Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (review)

One might say of this book it is Žižek enjoying his own “unilateralist moment” for when he isn’t discussing Iraq—i.e., most of the time—he is either putting the boots into erstwhile friends and comrades (Laclau, Miller), or recycling gags that work better “live.”

So what does he claim? His perhaps most controversial claim is that the US knew that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and that is why they risked a ground war. This is of course highly plausible. But in typical fashion he takes it a step further and proclaims that even if Iraq did have WMD, the US’s ideological position would still be false. He then holds out the idea that perhaps we’re not being paranoid enough, perhaps Bush not only knew there were no WMDs in Iraq, but also knew that invading Iraq could not guarantee peace in the Middle East, but on the contrary would insure instability in the region for years to come. Does anyone doubt this? The last the thing the US wants is a Pan-Arabian coalition, or what amounts to the same thing a united OPEC. Surely the more important question, which would be a Deleuzian question, is why are we so complacent about it?

The limitation of Žižek model is that it ultimately relies on self-deception to explain apparently irrational behavior. In the case of the public response to the claim by Bush and Blair that urgent action was demanded because Iraq might have WMD it is not enough to blame inaction on self-deception, even of the cynical kind Žižek theorizes (borrowing from Mannoni and Sloterdyjk): “I know very well Iraq has no WMDs, but all the same Saddam is a terrible tyrant and should be deposed.” Doubtless this was the attitude of the skeptics, but is it the whole story? What is missing is the explanation of the desire to believe Saddam is a tyrant and the desire to go along with one’s own government.

In this respect, the Deleuzian model of critique is stronger—as he put it, speaking of Nazism, at a certain point the German people wanted to be fascists. The self-deception argument comes later as a justification. The Deleuzian conclusion would be we desired what Bush did. In Bush’s regime we do not have to deny wanting to invade Iraq . . . the excuses about WMD, etc., were purely for those petty liberals who haven’t quite gotten around to understanding that one no longer has to be embarrassed about flaunting power.

When it comes to Žižek, as the Australian grunge band Regurgitator put it: I like the old stuff better than the new stuff. In a supreme irony that even Žižek couldn’t help but enjoy, this arch anti-Derridean has come to employ the supremely Derridean art of ellipsis. Where one might have expected an argument to be one encounter . . . . But perhaps that isn’t the best way to put it.

Žižek’s work has developed the way James Ellroy’s work has—I’m thinking particularly of the LA Quartet which, as Mike Davis put it in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), “is either the culmination of the genre, or its reductio ad adsurdum” (45). Not to be confused with the LA Trilogy, the LA Quartet is comprised of The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and ends with White Jazz. In the first novel every detail is labored and the juicy, violent bits are nicely interlarded with wearisome police work. But as the Quartet unfolds, this balance gives way. The final novel is all violence and no boring police work and in that way it follows the logic of pornography and is boring precisely because the boring bits have been edited out.

Žižek has edited out the boring exegesis which used to make his sparkling wit a wonderful relief from the heavy going Hegelese . . . but without that it has become, to use his own...