On Democracy

In 2003, after returning from a month long stay in Baghdad, American artist Paul Chan was given a copy of three speeches on democracy written by Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, before he became president of Iraq. The speeches, compiled here for the first time in English, are politically perverse, yet eerily familiar. This volume takes the speeches as an opportunity to ask what democracy means from the standpoint of a notorious political figure who was anything but democratic in English, are politically perverse, yet eerily familiar. With drawings by Paul Chan, and additional essays.