BIG IDEAS/small books

We’d love to tell you it gets easier, that somehow, by smartly packaging a single idea into a “small book”—as Picador’s new series attempts—it’s easier to wrap your brain around a concept and feel you’ve “got it.” But when that idea is something as broad as violence, and explored by a mind as flexible and perspicacious as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, no small book will take a small amount of energy to work through.

That’s a compliment, of course, and a credit to this new series launched by Picador. In Zizek’s Violence, the author looks at the way everything from Hurricane Katrina and M. Night Shyamalan’s widely panned film The Village say something about communal fear and violent behavior. Zizek creates a philosophical loop around the modern understanding of brutality. He breaks down violence into physical, or subjective violence (e.g., murder, crime) and ideological, or objective violence (e.g., hate-speech, racism). Zizek claims the modern preoccupation with the former has helped foster a third, most insidious type of violence: systemic, the onslaught from our governments and political systems that perpetuate an even graver brutality in the name of stopping subjective violence. Zizek can be funny while being culturally omnivorous (dropping Picasso and Alfonso Cuarón references) and mica-clear with what he’s trying to say. He occasionally slips into the windy ellipses of philosophical writing, but we’re guessing that anyone willing to pick up a book like this won’t quibble.

Sociologist Steven Lukes’s Moral Relativism—the other book launching this series—introduces a refreshingly nuanced perspective into a debate that has, for the most part, treated nuance like a leper at a nudist colony. Like Zizek, Lukes uses history, but primarily contemporary culture, as his playing field, attempting to suss out if there really is a “clash of civilizations,” as is so often invoked in regard to the conflict between the world’s “fundamentalist” religious types, and whether the neologism of multiculturalism excludes as much as it includes. As Lukes writes, his goal is to bridge the gap between the absolutists and the relativists, to investigate individual conflicts to seek out resolutions in context. He mixes in some Kant and some Aristotlte, and maybe it’s just the philosophy major in us talking, but it’s not as much of a snore as that might sound.

Picador has more of these books lined up, and we hope they continue to be both as engaging and relevant as these two first salvos. And we hope they keep designer Henry Sene Yee churning out the tiny, beautiful packages.