Iraq (Wo Es War): The Borrowed Kettle FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In order to render the strange logic of dreams, Freud cited the old joke about the borrowed kettle: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you, (2) I returned it to you intact, (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms exactly what it endeavors to deny - that I returned a broken kettle to you." "That same inconsistency, Zizek argues, characterized the justification of the attack on Iraq, whereby a link between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda was transformed into the threat posed by the regime to the region, which was then further transformed into the menace posed hanging over everyone (but the US and Britain especially) of weapons of mass destruction. When no significant weapons were actually found, we were treated to the same bizarre logic: OK, the two labs we found don'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 - a sequel to Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real - analyzes the background that such inconsistent argumentation conceals and, simultaneously, cannot help but highlight: what were the actual ideological and political stakes of the attack on Iraq? In classic Zizekian style, it spares nothing and nobody, neither pathetically impotent pacifism nor hypocritical sympathy with the suffering of the Iraqi people.
SYNOPSIS
The inconsistent arguments from the old joke about the borrowed Kettle—(1.) I never borrowed a kettle from you (2.) I returned it to you whole (3.) Anyway, it was broken when you gave it to me.—are analogous to the shifting justifications given for the Anglo- American invasion of Iraq, argues Zizek (senior researcher, Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia). Just as the joke's inconsistent arguments reveal that the speaker borrowed and broke the kettle, so the shifts from Weapons of Mass Destruction, to connections to Al Qaeda, to Saddam Hussein's persecution of his people point towards the reasons that they are attempting to conceal. For Zizek, these are ideological belief in Western democracy, the assertion of US hegemony in the New World Order, and the economic interest of oil. He explores these intertwined reasons in essays penned in immediate reactions to different stages of the war. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
As Slovenian public intellectual and provocateur Zizek puts it in his pungent sequel to Welcome to the Desert of the Real, a major motivational problem with the U.S.'s Iraq adventure has been "too many reasons for the war." As each pretext collapsed in the face of events, another rose to take its place. Thus, he says, the "war" has been as much on logical consistency as on Iraq. As piercing as Zizek can be about the rhetorical excesses of the Bush administration his Lacanian reading of Rumsfeld's infamous "known knowns" speech is a tour de force he doesn't spare what he sees as the smug complacencies of "Old Europe" and the left, putting them under the general rubric of convenient pacifism and selective outrage. Structured as an essay with two long appendixes, Zizek's book is consistently funny, engaging and accessible whether discussing Hitchcock or Heidegger. If some of the philosophical excursions in the book's second half threaten to derail the cogency of its arguments, they generally reward patience. And if the sheer exuberance of Zizek's biting invective acts as something of a tonic, the sobriety of his basic message that we have entered a permanent, Orwellian "state of emergency" that threatens the very freedoms we are supposedly defending is never lost. Simultaneously invigorating, depressing and maddening, Zizek's book reveals him to be an intellectual made for these times, a mixed blessing if ever there was one. (Aug.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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