Why should every project of a radical social revolution automatically fall into the trap of aiming at the impossible dream of 'total transparency'?

It should be noted that my wife and I viewed Zero Dark-Thirty last night before I began this challenging tome. Much of the premise is dated. There is no hint here of Civil War and the Surge, drones or Blackwater. Thus qualified, the ensuing discussion is rich and frenetic and evokes myriad notions, a personal favorite being "the cunning of noble lies and bitter truths". Antigone is explored as well as a rasher of contemporary theorists. While lacking the polish of [b:Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates|18914|Welcome to the Desert of the Real Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates|Slavoj Žižek|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1373996900s/18914.jpg|20259] this is a solid tract.

If the 'terrorists' are ready to wreck this world for love of another world, our warriors on terror are ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalize torture - the ultimate degradation of human dignity - to defend it . . .
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Slovenia.

Slovenia may be a more hopping joint than I realized. Imagine Žižek as your college philosophy instructor. Mine (in the days when instructors smoked in the classroom) would pace back and forth on a slightly raised stage flanked by two columns (Ionic, if memory serves). As he intoned about Aristotle or Hobbes, he would light a cigarette, then deposit it on the edge of an ashtray on the end of the plinth to which he had walked. He often wound up with a burning cigarette on either side, and occasionally would lift one to his mouth, seeming bemused when he discovered that he was already smoking another cigarette. I picture Žižek as that professor, but perhaps more ironic and, as befits a man who cites Lacan so frequently, with a fistful of burning stogies. This has little to do with Žižek, but is evoked because sometimes Žižek's essays seem to have little to do with the topic at hand, and sometimes the sense of them is obscured as if by clouds of smoke.

This rather dense yet sometimes loosely constructed volume collects three related essays that take as their starting point, and sometimes their end point, the war in Iraq. More specifically, the war in Iraq as its unconscious/subtextual metaphors and logic are unpacked, sometimes crisply and sometimes murkily. How many analyses of U.S. military decisions have you read that are based on Freudian dream interpretation? So it's intellectually fun, if sometimes obscure. The first and third essays cohere reasonably even if one (let me be frank: this one) cannot always follow or does not always agree with his associations or conclusions. The second essays lost me, though I even took notes in an attempt to wrest its meaning (phallus) from it to appropriate as my own. No dice. What's a girl who's only taken a few graduate semiotics classes to do?

As when I read many works of philosophy, religion, or conspiracy, I was frustrated at times by how self-referential a passage would become. Admittedly, Žižek does less of this than some maddening philosophers whom I shall not mention. I enjoy the aesthetic and balance of ideas that are internally harmonious, but also want to see sufficient outside referents and (and this is the feminist deconstructionist in me) acknowledgment that the idea or phenomenon under discussion could be understood differently without having to argue that one perception is always more accurate than others. This seems like an enactment of capitalist ideals or a pissing contest, probably not what Žižek had in mind.
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Says some great things about WMD as Hitchcockian "MacGuffin" - "of course we'll never find them, if we did, they wouldn't be Saddam's imaginary WMD's" - and the fearsome spinelessness of the anti-war left DESPITE the utter repulsiveness of the neocon projet, and Europe's refusal to take up the role of alternate source of geopolitical legitimacy, and the gap between "Jerusalem" as object of desire/return and real Jerusalem, and how trying to combine the two leads to endless emptiness and horror. And other stuff. And then he gets into his usual Lacanian groove and you yawn and say all right, do you really think you couldn't make this argument to better effect without using the term "objet petit a" even once? But it's a short book with some fun times, and Zizek's everreadiness to flirt with Stalinism in search of an illiberal, "intolerable," unsublimatable take is always bracing. ( )