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Nietzsche is not Zizek' s philosopher of choice. Zizek has, in passing, expressed his dislike of Nietzsche (2001b), preferring, of course, the masterful thinker of mediation and the dialectic- Hegel. Yet one gets the impression that it is really Nietzsche's celebrated proto-postmodernist status that transforms him into a suspicious philosopher in Zizek' s eyes. But what exactly is it about Nietzsche that the postmodernists find so attractive and that Zizek finds so offensive? Is it Nietzsche's playful undermining of truth, his deep skepticism about the philosophical project of defining and understanding the world? Is his doctrine of perspectivism all too amenable to postmodern epistemology? Take for example Foucault's Nietzschean claim that "truth is a thing of this world" (1980, 131). Or as Nietzsche himself puts it: "only that which has no history is definable" (1989, II, 13). On the whole, Zizek finds such a pursuit of endless interpretation politically dubious. Postmodernism, despite its purported iconoclasm, has not weakened capitalism's global hegemony. On the contrary, postmodernism, as Zizek and others have argued,1 has in fact been complicit with the expansion of late capitalism. What is allegedly needed is not postmodern skepticism à la Nietzsche but a more robust mode of critique, one that can effectively break the ideological spell of our contemporary cynical condition. In the following essay, I want to turn to Zizek's limited but nevertheless suggestive use of an "other" Nietzsche in his 2008 book Violence. I will focus in particular on Zizek's appropriation of Nietzsche's well-known notion of ressentiment, evaluating its interpretive function in Zizek's ideological critique of violence.
In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Zizek proposes nothing short of a reconceptualization of the problematic of violence. What is typically perceived as violence today is what Zizek calls "subjective violence": it is the violence that is "performed by a clearly identifiable agent... [and]... is seen as a perturbation of the 'normal/ peaceful state of things" (2008, 1-2). As a necessary philosophical supplement to our understanding of violence, Zizek adds "objective violence," which he then divides into, first, "symbolic violence" (the violence of racist rhetoric, for example, or, more generally, language as the hegemonic imposition of a given universe of meaning) and second, "systemic violence" (such as the violence of capitalism- the view of capitalism...