Some extracts from Zizek, Slavoj. VIOLENCE Six Sideway Reflections. Profile books. Great Britain. 2008.
Since a neighbour is, as Frued suspected long ago, primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life (or rather, way of joissance materialised in its social practices and rituals) disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life of the rails, when it comes too close, this can also give rise to an aggressive reaction aimed at getting rid of this intruder. As Peter Sloterdijk put it: ‘More communication means at first above all more conflict.’ This is why he is right to claim that the attitude of ‘understanding-each-other’ has to be supplemented by the attitude of ‘getting-out-of-each-other’s-way’, by maintaining an appropriate distance, by implementing a new ‘code of discretion’.
European civilisation finds it easier to tolerate different ways of life precisely on account of what its critics usually denounce as its weakness and failure, namely the alienation of social life. One of the things alienation means is that distance is woven into the very social texture of everyday life. Even if I live side by side with others, in my normal state I ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others.
The Muslim crowds did not react to the Muhammad caricatures as such. They reacted to the complex figure or image of the west that they perceived as the attitude behind the caricatures. What exploded in violence was a web of symbols, images and attitudes, including western imperialism, godless materialism, hedonism, and the suffering of Palestinians, and which became attached to the Danish cartoons. This is why the hatred expanded from the caricatures to Denmark as a country, to Scandinavia, to Europe, and to the west as a whole. A torrent of humiliations and frustrations were condensed into the caricatures. This condensation, it needs to be borne in mind, is a basic fact of language, of constructing and imposing a certain symbolic field.
The simple and all to obvious reflection on the way in which language works renders problematic the prevalent idea of language and the symbolic order as the medium of reconciliation and mediation, of peaceful coexistence, as opposed to a violent medium of immediate and raw confrontation. In language, instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we are meant to debate, to exchange words, and such an exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimal recognition of the other party. The entry into language and the renunciation of violence are often understood as two aspects of one and the same gesture: ‘Speaking is the foundation and structure of socialization, and it happens to be characterized by the renunciation of violence,’ as a text by Jean-Marie Muler written for UNESCO tells us. Since man is a ‘speaking animal’, this means the renunciation of violence defines the very core of being human: ‘violence is indeed a radical perversion of humanity’. Insofar as language gets infected by violence, this occurs under the influence of contingent ‘pathological’ circumstances which distort the inherent logic of symbolic communication.
What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? As Hegel was already well aware, there is something violent in the very symbolisation of a thing, which equals its mortification. This violence operates at multiple levels. Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it.
In the raging Muslim, crowd we stumble upon the limit of multicultural liberal tolerance, of its propensity to self-blame and its effort to ‘understand’ the other. The Other here has become a real other, real in his hatred. Here is the paradox of tolerance at its purest: how far should tolerance for intolerance go? All the beautiful, politically correct, liberal formulas on how the Muhammad caricatures were insulting and insensitive, but violent reactions to them are also unacceptable, about how freedom brings responsibility and should not be abused, show their limitation here. What is this famous ‘freedom with responsibility’ if not a new version of the good old paradox of forced choice? You are given freedom of choice, on the condition that you will not really use it.
