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August 12, 2005
Rumsfeld vs. Zizek
Also via GreenCine: At the recent New York premiere of Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener, Focus Films co-President, James Schamus, invoked both the Bush administration's resident epistemologist and the Slovenian philosopher:
"There are known knowns," Rumsfeld said back then. "These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."Zizek's article is over a year old, but well worth revisiting, especially given Zizek's parsing of Rumsfeld's notorious early attempts to defend the Bush administration against charges tha Saddam Hussein did not have a WMD program. Specifically, Zizek focuses on the "theatricality" of the use of torture in Abu Ghraib, the use of cameras to film what happened and the staged, or posed, quality of many of the images. Zizek's comments might provide an interesting starting point, or reference point at the very least, for the paper I'm writing for MLA, although I'm not quite prepared to go into specifics just yet.Schamus then went on to quote the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who discussed Rumsfeld's comments in an essay appearing in In These Times entitled "What Rumsfeld Doesn't Know That He Knows about Abu Ghraib" and which I excerpt from below:
"What [Rumsfeld] forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the 'unknown knowns,' the things we don't know that we know -- which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the 'knowledge which doesn't know itself,' as Lacan used to say.
"If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the 'unknown unknowns,' that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the 'unknown knowns' -- the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values."
But Schamus's comments also make Meirelles's follow-up to City of God, easily one of the best films of the decade so far, sound that much more interesting. Gardener, which has been marketed as a relatively run-of-the-mill thriller, is based on John Le Carre's novel about a "Big Pharma in Africa" conspiracy, focusing specifically on unsafe drug testing in Africa. Le Carre also discusses the pharmeceutical industry in a 2001 article that orginally appeared in The Nation.
Posted by chuck at August 12, 2005 12:12 PM
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Comments
You can't judge a book by its marketing. Le Carré generally writes something better than the generic thriller. I found The Constant Gardener to be one of the better books of his last two decades. He's certainly seemed to move to the left.
Posted by: Jonathan at August 14, 2005 10:24 AM
My reactions to the film were based almost entirely on the trailers--no disrespect to Le Carré, whose work I haven't read, intended. I generally like the conspiracy genre, especially after reading Jameson's reading of '70s conspiracy films in The Geopolitical Aesthetic.
Posted by: Chuck ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://chutry.wordherders.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 14, 2005 10:29 AM
You should do the following things: read Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy and watch the BBC adaptation. Repeat with Smiley's People (though you shouldn't skip The Honourable Schoolboy, unmade by BBC because of location expenses I suspect).
Posted by: Jonathan at August 14, 2005 8:28 PM