Violence and its Vicissitudes

Violence and its Vicissitudes

Jodi Dean:

What Zizek omits, though, is the creative, productive dimension of resentment. It can create power relations invested in refusal (an acquaintance of mine once used the expression ‘anti-war profiteers’). Differently put, even heroic resentment can become ordinary and normalized, ultimately exhausting itself and rendering the heroic feeble and pathetic. The challenge, then, of heroic resentment is this very risk, this unavoidable uncertainty.