physical violence?  If so, what more should be included?

I really wish I had more time to do substantive blogging these days (like finishing my thoughts on The New Conspirators!), but I’m swamped on the home front with reading and writing for school. Hopefully I’ll have more to offer soon. In the meantime, I’ve been watching stuff like this: a talk given earlier this month by Slavoj Žižek on ideology, power and civility. Watch it if you have the time — it will blow your mind…or something.