is borrowed from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. In an effort to illustrate the logic of dreams, Freud recounted an old joke that went: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you (2) I returned it you intact, and (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Zizek argues that this inconsistent logic was to be found in the US justifications for last year’s war on Iraq. (1) Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction (2) but even if he doesn’t have any WMD, he was involved with al-Qaeda in the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon (3) and even though he has no proven links with al-Qaeda, his regime is a brutal dictatorship that should be removed
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Zizek reminds us, though, that power’s greatest weapon is its conviction that history is resolved and that the nature of reality is already decided. ‘The rise of global capitalism is presented to us as – Fate, against which we cannot fight – either we adapt to it or we fall out of step with history, and are crushed.’ Yet Zizek’s commitment to socialism – albeit a version of socialism whose lineaments he frustratingly leaves vague – prevents him from seeing what Deleuze and Guattari and Manuel De Landa had glimpsed: a flight from global capital that involves an intensification, not an inhibiting, of market forces.
… more .. these excerpts come from a review on metamute (linked via the blog of the article’s author) .. a shorter one can be found on village voice