Invisible Violence: Zizek’s categories of Violence and Ellison’s Invisible Man

Abstract

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a violent text. It is unflinching in its confrontation with the violence at the heart of the (African-)American experience. In exploring the central role of violence here – narratively, within the novel; politically, within the culture that the novel explores – the recent work of Slavo Zizek is useful. Zizek posits a critical language which makes an important distinction between systemic violence (of the order of economic and political systems), objective violence (of the order of discriminatory patterns of behaviour), and subjective violence (of the order of individual, often spontaneous, sometimes self-directed acts – which have the effect of misdirecting and obscuring our awareness of these other two more insidious forms of violence). And, in a dialectical spirit of which both Zizek and Ellison might approve, Invisible Man will here reciprocally suggest an interrogation of Zizek’s theories of revolutionary violence.