I can’t help but notice that perhaps what you find formulaic about Zizek is his Lacanian-informed reading of Hegel. As a reader of Zizek I’m sure you’re aware of this, but the essential idea is that a universal can only be founded on the basis of some excluded particular. A good example would be class struggle, in which the proletariat stands for the excluded particular that also represents the universal field of emancipatory politics.

Although I haven’t read “Violence,” from his lectures on the subject I gather that the central point is this: in our day to day experience of watching the news and engaging in political discourse, we encounter disparate cases of violence that appear to be isolated and depoliticized. Zizek’s Marxian critique of this is that violence is in fact a structural manifestation of global capitalism. Regarding the subject of violence, his view of liberation might be something between Walter Benjamin’s notion of “divine violence” that breaks the knot between power (legitimized violence) and authority and the founding of a community along Pauline lines.

As to your question of UofM: it was a great institution and Ann Arbor is a lovely city. Unfortunately, the dire economics of the state of Michigan and the post-1968 sentiment have led the university to run itself more and more as a business, with some tragic results.

So many religious blogs! What is happening in the states? The public realm whips up the war drive while the private prays for salvation?

But back to Zizek. Like him. Just read his “Violence” book - an easy read. But doesn’t one tire soon with this trope that the exception is the condition for the possibility of the rule? And then the query (which the reader mistakes for a conclusion) that philosophy (in this case) should be happy to be the exception and not the rule. But philosophy now has become irrelevant. The juggernaut steams on. Are we to say a resounding “Yes” to irrrelevance because the exception is the condition for the possibiltiy of the rule?

The trope appears again and again: Pain is a condition for the possibility of painlessness (etc, etc); exteriority is a condition of the possibility of interiority; telling the truth (or at least the promise to do so - the expectation that one will do so) is a condition for the possibility of lying. But what makes pain good - what sort of pain is good? Why is some kind of pain a necessity now? What sort of exteriority matters now? And how is the truth to be told.

Maybe I have missed the point.

Maybe I am insufficiently philosophical.

Anyway, this is by the by. Really just a monad-blogger in search of a neighbourhood.

By the way, I write multiple choice questions for Greek kids who think the University of Michigan is cool. Is it cool?