Thinking Violence and Rhetoric

American culture is gripped by an obsession with violence. From hate crimes to violent video games, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Gaza, from action fi lms to the death penalty, it seems our most pressing and controversial contemporary issues have violence as a common theme. And even as the traumas of 9/11 begin to blur slightly in our national memory, we nonetheless continue to return to the images and the sense of panic associated with that day as the exemplar of the senseless and devastating pain of violence. Although these visible acts of violence are undoubtedly both compelling and horrifying, they tend to distract our attention from underlying forms of violence that generate both violent acts and our efforts to maintain peace. Slavoj Žižek calls these less visible forms of violence “objective violence,” and he describes them as being embodied in our language and in the functioning of our political and economic systems. Unlike “subjective violence,” the violence that is outwardly recognizable and “is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things,” objective violence, on the other hand, “is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is invisible