Iraq PA (Zizek)

In order torender the strange logic of dreams, Freud quoted the old joke about theborrowed kettle: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you, (2) I returnedit to you unbroken, (3) the kettle was already broken when I got itfrom you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course,confirms exactly what it attempts to deny'”that I returned a brokenkettle to you ...That same inconsistency, Zizekargues, characterized the justification of the attack on Iraq: A linkbetween Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda was transformed into the threatposed by the regime to the region, which was then further transformedinto the threat posed to everyone (but the US and Britain especially)by weapons of mass destruction. When no significant weapons were found,we were treated to the same bizarre logic: OK, the two labs we founddon't really prove anything, but even if there are no WMD in Iraq,there are other good reasons to topple a tyrant like Saddam ...Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle ' which can be considered as a sequel to Zizek's acclaimed post-9/11 Welcome to the Desert of the Real ' analyzes the background that such inconsistent argumentation concealsand, simultaneously, cannot help but highlight: what were the actualideological and political stakes of the attack on Iraq? In classicZizekian style, it spares nothing and nobody, neither patheticallyimpotent pacifism nor hypocritical sympathy with the suffering of theIraqi people.

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and many more.