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Divine Violence & Mythic Violence

Violence, Terror & The Sacred · 12 concepts · 32 talks · 47.2 hours · 2008–2023
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Following Benjamin, Žižek uses divine violence to mean violence that is not a means to a preconceived end but a pure manifestation of rage, distinct from both strategic terrorist violence and symbolic gesture, exemplified by Palestinian knife attacks and Paris suburban car-burnings.

2008: 2 talks 2009: 9 talks 2010: 2 talks 2012: 1 talk 2013: 3 talks 2014: 3 talks 2015: 4 talks 2016: 2 talks 2018: 3 talks 2022: 1 talk 2023: 1 talk
≤2000talks carrying this idea, per year2026

In his words 7

“A true Christian doesn't only love his neighbors — he is ready to hate even kill his neighbors out of love.”
26:18 Is God Dead? · hatred out of love / divine violence
“Benjamin says divine violence is an instrument without an end. The whole point of divine violence is that it's not an instrument for achieving a goal.”
~1:43:00 Ideology: The Terror of Permissive Biopolitics · divine violence as end in itself, not means
“Benjamin says mythical violence is violence which serves as a means to a goal. Divine violence are means without a goal.”
35:55 The MATRIX or Two Sides of Perversion · divine violence / Benjamin

The stories that teach it

the jokes and anecdotes he reaches for when he works in this idea, ranked by how many of its talks they turn up in; each card is one story, with every retelling on its page

example · in 7 of its talks

Starbucks ethical consumerism

Buying a Starbucks cappuccino is sold as supporting Guatemalan organic farmers and saving the planet; the owner appeared like Anthony Giddens calling Starbucks an ersatz place of collective experience. The sin of consumerism and its redemption are packaged together in the same…
example · in 3 of its talks

Eisenstein vs. Tarkovsky as two torturers

Žižek compares film directors Eisenstein (cutting/montage) and Tarkovsky (slow stretching) to two torturers asking 'what's the better way to squeeze out the truth?' illustrating that all art is a mode of 'torturing' language.
example · in 3 of its talks

Cars Burning in Paris Suburbs

Žižek cites the burning of cars in Paris suburbs and protests against police shootings as examples of 'divine violence', an explosion of rage with no goal.
example · in 3 of its talks

They Live / critique of ideology glasses

In John Carpenter's They Live, aliens live among us and special glasses reveal the alien/robot behind the human face. Žižek calls this the 'critique of ideology glasses' and uses it to read Biden-era capitalism.
anecdote · in 5 of its talks

Niels Bohr's horseshoe

Niels Bohr had a horseshoe on his country-house door; when a scientist friend asked why a scientist would keep a superstitious charm, Bohr answered 'I was told it works even if you don't believe in it', Žižek's model for ideology today.
example · in 2 of its talks

De Gaulle vs. Pétain legality

Žižek argues that de Gaulle's call to armed resistance against Vichy France was entirely illegal and that Pétain had the democratic majority behind him, yet de Gaulle was right. This illustrates that there are situations where supporting an illegal, minority political-military…

Ahmadinejad at Columbia2The Da Vinci Code DVD2Moshe Dayan's eulogy at Nahal Oz2Hegel on death penalty as respect for the criminal2Freud and the SS man on Berggasse2Toms Shoes 1-for-1 formula2Lenin and Inessa Armand2Nixon, Brezhnev, Honecker ask God2Fight Club: beating oneself as first step of liberation2David's Death of Marat as anti-totalitarian painting2

Where it comes up 32

47 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there

On Violence2008-09-15 · 1:11:30
2:11 divine violence
… Here I respectfully disagree with Benjamin and I think he himself implicitly moves into a totally different direction with his theses on divine violence.
18:43 mythic violence
… You probably know all Benjamin's classical opposition between mythic violence and divine violence.
20:03 sprachzerstörend violence
… But what we don't find in Heidegger and I think we should supplement here Heidegger would have been the divine violence of language which is precisely this torturing of language, not sprachbildend, that is to say not language-forming but sprachzerstörend, destroying of l …
+1 more in this talk
First as Tragedy, then as Farce – The Double Death of Neoliberalism and the Idea of Communism2009-11-25 · 59:47
57:41 divine violence
… Sorry, one question I missed after divine violence and before desires, my God, I...
55:32 mythic violence
… So the others, yes, mythic violence, India and so on.
39:14 Gandhian violence
… And this violence, this is what I would have called ironically the—the violence of Gandhi, Gandhian violence.
Ideology: The Terror of Permissive Biopolitics2013-11-27 · 1:59:05
1:49:35 divine violence
… Benjamin no why and Schmidt I think it's absolutely crucial to avoid all problems nonetheless to strictly distinguish what Benjamin called divine violence from all that Schmidt topic you know of of...
1:17:11 mythic violence
… What has to remain prohibited is the criminal underside of the law the what Benjamin would have called not divine but mythic violence of its instauration.
A Reply to my Critics2013-02-28 · 2:02:55
36:33 divine violence
… And the no less fundamental violence that sustains every attempt to undermine the functioning of the state, Benjamin's divine violence.
36:30 mythic violence
… Benjamin called it mythic violence.
Wagner’s Ring as a Communist Narrative2009-06-17 · 1:27:04
55:33 divine violence
… This is precisely if you want the dream of Benjaminian divine violence.
53:23 mythic violence
… He knew what this as Wotan’s problem is to use Benjamin mythic violence.

The company it keeps

thought with
Walter Benjamin24Simon Critchley7Udi Aloni10Frantz Fanon5Blaise Pascal7Catherine Malabou6Elfriede Jelinek4Gianni Vattimo4John N. Gray4Sergei Eisenstein5Martin Heidegger12Antonio Negri8Søren Kierkegaard11Bernard-Henri Lévy5Ismail Kadare3Andres Serrano3
alongside works
Violence6Critique of Violence4Antigone7The Palace of Dreams3Piss Christ3In Defense of Lost Causes4The Shining (film)3The X-Files3Philosophy of Right5Being and Time3The Monstrosity of Christ3The Brothers Karamazov3The German Ideology3Tristan und Isolde3On Religion2Joe Hill2

Nearest in meaning

Systemic vs. Subjective ViolenceJacobin Terror & Radical Emancipatory ViolenceRadical Evil & Diabolical EthicsThe Sacred Crime & ProfanationRussia-Ukraine War IdeologyIdeological Specter of the Jew & Anti-SemitismWar Communism & Emergency GovernanceObscene Underside of Power & Dirty Jokes

Concepts in this idea 12

22
divine violence
Following Benjamin, Žižek uses divine violence to mean violence that is not a means to a preconceived end but a pure manifestation of rage, distinct from both strategic terrorist violence and symbolic gesture, exemplified by Palestinian knife attacks and Paris suburban car-burnings.
 12
mythic violence
The violent origins of the law, referencing Walter Benjamin’s distinction between divine and mythic violence, which establishes the law through force rather than pure reason.
 4
sprachzerstörend violence
Violence that breaks through language to universality, contrasted with Heidegger's 'staatsbildend' (state-creating) violence of poetry.
 3
Gandhian violence
Žižek's preferred form of emancipatory violence: not killing but the refusal to participate, the act of stopping when a situation is unbearable, contrasted with Hitler's 'pure violence of impotence'.
 1
afformative
Werner Hamacher's term (cited by Ruda) for a creation of form in the act of formation itself, modifying 'performative' to avoid implying a pre-existing transcendental form being activated.
 1
constituted vs. constituent violence
Walter Benjamin's distinction applied to corruption: empirical law-breaking (constituted) vs. the corruption intrinsic to the democratic form itself (constituent).
 1
consumerist riots
Žižek's earlier characterization of the 2011 UK riots, which he here retracts in favor of reading them as closer to divine violence, a manifestation of rage without programmatic content.
 1
essencing of language (das Wesen der Sprache)
Žižek invokes Heidegger's verbal sense of Wesen, language 'essences' by establishing hierarchies of what is crucial and what is not, violently imposing a horizon of meaning and disclosure of world.