Lacan sive Althusser on Violence

Abstract

The aporia of violence is probably the single most important issue that defines the failure of the leftist revolutionary politics as was experienced in modern history. It is what prevented it from ultimately achieving its goal by entrapping it in the perverse effect of the sovereign violence (which was shown most evidently in the phenomenon of the proletariat’s dictatorship turning into a dictatorship over the proletariat). As is well known, Slavoj Žižek in his book, Violence (2008), proposes us to return to the practice of messianic or divine violence that Walter Benjamin conceptualized in contrast to that of mythical violence. But, such an idea of messianic violence was not just Benjamin’s, but in fact, a predominant one in the long tradition of Marxism including Marx himself (especially, in his texts such as The Communist Manifesto and Chapter 32 of Capital vol. I - see Balibar 2010a). It is then hard to see how a simple return to the practice of messianic violence will assist us better than it used to in discovering alternative ways to think about violence. In this paper, I would like to engage myself in a close reading of Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser’s discussions of violence, hoping to find such alternatives (if not solutions). On the issue of violence Lacan and Althusser both converge and diverge. While examining such a crossroad of sive—in both senses of the term: identity and difference—I will in the end emphasize the need to reconsider the notion of representation, which one may no longer easily put aside as opportunistic.