Reasoning with the Left in Berkeley

How are language and violence connected? In his “Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin raises the question: “Is any nonviolent resolution of conflict possible?” His answer is that such a nonviolent resolution of conflict is possible in “relationships among private persons,” in courtesy, sympathy, and trust: “there is a sphere of human agreement that is nonviolent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of ‘understanding,’ language.” This thesis belongs to the mainstream tradition in which the prevalent idea of language and the symbolic order is that of the medium of reconciliation and mediation, of peaceful coexistence, as opposed to a violent medium of 
immediate and raw confrontation. In language, instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we are meant to debate, to exchange words — and such an exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimum recognition of the other.

- Slavoj Zizek, "The Poetic Torture-House of Language"