An Iranian Capitalism and the Search for Islam

First published January 2010

It was with observations on 9/11 that Slavoj Žižek made his formal introduction into the Englishspeakingworld of politics proper – quietly forgetting for the time being his presidential campaign inthe Republic of Slovenia back in the 1990. Never, however, has he been able to drop the grindingacademic axe; surprised as many commentators were that someone could come along and talkabout Hegel and coca-cola in the same breath, Žižek of late takes to marrying tenets of Lacanianpsychoanalysis with Donald Rumsfeld quotations. But something different, some new sea-change,seems to have occurred again with Žižek’s piece on Iran, ‘Berlusconi in Tehran’, published in theLondon Review of Books, that it is pure politics, that the mode of language is no longer wry butserious. Before, looking closely at Žižek’s texts, one knew that behind the comic references topopular culture there was a serious kernel, of which to use in critically dismantling areas of unseenterror in the usual functioning of the economy, now the wry guard has been shelved, and the comicsubterfuge is the preserve of the enemy itself – “Berlusconi’s capitalism with ‘Italian values’(comical posturing)”. (Continue)