Recall three characters who accompany Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939):

1) Scarecrow: brainless
2) Lion: courageless/cowardly
3) Tin Man: heartless

Let’s begin with Scarecrow and Lion (then we’ll get to Tin Man):

1) Scarecrow is brainless since he is alienated from his intellectual power.
2) Lion is cowardly since he is alienated from his physical power.

But there are dialectical links between these two alienations:

1) It is Lion who alienates Scarecrow: At the level of our wild instincts, our human knowledge gets invalidated.
2) It is Scarecrow who alienates Lion: In the face of the instrumental reason of humanity, the animal kingdom falls helpless.

It is curious that one can express the same dialectic in communist jargon regarding two types of labor:

1) Brainless Scarecrow is the alienation of intellectual labor due to its detachment from manual labor: Knowledge detached from practice can only be false/fake/invalid/empty.
2) Cowardly Lion is the alienation of manual labor due to its detachment from intellectual labor: Action without theory can only be wrong/aimless/bewildered/perverted.

Scarecrow cannot reach love because he is brainless and Lion cannot reach love because he is a coward. When you combine brains and brawn to compose the love of humanity, you get Tin Man: Communism is an engineering marvel that was invented by combining manual labor and intellectual labor. But the resulting Tin Man (or Communism) still remains heartless, he too cannot reach love.

At this point, of course, one must notice that all three characters are male. Even when you match Scarecrow and Lion to get the Tin Man, he will remain heartless because “the woman who is the symptom of man” is still Dorothy. This is why the wizard of Oz tells the following to Tin Man when he gives him his heart:

And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner