Second, Zizek holds that fantasy answers the question "What am I to the Other?"22 In the United States, the typical answer to this question is "free:' To the Other, I am the one, we are the ones, who are free. After September n, 2001, "because we are free" answered the question "Why do they hate us?" From the U.S. perspective, to cite an earlier example, the Cold War was fought between freedom and totalitarianism. Neoliberalism afrms and extends this self-understanding in terms of freedom (or, better, freeness). Its emphasis on free trade answers the question of who we, as Americans, . are-we are those who trade freely, who value freeness. Ours is the home of the free (despite or because there is no such thing as a free lunch). Increasingly, neoliberalism afrms technology's fantasy of wholeness to tell us who "we" are in a global sense. We are those connected to each other through exchange, the exchange of commodities as well as of contributions. On the Internet, we are free to buy anything from anywhere at any time.
Third, Zizek explains that fantasy occults an original deadlock.23 In neoliber� ideology, the fantasy of free trade covers over persistent market failure, structural inequalities, the prominence of monopolies, the privilege of no-bid contracts, the violence of privatization, and the redistribution of wealth to the "have mores:' Free trade thus sustains at the level of fantasy what it seeks to avoid at the level of reality-namely, actualy free trade among equal players, that is, equal participants with equal opportunities to establish the rules of the game, access information, distribution, and financial networks, and so forth. Paradoxically, free trade is invoked as a mantra in order to close down possibilities for the actualization of free trade and equality.
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