topics: |  philosophy | history

Violence in everyday life

Violence is not just the physical forms as in wars or riots or police actions - it is also hidden in every restraint we face while living in civilized society. Zizek disginguishes at three forms of violence:

• Subjective - directly involving the subject - observed against the background of the normal, everyday violence, which is the "zero level". e.g. crime, terror
• Symbolic (objective 1) - language related - racism, hate-speech, social domination patterns inherent in everyday speech
• Systemic (objective 2) - results of dominant political and economic systems (such as various forms of capitalism)

The last two are both forms of objective violence - this type of violence is inherent to the "normal" state of things.

hence, Zizek argues, objective violence is invisible since it constitutes
"the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as
subjectively violent."  He goes on to compare violence that is systemic as
something like the notorious "dark matter" of physics. It may be invisible,
but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what
otherwise seem to be "irrational" explosions of subjective violence.
[p.2,preface: The tyrant's bloody robe].

This latter violence, which Zizek likens to 'dark matter' in physics, forms
the background to our lives, and is not obvious.  Zizek tells the story of
liberal-minded aristocrats, who were expelled from the Soviet Union in
Lenin's time, were completely taken aback.

This latter form of violence is particularly important for third world
cultures, as in islamic cultures, for whom protest can become the only
meaningful option.

Incidentally, in an incisive analysis of British Rule, the subaltern historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee (Spectre of violence, 1998) deals with the 1857 events at Kanpur. He explains the centuries-long British anger to the event (400 Britishers killed, several million Indian casualties) in terms of a violation of the colonial monopoly on violence inherent to life under a colonial rule that ultimately relies (explicitly) on the sword.

Terrorists are not fundamentalists

An interesting observation that violence by terrorists arises out of an insecurity. The true fundamentalists are indifferent to you, they may pity you, but they do not hate you.

	all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists
	to the Amish in the U.S.  [exhibit] a deep indifference
	towards the non-believers' way of life.

resentment and envy, the fount of terrorist acts, are absent in their lives.

However, this downplays the recourse to group identity which quite likely
informs much of this type of extreme action.

Although the book starts with a key notion that is fascinating, it
weakens its thrust by an excessive emphasis on Russian history and
totalitarian tales, an aspect often belaboured in Zizek.  Of course, like
any Zizek work, an amazingly erudite study.  With lots of references to
Lacan, of course.

Update 2015: Charlie Hebdo killings

Many of the points made in this volume are reiterated verbatim in Zizek's
article on the Hebdo attacks.
Slavoj Zizek: Are the worst really full of passionate intensity?
Surprisingly, the analysis of the 2005 Paris riots - which I thought was
particularly relevant - is not mentioned.

Excerpts

[The invisibility of much violence is illustrated with an opening
parable:]

There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing:
every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front
of him is carefully inspected.  The guards can find nothing. It is always
empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the
wheelbarrows themselves . . . p.1

[The public gets inured to violence, even the physical kind, and it becomes
invisible.

Over the last decade, 4 million people died in the Democratic Republic of
Congo - mostly political killings.  Time magazine ran a cover story in 2006,
titled "The Deadliest War in the World," chronicling this state of affairs.
But there was no uproar, no one took up on it.  Comparatively,
	The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli
	or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than
	the death of a nameless Congolese. p.3

and yet the U.S. media reproaches the public in foreign countries for not
displaying enough sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks...

Zizek higlights the nature of violence through a story from his favourite
domain - Russian history.



 Nikolay Lossky (wiki)

Philosophy ships from Russia 1922

In 1922 the Soviet government organised the forced expulsion
of leading anti-communist intellectuals, from philosophers
and theologians to economists and historians.  They left
Russia for Germany on a boat known as the Philosophy Steamer.
Prior to his expulsion, Nikolai Lossky, one of those forced
into exile, had enjoyed with his family the comfortable life
of the haute bourgeoisie, supported by servants and
nannies. He
    simply couldn't understand who would want to destroy his
    way of life. What had the Losskys and their kind done?
    His boys and their friends, as they inherited the best of
    what Russia had to offer, helped fill the world with talk
    of literature and music and art, and they led gentle
    lives. What was wrong with that?'

While Lossky was without doubt a sincere and benevolent person, really caring
for the poor and trying to civilise Russian life, such an attitude betrays a
breathtaking insensitivity to the systemic violence that had to go on in
order for such a comfortable life to be possible.  ... not only direct
physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain
relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of
violence. 9

There was no subjective evil in their life, just the invisible background of
this systemic violence.  Then suddenly, into this almost Proustian world
Leninism broke in. The day Andrei Lossky was born, in May 1917, the
family could hear the sound of riderless horses galloping down neighboring
Ivanovskaya Street." Such ominous intrusions multiplied. Once, in his
school, Lossky's son was brutally taunted by a working-class schoolmate who
shouted at him that "the days of him and his family are over now ... "

In their benevolent gentle innocence, the Losskys perceived such signs of the
forthcoming catastrophe as emerging out of nowhere, as signals of an
incomprehensibly malevolent new spirit. What they didn't understand was that
in the guise of this irrational subjective violence, they were getting back
the message they themselves sent out in its inverted true form. It is this
violence which seems to arise "out of nowhere" that, perhaps, fits what
Walter Benjamin, in his "Critique of Violence," called pure, divine violence.

There is an old joke about a husband who returns home earlier than usual from
work and finds his wife in bed with another man. The surprised wife exclaims:
"Why have you come back early?" The husband furiously snaps back: "What are
you doing in bed with another man?" The wife calmly replies: "I asked you a
question first-don't try to squeeze out of it by changing the topic!'. The
same goes for violence: the task is precisely to change the topic... 11

Liberal communists

The liberal communist (mainstream?) claim is that we can have the global
capitalist cake, i.e., thrive as profitable entrepreneurs, and eat it, too,
i.e., endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility and
ecological concern. Liberal communists include "Bill Gates and George
Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as their court
philosophers, most notably the journalist Thomas Friedman." (p. 16)
Points out how their ideology is comparable to that of leftists such as
Toni Negri.

He focuses on the lingo of the liberal communists, esp. word "smart":
	The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is
	"smart": smart indicates the dynamic and nomadic as against centralised
	bureaucracy; dialogue and cooperation against hierarchical authority;
	flexibility against routine; culture and knowledge against old
	industrial production; spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis against
	fixed hierarchy.

Other terms that are criticized include "frictionless capitalism" (Bill
Gates).  Gates as the ex-hacker who made it, carries the hacker image. "At
the fantasmatic level, the underlying notion here is that Gates is a
subversive, marginal hooligan who has taken over and dressed himself up as
a respectable chairman."

liberal communists are true citizens of the world. They are good people who
worry. They worry about populist fundamentalists and irresponsible, greedy
capitalist corporations.  their goal is not to earn money, but to change
the world, though if this makes them more money as a by-product, who's to
complain!  Bill Gates is already the single greatest benefactor in the
history of humanity...  The catch, of course, is that in order to give,
first you have to take-or, as some would put it, create. p.20


Good old Andrew Carnegie employed a private army brutally to suppress
organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his
wealth to educational, artistic, and humanitarian causes. A man of steel,
he proved he had a heart of gold. In the same way, today's liberal
communists give away with one hand what they first took with the other. 21

George Soros: financier-philanthropist Soros stands for the most ruthless
    financial speculative exploitation combined with humanitarian concern about
    the catastrophic social consequences of an unbridled market economy. Even
    his daily routine is marked by [this contrast]: half of his
    working time is devoted to financial speculation and the other half to
    humanitarian activities - such as providing finance for cultural and
    democratic activities in post-communist countries, writing essays and
    books-which ultimately fight the effects of his own speculation.

Bill Gates: The cruel businessman destroys or buys out competitors, aims
    at virtual monopoly, employs all the tricks of the trade to achieve his
    goals. Meanwhile, the greatest philanthropist in the history of mankind
    quaintly asks: "What does it serve to have computers, if people do not have
    enough to eat and are dying of dysentery?"  In liberal communist ethics,
    the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity. Charity is the
    humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation.  In a superego
    blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries "help" the
    undeveloped with aid, credits, and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue,
    namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable
    situation of the undeveloped. 22


German post-humanist philosopher Peter Sloterdijk traces the
evolution of capitalism ("its immanent self-overcoming"):

	  capitalism culminates when it "creates out of itself its own most
	  radical - and the only fruitful - opposite, totally different from
	  what the classic Left, caught in its miserabilism.  was able to dream
	  about."9 His positive mention of Andrew Carnegie shows the way; the
	  sovereign self-negating gesture of the endless accumulation of wealth
	  is to spend this wealth for things beyond price, and outside market
	  circulation: public good, arts and sciences.  health, etc. This
	  concluding "sovereign" gesture enables the capitalist to break out of
	  the vicious cycle of endless expanded reproduction, of gaining money
	  in order to earn more money.

the paradox: today's capitalism cannot reproduce itself on its own. It needs
extra-economic charity to sustain the cycle of social reproduction. 24

[Friedrich Nietzsche perceived] how Western civilisation was moving in the
direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or
commitment.  Unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only
comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another: "A little
poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the
end, for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day, and
their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. 'We
have discovered happiness,' -say the Last Men, and they blink." [Thus spake
Zarathustra. 28

["What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so
asks the Last Man, and blinks. ]

the split between First and Third World runs increasingly along the lines
of an opposition between leading a long, satisfying life full of material
and cultural wealth, and dedicating one's life to some transcendent
cause.  Isn't this the antagonism between what Nietzsche called "passive"
and "active" nihilism?  We in the West are the Last Men, immersed in stupid
daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything,
engaged in the nihilist struggle up to the point of self-destruction. 29

Against seeking a "deeper meaning'"

G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown defends commonsense reality in which things
are just what they are, 'not bearers of hidden mystical meanings,'

	"People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the
    	other. It's drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's
    	coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition....
    	It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your
    	common sense and can't see things as they are. ... And a dog
    	is an omen, and a cat is a mystery, and a pig is a mascot, and a beetle
    	is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and
    	old India; Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy
    	howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the
    	beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all
    	because you are frightened of four words:  'He was made Man.'"
		    - The oracle of the Dog

It was thus his very Christianity that made Chesterton prefer prosaic
explanations to the all-too-fast resort to supernatural magic.


---

We from the First World countries find it more and more difficult even to
imagine a public or universal cause for which one would be ready to sacrifice
one's life.

Indeed, the split between First and Third World runs increasingly along the
lines of an opposition between leading a long, satisfying life full of
material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one's life to some transcendent
cause.

Christianity as narrower than Islam?

exclusion others from the scope of our ethical concerns...  the more
universal our explicit ethics is, the more brutal the underlying exclusion...

What the Christian all-inclusive attitude (recall St. Paul's famous "there
are no men or women, no Jews and Greeks") involves is a thorough exclusion of
those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other
"particularistic" religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global
expansionism), there is a place for others: they are tolerated, even if they
are looked upon with condescension. The Christian motto "All men are
brothers," however, also means that those who do not accept brotherhood are
not men. 54

Globalization --> Get out of each others' way?

[discusses reasons for the islamic reaction to the danish cartoons depicting
Muhammad.]

Those who understand globalisation as an opportunity for the entire earth to
be a unified space of communication, one which brings together all humanity,
often fail to notice this dark side of their proposition. Since a Neighbour
is, as Freud suspected long ago, primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder,
someone whose different way of life (or rather, way of jouissance
materialised in its social practices and rituals) disturbs us, throws the
balance of our way of life off the rails, when it comes too close, this can
also give rise to an aggressive reaction aimed at getting rid of this
disturbing intruder.

As Peter Sloterdijk put it: "More communication means at
first above all more conflict." [14]

This is why he is right to claim that the attitude of "understandingeach-
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. I move in a social space
where I interact with others obeying certain external "mechanical" rules,
without sharing their inner world.

Those who propose the term "Occidentalism" as the counterpart to Edward
Said's "Orientalism" are right up to a point: what we get in Muslim countries
is a certain ideological vision of the West which distorts Western reality no
less, although in a different way, than the Orientalist vision distorts the
Orient. 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.

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. When we
name gold '"gold," we violently extract a metal from its natural texture,
investing into it our dreams of wealth, power, spiritual purity, and so on,
which have nothing whatsoever to do with the immediate reality of gold.

2005 suburban paris riots

background: from 2005 French riots

In October and November of 2005, a series of riots by mainly Arab, North
African, and black second-generation immigrants occurred in the suburbs of
Paris and other French cities,[1][2] involving mainly the burning of cars and
public buildings at night, starting on 27 October 2005 in
Clichy-sous-Bois. Events spread to poor housing projects (the cités HLM) in
various parts of France. A state of emergency was declared.

The igniting event, according to a NYT report:

    a group of ten or so friends had been playing football on a nearby field
    and were returning home when they saw the police patrol. They all fled in
    different directions to avoid the lengthy questioning that youths in the
    housing projects say they often face from the police. They say they are
    required to present identity papers and can be held as long as four hours
    at the police station, and sometimes their parents must come before the
    police will release them.

---

There were no particular demands made by the protesters in the Paris
suburbs. There was only an insistence on reognition, based on a vague,
unarticulated ressentiment.  Most of those interviewed talked about how
unacceptable it was that the then interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, had
called them "scum." 75

The protesters, although effectively underprivileged and de facto excluded,
were in no way living on the edge of starvation. Nor had they been reduced to
the level of bare survival. People in much worse material straits, let alone
conditions of physical and ideological oppression, had been able to organise
themselves into political agencies with clear or even fuzzy agendas. The fact
that there was no programme behind the burning Paris suburbs is thus itself a
fact to be interpreted.

The sad fact that opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the
guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a meaningful utopian project,
but only take the shape of a meaningless outburst, is a grave illustration of
our predicament. What does our celebrated freedom of choice serve, when the
only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?
The protesters' violence was almost exclusively directed against their
own. The cars burned and the schools torched were not those of richer
neighbourhoods.  They were part of the hard-won acquisitions of the very
strata from which the protesters originated. 76

What needs to be resisted when faced with the shocking reports and images of
the burning Paris suburbs is what I call the hermeneutic temptation: the
search for some deeper meaning or message hidden in these outbursts. What is
most difficult to accept is precisely the riots' meaninglessness: more than a
form of protest, they are what Lacan called a passage a l'acte-an impulsive
movement into action which can't be translated into speech or thought and
carries with it an intolerable weight of frustration. This bears witness not
only to the impotence of the perpetrators, but, even more, to the lack of
what cultural analyst Fredric Jameson has called "cognitive mapping," an
inability to locate the experience of their situation within a meaningful
whole.

The Paris outbursts were thus not rooted in any kind of concrete
socio-economic protest, still less in an assertion of Islamic
fundamentalism. One of the first sites to be burned was a mosque-which is
why the Muslim religious bodies immediately condemned the violence.  The
riots were simply a direct effort to gain visibility.

Their actions spoke for them: like it or not, we're here, no matter how much
you pretend not to see us.

The fact that the violent protesters wanted and demanded to be recognised as
full French citizens, of course, signals not only the failure to integrate
them, but simultaneously the crisis of the French model of integration into
citizenship, with its implicitly racist exclusionary normativeness. ... the
protesters' demand to be recognised also implies a rejection of the very
framework through which recognition takes place. It is a call for the
construction of a new universal framework.

The phatic function : meanoingless rituals

Analysts who were searching the riots for their hidden meaning were missing
the obvious. As Marshall McLuhan would have put it, here the medium itself
was the message.

In the golden era of structuralism, Roman Jakobson deployed the notion of
"phatic" function, which he derived from Malinowski's concept of phatic
communion, the use of language to maintain a social relation through
ritualised formulas such as greetings, chit-chat about the weather, and
related formal niceties of social communication.  A good structuralist,
Jakobson included the means of discontinuing communication: as he put it, the
mere purport of prolonging communicative contact suggests the emptiness of
such contact. He quotes a dialogue from Dorothy Parker: 78

	"Well, here we are," he said.
	"Here we are," she said, "Aren't we?"
	"J should say we are," he said.

The emptiness of contact thus has a propitious technical function as a test
of the system itself: a "Hello, do you hear me?" The phatic function is
therefore close to the "meta-linguistic" function: it checks whether the
channel is working. Simultaneously, the addresser and the addressee check
whether they are using the same code.

Is this not exactly what took place in the violent outbursts in the Paris
suburbs? Was the basic message not a kind of "Hello, do you hear me?," a
testing both of the channel and of the code itself?

Conservative and Liberal reactions

The first conclusion to be drawn from the French riots is thus that both
conservative and liberal reactions
to the unrest clearly fail.

CONSERVATIVES: emphasise the clash of civilisations and, predictably, law and
    order.  Immigrants should not abuse our hospitality. They are our guests,
    so they should respect our customs. Our society has the right to
    safeguard its unique culture and way of life. There is no excuse for
    crime and violent behaviour.  What young immigrants need is not more
    social help, but discipline and hard work . . .

LEFTIST LIBERALS: , no less predictably, stick to their mantra about
    neglected social programmes and integration efforts, which have deprived
    the younger generation of immigrants of any clear economic and social
    prospects: violent outbursts are their only way to articulate their
    dissatisfaction.

Terrorism

The Paris riots need to be situated in a series they
form with another type of violence - direct
terrorist attacks and suicide bombings.

In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a deadly
vicious cycle, each generating the very forces it tries to combat.

In both cases we are dealing with blind passages a l'acte, where violence is
an implicit admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to
the Paris outburst, which were a zero-level protest, a violent outburst which
wanted nothing, terrorist attacks are carried out on behalf of that absolute
meaning provided by religion.

Their ultimate target is the entire western godless way of life based on
modern science.

The dominance of Science (over religion)

Science today effectively does compete with religion, insofar as it serves
two properly ideological needs, those for hope and those for censorship,
which were traditionally taken care of by religion. To quote John Gray:

	Science alone has the power to silence heretics.  Today it is the
	only institution that can claim authority.  Like the Church in the
	past, it has the power to destroy, or marginalize, independent
	thinkers ... From the standpoint of anyone who values freedom of
	thought, this may be unfortunate, but it is undoubtedly the chief
	source of science's appeal.  For us, science is a refuge from
	uncertainties, promising - and in some measure delivering - the
	miracle of freedom from thought, while churches have become
	sanctuaries for doubt. [4. Gray, Straw Dogs, p. 19]

We are not talking here about science as such, so the
idea of science sustaining "freedom from thought" is
not a variation on Heidegger's notion that "science
doesn't think." We are talking about the way science
functions as a social force, as an ideological institution:
at this level, its function is to provide certainty, to be a
point of reference on which one can rely, and to provide
hope. New technological inventions will help us fight
disease, prolong life, and so on.

Science is what Lacan called "university discourse" at its purest: knowledge
whose "truth" is a Master-Signifier, that is, power. Science and religion
have changed places: today, science provides the security religion once
guaranteed.  In a curious inversion, religion is one of the possible places
from which one can deploy critical doubts about today's society. It has
become one of the sites of resistance.

Terrorist Resentment

William Butler Yeats's "Second Coming" seems perfectly to render our present
predicament: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of
passionate intensity." This is an excellent description of the current split
between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. "The best" are no
longer able fully to engage, while "the worst" engage in racist, religious,
sexist fanaticism.

Are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really
fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe?

What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic
fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence
of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers' way
of life.

If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way
to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they
envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns
him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is
self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist
pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the
sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful
Other, they are fighting their own temptation.

These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true
fundamentalism. 85

Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction
-their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim
must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation
Danish newspaper.

The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists'
conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their
cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist
civilisation. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them
inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves
inferior.

This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no
superiority towards them only make them more furious and feeds their
resentment.

while they pursue what appear to us to be evil goals with evil means, the
very form of their activity meets the highest standard of the
good. [altruistic]

The problem with human desire is that, as Lacan put it, it is always " desire
of the Other" in all the senses of that term: desire for the Other, desire to
be desired by the Other, and especially desire for what the Other desires.

Recall the passage from Augustine's Confessions, often quoted by Lacan, the
scene of a baby jealous of his brother suckling at the mother's breast:
	I myself have seen and known an infant to be jealous though it could
	not speak. It became pale, and cast bitter looks on its
	foster-brother.

[Rawlsian Justice - inequalities are admissible only if they are beneficial to
the less privileged.]

	What Rawls doesn't see is how such a society would create conditions
	for an uncontrolled explosion of ressentiment: in it, I would know
	that my lower status is fully "justified" and would thus be deprived
	of the ploy of excusing my failure as the result of social
	injustice. 88

an anecdote about a Slovene peasant makes this palpably clear. The peasant is
given a choice by a good witch. She will either give him one cow and his
neighbour two cows, or she'll take one cow from him and two from his
neighbour.  The peasant immediately chooses the second option.

Gore Vidal: "It is not enough for me to win - the other must lose."

French Jewish writer, Cecile Winter, proposed a nice mental experiment:
imagine Israel as it is, and its trajectory over the last half-century,
ignoring the fact that Jews came there stigmatised by the signifier of the
absolute victim, and thus beyond moral reproach. What we get, in that case,
is a standard story of colonisation.
[7. See Alain Badiou and Cecile Winter, Circonstances, Vol.
3, Portees du mot 'Juif', Paris: Leo Scheer, 2005.]

The very need to evoke the Holocaust in defence of Israeli acts secretly
implies that Israel is committing such horrible crimes that only the absolute
trump card of the Holocaust can redeem them. Does this then mean that one
should ignore the fact of the Holocaust when dealing with actual politics,
since every use of it to legitimise political acts amounts to its obscene
instrument alisation?