Slavoj Žižek’s essay for the LRB, ‘Resistance is Surrender’, provoked a number of responses in the Letters page. Žižek answers them here, and introduces the ideas in his book, Violence, which delves into the supposed ‘divine violence’ that propels suicide bombers and examines the hidden causes of violent outbursts, from the Parisian suburbs to New Orleans. Using unconventional references – Hitchcock, Orwell, Fukuyama, Freud – he calls for a forceful confrontation with the vacuity of today’s democracies.
Recorded at the London Review Bookshop on 10 January 2008.
