Iraq : the borrowed kettle

Abstract

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 110 citations exist upstream.