Being John Malkovich dvdrip Slavoj Žižek has a rambling, half-incoherent piece At First Sight movie download on Iran and Italy in the London Review of Books

. Žižek can be very interesting, but here he rather un-neatly demonstrates the danger topicality presents to a rigidly abstract cast of mind. The bio-note footing the piece calls him a “dialectical-materialist philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalyst.” One would think philosophy had gotten past the point where self-circumscription is something to brag about, but here we are.

“There are many versions of last month’s events in Tehran,” Žižek writes.

Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western ‘reform movement’, something along the lines of the colour-coded revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia…They are countered by sceptics who think that Ahmadinejad actually won, that he is the voice of the majority, while Mousavi’s support comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth…Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the clerical establishment whose differences from Ahmadinejad are merely cosmetic…Finally, and saddest of all, are the leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad. What is at stake for them is Iranian freedom from imperialism.

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Spot-on characterization if you’re watching cable news or thumbing the back rows of the magazine section, but straw-men if you’re addressing serious people or your (no doubt overly serious) fellow philosophers.

Žižek lazily continues. He too-neatly explains the protests following the election as “a genuine popular uprising on the part of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution,” and too-neatly characterizes Mousavi as someone who “stands for the resuscitation of the popular dream that sustained the Khomeini revolution. It was a utopian dream, but one can’t deny the genuinely utopian aspect of what was so much more than a hardline Islamist takeover.” This formulation handily ignores the revolutionaries’ jumbled makeup and the rather liberal (and youthful) makeup of the protestors today. If Mousavi represents a repressed part of the Iranian revolution, then it’s a part that has little in common with the Ayatollah’s religious fundamentalism.

Yet this is all fodder for his main argument, which he eventually stumbles into.

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But whatever the outcome [of the protests], it is vital to keep in mind that we have witnessed a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit within the frame of a struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If we don’t see this, if as a consequence of our cynical pragmatism, we have lost the capacity to recognise the promise of emancipation, we in the West will have entered a post-democratic era, ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line…. Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process… The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe.

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Žižek is in good form in the theoretical discussion of “the virus” that follows, but Iran isn’t mentioned again, nor should it have been brought up in the first place. The Iranian context is wholly different from that of Italy, or the other authoritarian capitalist countries he mentions. But it’s current, and Berlusconi’s corruption is less immediate. More importantly, with a little teasing it can be made to fit a pattern. Like Plato, who briefly pops up later in the piece, Žižek isn’t one to let reality muck up the smooth contours of a theory’s form.

-Greg Waldmann

In his weekly column for Slate, part-time literary critic, part-time muckraker, and part-time dime-a-dozen political pundit Christopher Hitchens shares his two cents about the crisis in Iran, and draws a particular focus on Ayatollah Khamenei’s recent paranoid invocation of the “evil” British government. Hitchens points out that while America-hating is commonplace in Iran, it’s a youthful phenomenon next to the decades of anti-British rhetoric. Hitchens then calls our attention to the great book that lampooned Iranian Anglophobia:

The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the “Brit Plot” theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat

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form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the “creation” of the British government itself.

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Hitchens goes on to recommend that we all get our own copy of My Uncle Napoleon, to which Open Letters can only agree. Recently, Bryn Haworth reviewed the book with an eye to the pre-election-crisis troubles in Iran, and found much to admire on both artistic and political levels:

The beauty of My Uncle Napoleon is that it is blissfully funny. Though it has the slapstick mayhem of many Egyptian comedies, it is more than pure farce. And although it has debts to European literature – My Uncle

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is very much like Don Quixote, or Sterne’s Uncle Toby Madhouse movie full (he even has his own Corporal Trim) – it is not a plagiarizing tribute to the classic comic novel. This is a book that manages to create memorable and believable characters while shamelessly sending them up, loading them with catchphrases and putting them in bizarre situations. Behind all its tomfoolery lie the serious issues of love, sexuality and, most importantly, paranoia on a grand scale.

Go here to read the rest of Haworth’s examination of a book given such abrupt and urgent relevance—and then, by all means, get a copy for yourself!

A certain degree of fraud is to be expected in Iranian elections. In 2005, some electoral chicanery made sure that Ahmadinejad emerged from the field of right-wing candidates to challenge the more moderate Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. We still can’t be sure who would have won the elections one week ago, but the official results had Ahmadinejad beating his rival Moussavi by about two to one, almost laughably out of step with every poll done in the run-up to the vote.

We can’t know what Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah expected to happen, but it certainly wasn’t this – protests blanketing the country, hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) marching in Tehran. Moussavi’s opposition has been joined by former presidents Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, along with several important members of the clerical establishment. They’ve been saavy in keeping the protests largely non-violent, and in portraying themselves as the true inheritors of 1979’s Islamic revolution. Marchers chant “Allahu akbar” as a rebuke to their government. Their goal is the removal of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, nothing less than the overthrow of the current government.

Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have been slow to respond. A few days ago they banned foreign media coverage of the protests, and today the Ayatollah made an ominous and threatening speech at Friday prayers. All this seems preparation for a confrontation, as the demonstrations gain momentum.

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As far as I can tell, the best place to go for info is Andrew Sullivan, who’s been posting dozens of updates a day every day for the last week. This is, as he has said, “the central event in modern history right now.” This is the same Iran that many want to bomb or invade for their nuclear program. If America had done that – bombed and invaded a country primed for a mass democratic movement – Ahmadinejad wouldn’t have needed to rig the votes.

-Greg Waldmann