summary of Violence by Slavoj Žižek:

Slavoj Žižek’s Violence is a provocative philosophical meditation on the nature, forms, and paradoxes of violence in contemporary life, pushing readers to look beyond the obvious and visible manifestations of brutality to the hidden structures that sustain them. Žižek begins by distinguishing between “subjective violence”—the direct, physical, and often spectacular acts of aggression we see in crime, terrorism, or war—and “objective violence,” the systemic, structural, and symbolic forces embedded in language, ideology, and economic arrangements that invisibly condition social life. He argues that an exclusive focus on subjective violence, such as acts of terror or street crime, distracts us from confronting the far more pervasive violence of capitalism, inequality, racism, and the coercive operations of state and media institutions. By analyzing examples ranging from 9/11 to global capitalism, Žižek demonstrates how violence is not merely an aberration but often the logical consequence of underlying political and economic systems. He also examines “symbolic violence” in language and discourse, where words themselves can wound, exclude, and oppress, shaping the conditions of possibility for physical violence. Far from advocating complacency, Žižek urges readers to resist the liberal tendency to condemn only the spectacular and visible forms of violence while ignoring the systemic ones that produce them. Ultimately, Violence calls for a radical rethinking of how we conceptualize justice, responsibility, and change, insisting that the most urgent political task is not simply to react to eruptions of violence but to confront the hidden structures that normalize exploitation and suffering.