Slavoj Žižek

#2

It seemed logical that Captain Jose Da Silva of the Brazilian Federal Police Force, a man with a maverick reputation for problem solving, be the one assigned to solve Brazil's growing scourge of death squads. They were unpredictable and ran on their own agenda. So did Da Silva. His superiors knew he worked on the fringes of authority and would send him to the edge-to the remote border town of Paraiso. There had been five new underworld slayings and the signs pointed to a new kind of death squad. These killers were different. Their victims were different. The Captain's plan would have to be different as well.Planting a story in a Rio newspaper, Da Silva makes himself the brave bait to trap these perpetrators. But would he end up mincemeat for these murderers? Would the right killers bite? Or will there be too many takers to sort out? Would his own tight-knit plan become a noose around his own neck? Only a stunning young beauty with the smell of danger drifting in her wake can show the good captain the proper path to take. It's trouble in paradise.

#3

We live in a time when we are overwhelmed with talk and images of violence. Whether on television, the internet, films or the video screen, we canʹt escape representations of actual or fictional violence - another murder, another killing spree in a high school or movie theatre, another action movie filled with images of violence. Our age could well be called "The Age of Violence" because representations of real or imagined violence, sometimes fused together, are pervasive. But what do we mean by violence? What can violence achieve? Are there limits to violence and, if so, what are they? In this new book Richard Bernstein seeks to answer these questions by examining the work of five figures who have thought deeply about violence - Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Jan Assmann. He shows that we have much to learn from their work about the meaning of violence in our times. Through the critical examination of their writings he also brings out the limits of violence. There are compelling reasons to commit ourselves to non-violence, and yet at the same time we have to acknowledge that there are exceptional circumstances in which violence can be justified. Bernstein argues that there can be no general criteria for determining when violence is justified. The only plausible way of dealing with this issue is to cultivate publics in which there is free and open discussion and in which individuals are committed to listen to one other: when public debate withers, there is nothing to prevent the triumph of murderous violence. -- Publisher description.