The violence of the event: ontology, ethics, and politics in Zizek

Abstract

The article presents the guidelines of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s ontology, in order to understand his unique conception of violence, as well as the respective ethical and political consequences. For him, violence is not necessarily destructive, as there is a productive form of violence: transcendental violence, which involves both breaking the coordinates and building the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a new event. However, although he came to formulate, based on the examples of Socrates, Jesus and Gandhi, the idea of a violent pacifism, Zizek does not distinguish between antagonism and agonistic and, thus, loses sight of the strategic possibility of an agonistic pacifism.

Keywords

• Agonistics
• Ideology
• Ontological turn
• Pacifism
• Parallax