political violence

is any kind of disruption, destruction, and injury, the effects of which have political significance.

the act of disruption, destruction, injury whose purpose choice of targets or victims surrrounding circumstances, implementation and or effect have political significance i.e. . . . . tend to modify the behaviour of other in a bargaining situation that has consequences for the social system'

is necessary, on the one hand, as a sign of the commitment to seizing and maintaining political power. On the other hand, violence without organization can in fact be the very way not to do something, a surface action that hides a true passivity.

Zizek follows the French political theorist Etienne Balibar's critique of 'standard Hegelian-Marxism' for its 'conversion-theory' of violence: the fact that violence must necessarily be sublated in the political process, eventually to be seen only as a momentary stage within an overall 'rational' progress. And yet, read carefully, neither Zizek nor Balibar proposes a direct, unmediated, unsublimated violence as opposed to this. Rather, the theoretical task is always double: 'According to Balibar, for necessarily structural reasons, Marxism is unable to conceive of an excess of violence that cannot be integrated into the narrative of historical progress . . . The task then becomes double: to deploy a theory of historical violence as something that cannot be mastered, instrumentalized by any political agent, which threatens to engulf this very agent in a self-destructive cycle, and the other side of the same task to pose the question of how to 'civilize' revolution, of how to make the revolutionary process itself a 'civilizing' force' (213-14). To put this another way, on the one hand, violence is necessary as a sign of the commitment to seizing and maintaining political power: 'Violence is the necessary supplement to power' (217). On the other hand, violence without organization is not enough... it can in fact be the very way not to do something, a surface action that hides a true passivity: ' [fascist violence] is a violence whose aim is to prevent the true change' (218) and perhaps the same criticism might apply not only to the violence of the Islamic fundamentalist but also to that of the American invasion of Iraq.

political violence, n.Definitions

political violence