The map and the territory
Once upon a time, Alfred Korzybsky imagined a sort of non-Aristotelian logics. He even invented an apparatus --"the structural differencial"--to teach how not to confuse beteween the map and the territory.
When we see and listen a message as "Israel must be erased from the map", coming from the Irani President, we may ask ourselves if he is referring to the map or to the territory. And the question is not a simple one, because fundamentalist regimes are supposed to know how to distinguish between the Divine Name and its properties.
If he was referring simply to the map, he may be excused by his ignorance. It is rather difficlt to erase from the map the name of Israel, simply because the region where it is--the Middle East--is the origin of religions and superstitions, as Freud once said, and these sort of things are not easy to erase. In our times, we paradoxically need them, even if it is only because they thirst for meaning. Jacques-Alain Miller speaked in London, 2005, about how to humanize religion, and surely he was pointing to this.
If, on the other side, the President of Iran was referring to the territory, well, he incurred in a sort of excess. Macedonio Fernandez, the argentine writer Borges admired so much, loved to recall a story of a discusion in a bar of the pampas. A man throwed a glass of liquor at another's man face. The man, very quietly, answerd: "this was an ex-abrupto. Now I listen to your arguments.

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