Perception and Misperception of Violence: A Žižekian Study of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Beloved

AbstractViolence as an unavoidable part of human beings' experience is so widespread within individuals' contacts that in most cases is ignored or taken for granted. However, violence is subject to various misperceptions that make the study of it challenging. Theoretically, this paper adopts the three forms of violence suggested by Slavoj Žižek: subjective, objective and systemic violence in order to explore how Žižek proves the ways by which, violence is perceived and misperceived. In doing so, this paper applies political discourse analysis, Black gender feminism, and psychoanalytic methods to be the approaches of this study. By applying Žižek's theories of violence on Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Beloved as the corpus of the study the current paper explores violence and the ways it is misrepresented. The objective of this paper is to explore the strategies which lead to misperception of violence. The conclusion drawn from this paper shows that Žižekian systemic violence that generates other forms of violence should remain hidden as dark matter of physics. Some pseudo-activities, ideologies or pseudo-ideologies can be at work in their manifest and latent forms when something that is so obviously omnipresent remains invisible or is misperceived.

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Keywords: Misperception of violence , Pseudo-activities , Ideology , Pseudo-ideology , Toni Morrison , Slavoj Žižek