Zizek's Jokes (10 page)

3
. Ibid., 538.

4
. Ibid., 89.

5
. Ibid., 325.

6
. Ibid., 277.

7
. Ibid., 494.

8
. Ibid., 422.

9
. Ibid., 696–697.

10
. Ibid., 708–709.

11
. Ibid., 745–746.

12
. Ibid., 765–766.

13
. Ibid., 788.

14
. Ibid., 768.

15
.
Living in the End Times
(London: Verso, 2010), 27.

16
. Ibid., 401–402.

17
.
The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 42.

18
. Ibid., 286.

19
.
Living in the End Times
, 299–300.

20
.
Violence: Big Ideas/Small Books
(New York: Picador, 2008), 11.

21
.
In Defense of Lost Causes
(London: Verso, 2008), 268.

22
. Ibid., 306–307.

23
.
The Monstrosity of Christ
, 270.

24
.
The Sublime Object of Ideology
(London: Verso, 1989), 147.

25
.
For They Know Not What They Do
(London: Verso, 1991), 173.

26
.
In Defense of Lost Causes
, 318.

27
. Ibid., 331.

28
.
How to Read Lacan
(London: Granta Books, 2006), 69–70.

29
.
The Parallax View
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 64.

30
. Ibid., 109–110.

31
. Ibid., 178–179.

32
. Ibid., 351.

33
.
How to Read Lacan
, 43.

34
.
The Parallax View
, 353.

35
. Ibid., 401.

36
. Ibid.

37
. Ibid., 413.

38
.
Interrogating the Real
(London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 13.

39
.
Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
(London: Verso, 2004), 4.

40
.
Violence
, 44.

41
.
Iraq
, 70.

42
. Ibid., 132.

43
.
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 49.

44
. Ibid., 101.

45
. Ibid., 137–138.

46
. Ibid., 182.

47
.
Organs Without Bodies
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 58–59.

48
. Ibid., 60.

49
. Ibid., 61.

50
. Ibid., 77–80.

51
. Ibid., 158.

52
.
Tarrying with the Negative
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press 1993), 74.

53
.
Revolution at the Gates: Žižek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings
(London: Verso, 2002), 206.

54
.
Welcome to the Desert of the Real
(London: Verso, 2002), 1.

55
. Ibid., 3.

56
. Ibid., 77.

57
. Ibid., 92.

58
.
On Belief
(London: Routledge, 2001).

59
.
The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-Theory
(London: British Film Institute, 2001), 29.

60
.
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
(London: Verso, 2001), 147.

61
. Ibid., 190.

62
.
The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
(London: Verso, 2000), 50.

63
. Ibid., 50–51.

64
. Ibid., 53–54.

65
.
The Plague of Fantasies
(London: Verso, 1997), 25.

66
. Ibid., 39.

67
. Ibid., 46.

68
. Ibid., 110.

69
. Ibid., 172.

70
. Ibid., 179.

71
. Ibid., 188–189.

72
.
The Indivisible Remainder: Essays on Schelling and Related Matters
(London: Verso, 1996), 198.

73
.
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan … But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock
(London: Verso, 1993), 44.

74
.
Tarrying with the Negative
, 244.

75
. Ibid., 268.

76
.
Enjoy Your Symptom!
(London: Routledge 1992), 10.

77
.
The Sublime Object of Ideology
, 6–7.

78
. Ibid., 29.

79
. Ibid., 64.

80
.
The Metastases of Enjoyment
(London: Verso, 1994), 143.

81
.
The Sublime Object of Ideology
, 65.

82
. Ibid., 66.

83
. Ibid., 159.

84
. Ibid., 160.

85
. Ibid., 163.

86
. Ibid., 175–176.

87
.
Less Than Nothing
, 243.

88
. Ibid., 1003.

89
. Ibid., 530–531.

90
. Ibid., 535.

91
. Ibid., 538.

92
.
For They Know Not What They Do
, 1.

93
.
The Sublime Object of Ideology
, 197.

94
. Ibid., 198.

95
.
In Defense of Lost Causes
, 13.

96
.
The Plague of Fantasies
, 110–111.

97
.
The Universal Exception
(London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 316.

98
.
Organs Without Bodies
, 145.

99
.
The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 16.

100
.
The Sublime Object of Ideology
, 212.

101
. Ibid., 223.

102
.
The Ticklish Subject
(London: Verso, 1999), 382–383.

AFTERWORD BY MOMUS

There's a joke that appears twice in my
Book of Jokes
(a novel in which the story of a family is told entirely in jokes). I learned it from Žižek, who attributes it to Freud. “We all remember,” says Žižek, at the start of a 2004 essay entitled “The Iraqi Borrowed Kettle,” “the old joke about the borrowed kettle that Freud quotes in order to render the strange logic of dreams, namely the enumeration of mutually exclusive answers to a reproach (that I returned to a friend a broken kettle): (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you.” Is this a joke, or is it a conundrum or a syndrome? It's a shape of situation, Žižek says. A structure.

Žižek seems to have a brain very much suited to the recognition of particular situational shapes. Thinking about something in the real world, he suddenly recognizes that it has the same basic structure as an absurd situation in a joke he's heard, often from a highly respectable source; Derrida, or Lacan, or Freud.

This technique gives us a refreshing sense of what we might call “the lightness of profundity.” We see the charming playfulness of the great masters of philosophy, and perhaps begin to recognize philosophy itself, at its highest, lightest level, as something akin to laughter and joking; “the smile of the gods.” Certain scenarios in the real world can be as absurd as jokes, self-evidently laughable, no matter how tragic they are.

History, Žižek likes to remind us—citing Marx, himself citing Hegel—plays first as tragedy, then as farce. And laughter at the farcical has a sublime aspect; it allows us to imagine the redundancy of one set of ideas, and the birth of a dizzying plethora of alternatives. Comedy is a legitimacy crisis followed by the sudden appearance of a cornucopia.

In my telling of the kettle story the situation becomes farcical by exaggeration. My father has been entrusted with the care of a pot plant while its owners, led by a small, prissy, semi-naked lawyer called Bernard Bernardson, go on holiday. My father forgets completely to water the plant, which consequently withers. He defends himself with the following list of self-justifications:

1. The plant had never been entrusted to him.

2. In fact, it was his plant.

3. The plant had been entrusted to him, but he had never promised to return it in good condition.

4. He had sworn to the gods to ruin the plant, and was simply fulfilling his promise.

5. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the plant.

6. He wished he'd never borrowed the plant, it was withered from the moment he set eyes on it.

7. This species of plant is withered from birth or, rather, is wither-proof.

8. The plant withered despite his best efforts. It was beset by a plague of flies.

9. Withering is only bad because we are conditioned to think of it as such.

10. In fact, healthy green sprouting is the most painful thing for a plant to endure.

11. Healthy green sprouting is an abomination.

12. Withering—warmly welcomed by sensible plants—is “the new” healthy green sprouting.

13. Therefore withering is good, because healthy green sprouting is good.

14. On the contrary, healthy green sprouting is abominable, and therefore withering is abominable.

15. Nothing as bad as withering could have happened to the plant under my watch. Therefore it has not withered.

16. Healthy plants have gone out of fashion during your absence.

17. This is not the same plant you left me.

18. This is, nevertheless and despite appearances, a healthy plant.

19. Look, there, behind you! A kitten!

20. The plant has committed suicide.

My father is a monstrous character in the book, and yet we cannot help liking him. This “kettle list” of excuses has a low motivation—the covering-up of an act of neglect—but its attenuation, inventiveness, ingenuity, and illogicality begin to amuse and refresh us, like a Cubist painting of the situation that may not add up to anything like “the truth,” but begins to dazzle us with a sense of sheer possibility, or like a clever child's answers to a psychologist's Uses of Objects test. We begin to see, alongside the merely legitimate, or the merely correct, the possibility of a cornucopia.

Because we live in a society that massively prefers control to creativity, telling the truth has been vastly overrated. “Every lie creates the parallel world in which it is true.” This is the aphorism that guides my
Book of Scotlands
, a series of scenarios imagining, deliriously, alternative futures for my northern British motherland. Lies can be generative, they can help us brainstorm our way out of stale, dead-end ways of thinking. Jokes have the same capacity; by overturning the logic of clichés based on what are undoubtedly true and correct ways of understanding the world, jokes give us a tingling and vertiginous sense of alternative possibilities. Political pundits have a term called the Overton Window. It describes the sort of centrist agenda a politician may embrace without any danger of being called a crank or an extremist, and the ways he may shift that window of acceptability a few degrees to the left or right. The dogged pursuit of consensus and compromise based, precisely, on a lack of any fresh or original thinking may be crucial for a career politician, but it spells death to anyone who's mentally alive. The “mentally alive”—and in this category good writers are found—will surely prefer the logic of jokes, which by their very nature stray outside the Overton Window, transgress against common sense and accepted morality, and breach taboos.

Let's say that the world divides into those who want to be right, and those who want to be interesting. The Right usually have an eye on instrumental power over man and over nature. Their rightness is a means to that power. The Interesting wish to charm, beguile, teach, astound, influence, outrage, confuse. What power they possess is predicated on a renunciation of actual, instrumental power.

I would not want the captain of my jet to be interesting; I would prefer him to be right. But I would like the in-flight movie to be as interesting as possible. In contrast to events in the cockpit, whatever happens in the movie, the plane will not crash. In my own (real) family, my brother, an academic, is the Right one and I am the Interesting one. I first heard of Žižek through my brother, who described him to me as “crazy, a hothead.” Interesting, perhaps, but untrustworthy. Not a solid chap, but an interestingly unreliable narrator of history, a wearer of clown motley, a Shakespearean Fool. My brother must have known that, based on this sketch, I would become a fan.

Žižek's unreliability is underlined by the fact that he re-tells the same jokes in different forms. As if enacting in his texts a kind of synthetic version of the oral folk culture from which jokes originate, he rings the same joke through a series of changes, reporting different origins, outcomes and moral applications each time.

Žižek risks giving the appearance of a slightly absent-minded old uncle at a wedding, who doesn't remember that he told us the same joke at another family gathering recently, or perhaps does remember but finds the joke so funny and so effective that he can't help tell it again, but with its attributions, pedigree, wording, length and degree of obscenity tailored (suspiciously, we might say) to the new context.

And so the fiancée joke (“my fiancée is never late for an appointment, because the moment she is late, she is no longer my fiancée”) makes an appearance in several of his books, attributed variously to Lacan and to an “old proverb,” and interpreted, like the broken kettle, in an incompatibly wide variety of different applications. According to Žižek, and according to situation, the fiancée joke implies: