In order torender the strange logic of dreams, Freud quoted the old joke about theborrowed kettle: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you, (2) I returnedit to you unbroken, (3) the kettle was already broken when I got itfrom you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course,confirms exactly what it attempts to deny—that I returned a brokenkettle to you ...

That same inconsistency, Zizekargues, characterized the justification of the attack on Iraq: A linkbetween Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda was transformed into the threatposed by the regime to the region, which was then further transformedinto the threat posed to everyone (but the US and Britain especially)by weapons of mass destruction. When no significant weapons were found,we were treated to the same bizarre logic: OK, the two labs we founddon't really prove anything, but even if there are no WMD in Iraq,there are other good reasons to topple a tyrant like Saddam ...

Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle – which can be considered as a sequel to Zizek's acclaimed post-9/11 Welcome to the Desert of the Real – analyzes the background that such inconsistent argumentation concealsand, simultaneously, cannot help but highlight: what were the actualideological and political stakes of the attack on Iraq? In classicZizekian style, it spares nothing and nobody, neither patheticallyimpotent pacifism nor hypocritical sympathy with the suffering of theIraqi people.

NSK is considered by many to be the last true avant-garde of the twentieth century and the most consistently challenging artistic force in Eastern Europe today. The acronym refers to Neue Slowenische Kunst, a Slovene collective that emerged in the wake of Tito's death and was shaped by the breakup of Yugoslavia. Its complex and disturbing work -- in fields including experimental music and theater, painting, philosophy, writing, performance, and design -- has an international following but a powerful and specific cultural context. Within the NSK organization are a number of divisions, the best-known of which is Laibach, an alternative music group known for its blending of popular culture with subversive politics, high art with underground provocation -- reflecting the political and cultural chaos of its time.In Interrogation Machine, Alexei Monroe offers the first critical appraisal of the entire NSK phenomenon, from its elaborate organizational structure and its internal logics to its controversial public actions. The result is a fascinating portrait not only of NSK but of the complex political and cultural context within which it operates. Monroe analyzes the paradoxes, perplexities, and traumas of NSK's work at its deepest levels. His investigation of the relationships between conceptual content, stylistic method, and ideological subtext demonstrates the relevance of NSK in general and Laibach in particular to current debates about culture, power, war, politics, globalization, the marketplace, and life itself. As Slavoj Zizek writes in his foreword, 'Today, the lesson of Laibach is more pertinent than ever.'Monroe uses a variety of theoretical and historical approaches, as is appropriate to the shifting and elusive nature of his subject. The use of theory reflects NSK's own theoretical engagement; it is also a valuable way to read the issues raised by the work. Neither oversimplifying nor uncritically mystifying, Monroe leaves intact the 'gaps, contradictions, and shadows' inherent in his subject, demonstrating that 'it should still be possible to appreciate the work as art that moves, confuses, agitates, or fascinates.'

Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Zizek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead - a strategy of 'looking awry' that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.Zizek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject - at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Zizek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, Zizek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him.Slavoj Zizek is a Researcher in the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. His work has been published in France and in Yugoslavia where, running as a proreform candidate, he narrowly missed being elected to the presidency of the republic of Slovenia.