The Master's Voice. posted by Richard Seymour

A Review of Slavoj Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Verso, 2004.

1.
With the usual barrage of Freudian jokes, nuanced political argument, suggestions destined to give offense to both politically correct Leftists and reactionaries, and philosophical argument that hops from Heidegger to Kant to Laclau, but always returns to Lacan, Zizek is back. He didn't quite go away, of course. Since the last big political intervention, (Revolution at the Gates, a collection of Lenin's writings of 1917 with lengthy pre- and post-faces), we have had another abstruse philosophical work, a collection of interviews and several critical introductions to him published. But Iraq is exactly the kind of juicy, big political topic that you want Zizek to sink his teeth into.

Tough shit. As he warns the reader in the introduction, this is "not a book about Iraq - but then, the Iraq crisis and war were not really about Iraq either". The text is structured into three segments. The last two are vertiginous Lacanian meditations on the possibilities for a renewed radicalism, on ethical violence and democracy, discussed with Zizek's characteristic pedagogic clarity (I am even beginning to understand what those funny little Lacanian symbols mean). The beginning is indeed about the war on Iraq, the 'war on terror', the situation of the international Left, Israel-Palestine and so on. In many ways, it is a collation of thoughts and reactions already known to us from various essays written closer to the time. It does not include Abu Ghraib , apparently because it was written before that episode was revealed. But he does have a few prescient comments to make on the matter of American torture. He begins, however, by comparing the posture of the warring parties with the old Freudian story about the returned kettle that is broken. The borrower offers various excuses: 1) I didn't borrow the kettle, 2) I returned it to you intact, 3) it was broken when you gave it to me. All of which merely confirms that the borrower has returned a broken kettle. Similarly, the warniks insist that: 1) Saddam was a menace to the international community, 2) Saddam was a menace to the countries around him, 3) Well anyway, there are perfectly good reasons for getting rid of a regime like Saddam's etc.

One of the things that Zizek highlights so well is the ideological sleight of hand involved in the "pure humanitarian" apology for war. Yes, yes, war is terrible, but we must stop the suffering... Citing Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman, who both wish dearly to deflect the argument about the war from being a referendum on Bush to being a strict humanitarian concern with the fate of Iraqis, Zizek asks what he calls a "naive" question: "do Ignatieff and Berman seriously believe that the US attack on Iraq was motivated by the desire to 'improve the human rights of 26 million Iraqis'? Even if the improvement of life for Iraqis may be a welcome 'collateral' effect of the overthrow of Saddam's regime, can any serious analysis be allowed to forget the global context of the attack on Iraq, the new international rules of life that were exemplified and imposed by this attack?"

Similarly, on the hunt for WMDs, Zizek repeats a favourite riff of his - isn't this the Iraqi "MacGuffin"? The "empty pretext which just serves to set the story in motion"? Zizek notes how the more these weapons were destroyed, the more omnipresent and omnipotent they appeared to be, as if their dreaded remainder were pointed right at the heart of America (but, of course, constantly being moved about by teams of Iraqis in the middle of the night). The notion of a "preemptive strike" is skewered too. Doesn't the 'Bush Doctrine' rely on the violent assertion of the paranoid logic of control over future threats? Yes, Saddam hasn't attacked us yet - but then, prior to 9/11, Al Qaeda had not successfully attacked us either! The trouble with this logic, Zizek avers, is that it involves treating the future as something that - in a way - has already happened. And the hypocritical concern with war crimes doesn't quite pass muster either - the US was, in 2003, applying pressure on Serbia and Croatia to hand over suspects to the Hague. The infuriated, baffled response was entirely just since the US does not accept the authority of that court itself, and has considered legislation that would allow it to mount an attack on the Hague tribunal should it seek to arrest and detain any American citizen. The worry, of course, is that people could seek to use this court for spurious, 'political' means. Hence, a serious attempt could be made to try Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld or Tony Blair. But, as Zizek himself once said of the Hague - yes yes yes, try Milosevic and Karadzic. But also try Kissinger, or shut up!

2.

One of the most patronising and empty gestures of mainstream liberalism following 9/11 was to make a distinction between "true Islam" and the bestial kind practised by the WTC attackers. Instead of this, one should conceive of the Islamic 'resistance to modernity' as an "open chance", as "undecidable": "this resistance does not necessarily lead to 'Islamo-fascism', it can also be articulated into a socialist project. Precisely because Islam harbours the 'worst' potentials of the Fascist answer to our present predicament, it can also turn out to be the site for the 'best'. In other words, yes, Islam is indeed not a religion like the others, it does involve a stronger social link, does resist integration into the capitalist global order - and the task is to work out how to use this ambiguous fact politically." I have argued this for months, but rarely with such concisions. Religions, being as indeterminate as they are, stand in complex relations to reality and can swing wildly between being reactionary and revolutionary. The history of Protestantism since the Reformation renders the point eloquent.

Zizek insists that there needs to be a fundamental re-think of the Old Left. The 'Third Way', as contemptibly servile toward the capitalist social order as it has been, is not simply the invention of a few fevered egos. It was an authentic response to a real dilemma - what was the alternative, given the circumstances? On the other hand, with the flight from multitudinous cultural identity politics toward collective anticapitalist resistance, Zizek thinks it is perhaps now time to reinvent the final step in that movement - the formation of a revolutionary party. (Partly, however, I suspect he says this to wind up Ernesto Laclau with whom he takes issue in the book). He evokes 'liberated spaces', especially the workers' councils of the 20th Century (which were beloved of many dissidents in the old USSR, who hoped one day to transfer them into the real organisational basis of a democratic society). Through these, he says, we can "practise utopia".

These arguments twist and knot through some abstruse Lacanian analysis which I wouldn't begin to risk detailing. Suffice to say, there are some misses alongside the hits. He wonders why the Israel-Palestine conflict isn't settled when everyone knows the answer. But his 'answer' merely invites the conclusion that everyone does not know, that the apparent consensus is less than skin deep. For instance, he suggests that the obvious solution is for Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories and for Palestinians to eschew their right of return to Israeli-controlled territory. No. I fail to see why this would be either just or effective. A functioning Palestinian state would be an improvement on the present state of abject degradation forced on the Palestinians, but it would be neither a just settlement nor a guarantee of continuing peace. Israel's expansionist tendencies have exhibited themselves sufficiently for any illusions about the sanctity of these borders to persist. Moreover, the whole point of a settlement based on a partition of the land would be to preserve the ethnic character of the Jewish State, which is currently under threat (if demographic predictions are fulfilled). Instead of this, I would propose a one-state binational solution. But that is another topic - the relevance here is, if Zizek is wrong about the reason for the failure of consensus, the ensuing analysis about the deadlock fulfilling a basic function for both parties to the conflict is likely to be flawed.

That said, this is Zizek at his best. It doesn't contain the sudden, flooring surprise of The Ticklish Subject, say, or the pop-cultural jamming of The Sublime Object of Ideology, but it is in the best tradition of his recent, politically-engaged works like The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? which combine the maximum of clarity and the minimum of effort. It moves with segueing skills that would shame Tom O'Connor from topos to topos without any apparent interruption, and does so with his usual wit and passion. The total result is a book which exhorts us to understand that our present impotence is an opportunity to do something about it; the success of capitalism in overcoming all walls (Chinese Walls included) during the 1990s was in itself a Fukuyaman utopia, a suspension of the reality of engaged political struggle to which we now return; the very inner weakness of capitalism renders it incapable of fulfilling its old ideological commitments to human rights etc (this before Abu Ghraib); the increasing authoritarianism and war-readiness of the state may cause some to despair but Zizek urges us to see it as an opportunity and to treat bourgeois human rights discourse as the rope in the old Marxist wisdom: "A capitalist will even sell you the rope to hang him with".