To Know

“In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown:

There are known knowns. These are things we know 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.

What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the ‘unknown knowns’, the things we do not know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge which does not know itself’, as Lacan used to say.”

Iraq: the borrowed kettle by Slavoj Zizek (2004)