Dialogues with Slavoj Zizek: placing the role of torture in context.

Abstract

This essay review discusses criticall the book the universal excemption of Slavoj Zizek. 

Just after finishing my two recent books: Tracing Spikes in Fear and Narcissism in Western Democracies Since 9/11 (Peter Lang) and The Challenges of Democracy in the War on Terror (Routledge). While in the first work I traced back the limitations of Psychoanalysis as well as its complicities to legitimate the advance and expansion of capitalism, the latter focused on the role of torture –as a lesser evil- of contemporary government in their war on terror. One of my arguments sounded polemically as though not only terrorism is the organization of labor by other means but psychoanalysis organized a specific ethics, which extracting its nature from ancient Greek philosophy, ascribed to the theory of scarcity which is the touchstone of capitalism.  Secondly but most important, Occident carefully developed a doctrine of security, which the part may be sacrificed at the moment the body is in danger. Let me put the medical metaphor of cancer. While the medical gaze is programmed to look and eradicate the pathology, the illness, cancer derives from an anomaly of cell growth. Once some organs are affected, the medical gaze does not hesitate in extirpating the affected organ. The same allegory can be applied to the war on terror and the serious risks of ghettoization the Muslim community daily faces.