Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

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 characterized the justification for the US-led invasion of Iraq, argues Zizek in this provocative study that can be considered a sequel to his acclaimed post-9/11 Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

Slavoj Zizek is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana.

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