Violence and Love (in Which Yoko Ono Encourages Slavoj Žižek to ‘Give Peace a Chance’)

Abstract

In his book Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2009), Slavoj Žižek returns to the 1960s and to Che Guevara, the poster boy of the radical left, in order to stress ‘the transformative power of love’. But while Guevara believed in love, Žižek affirms, ‘he would never have been humming “love is all you need” — you need to love with hatred’ (italics in original).1 In their own equivocal meditations on revolution,2 The Beatles express scepticism towards that other great beacon of Marxist (particularly French) fervour: ‘if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow’ (The Beatles, ‘Revolution 1’, 1968). Mao Zedong is currently back in vogue in parts of the Anglophone circle of Marxist philosophy following the discovery of Alain Badiou and the translation of many of his key works, an interest promoted by Žižek who ends his book with a discussion of the problematic legacy of Mao, counting himself in to the cultural revolution, though suggesting that it failed to achieve a sufficiently radical upheaval in social relations. I will return to this discussion later in this chapter. For now, I want to stress Žižek’s emphasis on the tough love of the revolutionary, indeed on the importance of regarding love as itself a form of violence.