7/31/2019 Zizek on Violence and Stories We Tell Ourselves

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"The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally alie - the truth lies outside, in what we do." (six sideways reflections 47)

Of course it is true that there is a gap between our experience of the world andour actions, and our world and actions as considered by other perspectives - even an idealized neutral perspective (which always implies our idea of the correct goals and norms). But it does not follow from this that our story is "fundamentally" a lie; it depends on what sense of truth, and what moral compulsion towards it we adopt.

Earlier in the book Zizek distinguishes between factual truth and truthful speech, i.e. a rape victim might get some details factually wrong, but the distortionof her perspective is a mark of authenticity for the truthfulness of her testimony. No truthful recounting of trauma can be objective enough to be "true".

If we apply this distinction in this case, and think about the story we tell ourselves, and what we in fact do, not as objectively present facts but as evaluable normatively, as well as think about our relation to those stories as somethingthat requires truthfulness rather than true-correctness, then we realize thereis no fundamental block against having a truthful understanding of "what we do".

The distinction between those who have a truthful understanding of what they do,

and ones who lie to themselves, actively or passively deceiving themselves about their motivations, this is the line where "an enemy is a friend you have not yet met" should find its limit. Insofar as people genuinely are truthful about their own stories, and love what they don't know more than what they do know, if their actions factually result in horrors then we should listen to their apologies and contexts as we listen to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. But those who refuseto revaluate their own stories when they are presented with undeniable catastrophe, or when they love what they know more than what they don't know, and as a result disavow horrendous violence which they cause, these people we need not listen to their stories because they do not themselves understand their own stories. Zizek gets this right about Hitler - Hitler was not a man of great violence, he was a tyrant, a fantastic organizer, and a man who killed 6 million in order to not do any real violence (to not change the system). We should not listen to H

itler's personal stories, because his stories are not and cannot be an moral inspiration to us, because he did not struggle as we should with the contrast between what he knew and what he didn't know. His life embodies a deep fundamental lie - the lie of not allowing yourself to experience challenge as challenge, decision as decision, moral weight as moral weight - and instead remain captured by an ideological frame which has an answer for everything and refuses to let itselfbe disintegrated. The tyrants way