symploke

Nietzsche is not Žižek's philosopher of choice. Žižek has, in passing, expressed his dislike of Nietzsche (2001b), preferring, of course, the masterful thinker of mediation and the dialectic—Hegel. Yet one gets the impression that it is really Nietzsche's celebrated proto-postmodernist status that transforms him into a suspicious philosopher in Žižek's eyes. But what exactly is it about Nietzsche that the postmodernists find so attractive and that Žižek finds so offensive? Is it Nietzsche's playful undermining of truth, his deep skepticism about the philosophical project of defining and understanding the world? Is his doctrine of perspectivism all too amenable to postmodern epistemology? Take for example Foucault's Nietzschean claim that "truth is a thing of this world" (1980, 131). Or as Nietzsche himself puts it: "only that which has no history is definable" (1989, II, 13). On the whole, Žižek finds such a pursuit of endless interpretation politically dubious. Postmodernism, despite its purported iconoclasm, has not weakened capitalism's global hegemony. On the contrary, postmodernism, as Žižek and others have argued,¹ has in fact been complicit with the expansion of late capitalism. What is allegedly needed is not postmodern skepticism à la Nietzsche but a more robust mode of critique, one that can effectively break the ideological spell of our contemporary cynical condition. In the following essay, I want to turn to Žižek's limited but nevertheless suggestive use of an "other" Nietzsche in his 2008 book Violence. I will focus in particular on Žižek's appropriation of Nietzsche's well-known notion of ressentiment, evaluating its interpretive function in Žižek's ideological critique of violence.

In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Žižek proposes nothing short of a reconceptualization of the problematic of violence. What is typically perceived as violence today is what Žižek calls "subjective violence": it is the violence that is "performed by a clearly identifiable agent... [and]... is [End Page 53] seen as a perturbation of the 'normal,' peaceful state of things" (2008, 1-2). As a necessary philosophical supplement to our understanding of violence, Žižek adds "objective violence," which he then divides into, first, "symbolic violence" (the violence of racist rhetoric, for example, or, more generally, language as the hegemonic imposition of a given universe of meaning) and second, "systemic violence" (such as the violence of capitalism—the view of capitalism as a naturalized, oppressive, impersonal, smooth-functioning socio-political reality). "Objective violence is invisible," Žižek maintains, "since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent" (2). A serious account of objective violence would thus not simply complement a critique of subjective violence but demonstrate how a concern for subjective violence, in effect, helps to sustain the existence of this more insidious form of violence.

Whereas humanists and liberals typically advocate the cultivation of empathic imaginings, Žižek enjoins his readers to resist the ideological pull of subjective violence: "My underlying premise is that there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with [violence]: the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking" (3-4). To think critically about violence is to think about it obliquely, to look at violence awry, that is, to look at violence from a multiplicity of incommensurable perspectives.²

Žižek puts the notion of Nietzschean ressentiment in the service of this interpretive task. Briefly, to recall, the men of ressentiment, "these cellar rodents full of vengefulness and hatred" (1989, I, 14) as Nietzsche cruelly describes them in On the Genealogy of Morals, are responsible for the slave revolt in morality, for the reversal and perversion of the original meaning of good and bad. They violently imposed on the ancient opposition of good and bad a moral interpretation, creating, in turn, a new mode of valuation: what was previously "good," in a non-moral sense, now becomes "evil" and what was previously "bad" becomes morally "good."³ Žižek locates and makes visible the bitter feeling of ressentiment in today's religious fundamentalists. In...