I just viewed the Coen Brother's film Burn After Reading, and if someone where to hold a .38 to my head and ask me to tell them what this film REALLY means, I would say something like: This film presents America with an ideology without a center-point, which is another way to say that after the unravelling of the Cold War (in which ideology was relatively stable on a basic level) the ideology we are left with is akin to Hitchcock's MacGuffin-Effect but with a twist: A Pure Phallus Signifier that signifies NOTHING at all! The Coen Brother brilliantly weave together two fundamental themes: The first emerges from the unknowability of a women's desires (What does a Women Want?) and the second is the logic of signification grounded in the signifier of the phallus that means nothing at all! But this nothing is that one which all else functions as meaningful signification.
In regards to the first motif viz. the mystery of a women's desire, really does not ever exist (in the Hegelian sense of the intrinsic "In-Itself"). This mysterious drive (of a women's desire) motivates and moves the plot, and it moves in relation to the nothing qua S, that is the subject is the nothing at all. And because the subject (and lets be clear, the subject here is totally male centered) does not exist as a self-referent (or pure signified) it can only be defined in relation to a women's sexual desire.
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With all respect: But what does this really tell us? The means employed are simlar to those employed in 1979? But are these not the means employed in most revolutions?: the chanting of slogans, the mass mobilisation of the public. The repeated cries of "Allah Akbar" are an Islamic quirk, they are also defensive. As the statement is one of Islamic doctrine, it cannnot be measured against, and is in fact the same cry used by the supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The employment of the phrase 'we will not be moved' by everyone from fox hunters to animal rights protestors in the UK suggests no similarity in intention between such vastly disparate groups.
The comparison with Berlusconi is rather simplistic, and indicative of, like the aforementioned fault, a social commentary that aims to seek likenesses, rather than to adequately explain real phenomena. And in this respect, quite why Ahmadinejad is an 'Iranian Berlusconi' rather than an 'Iranian George Bush', or, indeed, Sarkozy, Brown or Obama, is beyond comprehension. Do you really hold so much faith in our western leaders (aside from Berlusconi)?
Next we have an over convenient identification of some rudimentary differences between Mousavi and Karroubi. Yet it is not pointed out that Karroubi would have been far short himself of delivering some of the demands of the protestors, rounded off nicely with some allussion to a momentary 'opening that unleashed unheard-of social forces...' in the year following the 1979 revolution. Unheard of then, now? Unheard by whom?
There is a genuine liberal potential in Islam, for sure, but who is to say that that is what we are witnessing, and that our apparent failure to see it (who's failure, by the way? surely everyone is seeing it pretty clearly, it's arguably more popular in the West than the fall of the Berlin wall was) will land us with a tyrant like 'Berlusconi' (I have to smirk here. Where is the logical train of thought)? Apparently, for us to end up with Italian PM Berlusconi would somehow link with our having not welcomed a liberal strand of Islam, which opened up 'unheard of' forces 30 years ago and is repeating (rehearing them, or failing to)them now. Is this what the Italians did wrong?
One may as well get Badouian and declare the whole thing an 'Event', claiming to have somehow foreseen it in 'Being and Event'.
I think what we need is to let the Iranians speak, those that can, to stop making such awful attempts at interpreting a situation to which we have no access, and to stop making obscene generalistions, the type of which compare Berlusconi (presided over by ex-Communist President Napolitano) to Ahmadinejad, presided over by Khamenei. Maybe then we might leave praxis to the people at ground level, allowing amateur and professional journalists to tell us what is happening, spreading awareness by disseminating the information and technology open to us, this being one of the most striking revolutionary aspects of this current situation, and one which we cannot find analogy with in the past. This (twitter, flickr, facebook, blogger, etc) is the nature of the (a) revolution, that has already occurred.
Just what is so frightening about not knowing what will happen next in Iran, not knowing the true nature of that particular revolution, of a President? To offer poor analogies just reduces philosophy and critique to what it surely rails against; the under-confident Conservative social forces that attempt to categorise and channel every new movement as it comes.
We all want genuine change in Iran as in Italy, the UK, the US, Zimbabwe, Russia and on and on. Let us not belittle the enactment of change when it comes, with inadequate analyses.
I'm sorry but where is the concrete analysis here? To compare Berlusconi to Ahmadinejad on the basis of an electoral coup does not demonstrate some special knowledge on Zizek's part. Quite apart from the fact that Berlusconi's predicament now is that he is being caught with his trousers down, a bit like Clinton, and is refusing to step down on this, unproven, account; a bit different to what is happening to Iran, no?
I would hazard to guess that Berlusconi falls more in the banning of headscraves camp, ala Sarkozy (if he cares at all), rather than the beating of women for not wearing headscarves. Do I like Berlusconi? Not one bit, yet he is still not a good like-for-like comparison with Iran's official (though unelected) President.
I am sorry, again, but Zizek's text is comprised of a series of disparate non-factual remarks.
I think, for sure, anyone can comment on the situation on Iran, but I am dissapointed in the remarks of one of our most illustrious phiolosopher figures.
Is this the return to the roots of the 1979 revolution? Likely not, probably it's something quite different, even if it is in some respects cast in its image. Why over simplify? And why drag Italian politics into it when any nation may just as well make a comparison with the tyranny of the Iranian regime?
http://logicalregression.blogspot.com/
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