Introduction

This chapter addresses iek's reflections on violence through his deployment of Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence and his differing accounts of the riots in France and Greece. The complete lack of political analysis and increasingly the lack of any identifiable cause, coupled with a romantic individualism, are doomed to failure before it even begins. The revolutionary suicide might resonate with iek's notion of an authentic political act or a rather literal understanding of Benjamin's pure violence, but it will get us nowhere. While he generally adopts a negative stance towards the violence of the banlieues, iek sees in Greece's riots from an abstract or determinate negation that could build into something greater. The chapter suggests that Benjamin's conception of divine violence is not as easily reconcilable with acts of revolutionary violence as iek's takes it to be. SYRIZA has consistently been forced onto the defensive as journalists insist that its leader Alexis Tsipras denounces the violence of the left.