In order to render the strange logic of dreams, Freud quoted the old 'joke' about the borrowed kettle: 1) I never borrowed a kettle from you, 2) I returned it to you unbroken, 3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms exactly what it endeavours to deny - that I returned a broken kettle to you...That same inconsistency argues Zizek, characterized the justification of the attack on Iraq whereby Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda against all the evidence, then it was asserted he posed a threat to the whole region, which in turn became a threat to the rest of the world with his weapons of mass destruction. When no significant weapons were found the logic became even more bizarre...Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle analyses 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 iconoclastic Zizekian style, it spares nothing and nobody, neither pathetically impotent pacificism nor hypocritical sympathy with the suffering of the Iraqi people.

Author Biography

Slavoj Zizek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana. His books include The Sublime Object of Ideology, Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan (but were afraid to ask Hitchcock), The Plague of Fantasies and The Ticklish Subject.