Review: Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

Violence: Six Sideways Reflections by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I find it hard to rate this book, and the 4 is a reflection of that.

I’ve been reading Pinker’s Sense of Style, which makes the tediousness of the prose all the more hurtful. It is tedious, but I don’t know if it could be anything but. The ideas in it, on the other hand, are beautiful. They are terrifying and thought-provoking and absolutely brilliant to read and think about. I highlighted so much, so much of it I will come back to and I will read over and over the passages where my eyes glazed over, if only to absorb a modicum of them.

There is shining power here, terrible and destructive and earth-shaking.

I am unconvinced that it needed to be hidden the way it is behind tediousness. Maybe it did. But I am unconvinced.

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