Josh Strawn from Jewcy.com writes a first – first I really enjoyed, I should add – thoughtful response to the Kirsch vs. Zizek brouhaha:
Nowhere is the problem with Kirsch’s analysis more apparent than in his attacks on the recent book ‘Violence.’ He tells his readers that Zizek means to tell us that “resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence.” Not so. The author is very clear. He says that his intent is to expand our conceptual understanding of violence beyond it’s more obvious eruptions. He wants to explain violence not as merely the act of violence with which we’re most viscerally and morally aware (what he calls ‘subjective’ violence), but more thoroughly–as inclusive of the network of relations and circumstances that make that violence possible (he calls this ‘objective’ violence). Sure Zizek quotes Lenin’s directive to “Learn, learn, learn.” That doesn’t make him a Bolshevik.
Couldn’t say it better meself…
Perverse Egalitarianism 