http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/web/zizek.php

ST: It is not for nothing that Sorel is the fundamental reference for Benjamin! This is completely effaced in Agamben’s discussion of the text. When discussing divine violence in recent texts, you tend to refer to events like the uprisings of the Brazilian favelas and the slums of Caracas rather than the antiglobalization movement and its theorists. The example you yourself provide for "divine" violence, in a recent text on Robespierre, are the "food riots" in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the 1990s . . . Do these upheavals bear witness to the emergence of a new "subject" of struggles to come? In making this identification, doesn’t one risk the "populist" temptation you elsewhere denounce?

I was in Brazil during the food riots. People from the favelas simply descended into the city and began to loot, to terrorize the middle classes a little bit. I was shocked at how these events were treated. At first, people were horrified, as if it came from nowhere, a divine catastrophe. But once the police took care of the situation, the burnt stores and so on were treated like one more tourist attraction! But violence is a complex phenomenon, and several things have to be taken into account. First of all, we have to emphasize that violence is always a structural problem, an "objective" feature of contemporary capitalist societies. Today, we are fascinated by what I, following Badiou, call "subjective" violence, with an easily identifiable agent. Balibar has developed the idea, itself found in the Marxist tradition more generally, of a basic, structural violence in the functioning of capitalism itself. It is absolutely necessary to read explosions of subjective violence against this structural or objective violence. We shouldn’t focus exclusively on the subjective dimension. And we should also remember that violence is not necessarily activity, action. It is not always the case that social functions run by themselves and that it takes a lot of energy, a lot of violence to transform them. To the contrary, it often takes a lot of violence to make sure things stay the way they are. Sometimes, then, the truly violent act is doing nothing, a refusal to act.