BEYOND SUBJECTIVE VIOLENCE: A ZIZEKIAN READING OF TONI MORISON’S BELOVED

Abstract

Morrison’s Beloved, the winner of Pulitzer’s prize for fiction, is a narrative of American post-civil war through memories of an emancipated black salve, Sethe. Sethe importunes and fulfils her escape from plantation farm, though she pays for her freedom by being raped and filicide, her reaction against slavery is groundbreaking. There are different types of violence in Beloved that in the light of Žižek’s theory they are divided into subjective and objective violence. Sethe is the victim and agent of subjective violence that is rooted in objective violence, discrimination, and racism in the history of America. The revolutionary side of the novel justifies Sethe’s filicide as a phenomenon to resist against exploitation and slavery, a reaction that convicts ontological violence to defend equality of ethnic biological essence. The subjective and visible side of violence represents the objective and invisible side of violence indicating that genetic inferiority of blacks is a cultural and social ideology of dominant white society. It indicates that symbolic violence enclosed the codes of blackness and inferiority unravels the roots of violence and introduces systemic violence as the invisible source of generating all types of violence