Zizek's Jokes (7 page)

With Quayle, this reflexivity culminates in the following quote in which the series of three evasions/disavowals is consummated in the speaker's self-erasure from the picture: “The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.” The logic of progress in this series is inexorable: first, in his eagerness to square the accounts with the dark past of his own nation, Quayle attributes to it the crime of the century that it did NOT commit; then he retracts, specifying that the act was not committed by his nation; in a desperate attempt to return to the logic of settling the accounts with one's past, he then constitutes a new community—no longer “our nation,” but all of us who lived in the last century and are thus coresponsible for the Holocaust; finally, becoming aware of the mess he talked himself into, he as it were automatically opts for a quick escape, excluding himself from his own century. In short, in a gesture that forms the perfect reversal of Goldwyn's “include me out,” Quayle “excludes himself in” his century! No wonder, then, that, after this imbroglio, he makes a statement that provides the most succinct characterization of Bush: “People that are really weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.”

There are, however, two domains in which Bush goes further than Quayle; the first is that of the postmodern dialectics of certainty and uncertainty. In Bush's thought, uncertainty (about the empirical figure of the enemy), far from diminishing the danger, dialectically inverts itself into the higher certainty that there MUST BE an enemy, all the more dangerous for the fact that we don't know who, exactly, he is. So the more uncertainty about the enemy, the more we can be certain of him lurking out there: “This is a world that is much more uncertain than the past. In the past we were certain, we were certain it was us versus the Russians in the past. We were certain, and therefore we had huge nuclear arsenals aimed at each other to keep peace. … Even though it's an uncertain world, we're certain of some things. … We're certain there are madmen in this world, and there's terror, and there's missiles and I'm certain of this too.” Bush also surpasses Quayle with regard to the refined reflexive twist of the simple Christian precept “Love your neighbor like yourself!” Bush took the lesson of the dialectics of the desire for recognition from Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit
: we do not directly love ourselves—what we effectively love is to be loved by others, that is, we love others to love us: “We must all hear the universal call to like your neighbor just like you like to be liked yourself.”

So what should the unfortunate Bush do to avoid Quayle's sad fate and to dispel the blindness of the stupid liberal public, which is unable to appreciate the hidden dialectical finesse of his statements? As we all know, not only is it true that
du sublime au ridicule, il n'y a qu'un pas
; the same goes also the other way round. So, perhaps, Bush should just learn the Heideggerian art of generating deep insights from tautological reversals. That is to say, when we recall Heidegger's famous reversal “
das Wesen der Wahrheit ist die Wahrheit des Wesens
[the essence of truth is the truth of the essence],” or his rhetorical strategy of excluding
das Wesen
of some domain from this domain itself (“the essence of technology is nothing technological”), it cannot but strike us how easy it would have been to change some bushism into a deep thought. “This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It's what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve” could be translated into: “The essence of preservation has nothing to do with the ontic preservation of our physical resources. The essence of preservation is the preservation of the essence of our society itself—and this is what the president of the United States has to do, even if, at the vulgar ontic level, he allows the destruction of more natural resources than in the entire previous history of the United States.”

In learning this art, Bush will regain a chance of proving himself a worthy successor to Bill Clinton, since this Heideggerian trend in the American presidency was discernible already in the Clinton era: when Clinton answered the prosecutor's question about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky (“Is it true that …?”) with the infamous “It depends on what you mean by ‘is,'” was he not pointing toward the Heideggerian
Seinsfrage
?
⁵⁰

RECALL THE CLASSIC GROUCHO MARX LINE: “This man may look like an idiot and act like an idiot, but don't let that fool you—he really is an idiot!” Is the denouement of Hitchcock's
Vertigo
not a version of this joke? “This woman (Judy) may look like Madeleine and act like Madeleine, but don't let that fool you—she really is Madeleine!”
⁵¹

VARIATION

Recall the often quoted Marx Brothers joke about Ravelli:
Spaulding:
Say, I used to know a fellow looked exactly like you, by the name of ... ah ... Emanuel Ravelli. Are you his brother?
Ravelli:
I'm Emanuel Ravelli.
Spaulding:
You're Emanuel Ravelli?
Ravelli:
I'm Emanuel Ravelli.
Spaulding
:
Well, no wonder you look like him ... But I still insist, there is a resemblance.
⁵²

TODAY, THE OLD JOKE ABOUT A RICH MAN telling his servant “Throw out this destitute beggar—I'm so sensitive that I can't stand seeing people suffer!” is more appropriate than ever.
⁵³

IN AN OLD JOKE from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is
red ink
.”

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the “red ink”: we “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict—“war on terror,” “democracy and freedom,” “human rights,” etc.—are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. The task today is to give the protesters red ink.
⁵⁴

IN A CLASSIC LINE from a Hollywood screwball comedy, the girl asks her boyfriend: “Do you want to marry me?” “No!” “Stop dodging the issue! Give me a straight answer!” In a way, the underlying logic is correct: the only acceptable straight answer for the girl is “Yes!” so anything else, inclusive of a straight “No!” counts as evasion. This underlying logic, of course, is again that of the forced choice: you are free to decide, on condition that you make the right choice. Would a priest not rely on the same paradox in a dispute with a skeptic layman? “Do you believe in God?” “No.” “Stop dodging the issue! Give me a straight answer!” Again, in the eyes of the priest, the only straight answer is to assert one's belief in God: far from standing for a symmetrical clear stance, the atheist denial of belief is an attempt to dodge the issue of the divine encounter. And is it not the same today with the choice “democracy or fundamentalism”? Is it not that, within the terms of this choice, it is simply not possible to choose “fundamentalism”? What is problematic in the way the ruling ideology imposes on us this choice is not “fundamentalism” but, rather,
democracy itself
: as if the only alternative to “fundamentalism” is the political system of the parliamentary liberal democracy.
⁵⁵

THERE IS AN ISRAELI JOKE about Bill Clinton visiting Bibi Netanyahu: when Clinton sees a mysterious blue phone in Bibi's office, he asks Bibi what it is, and Bibi answers that it allows him to dial Him up there in the sky. Upon his return to the States, the envious Clinton demands that his secret service should provide him with such a phone—at any cost. They deliver it within two weeks, and it works, but the phone bill is exorbitant—two million dollars for a one-minute talk with Him up there. So Clinton furiously calls Bibi and complains: “How can you afford such a phone, if even we, who support you financially, can't? Is this how you spend our money?” Bibi answers calmly: “No, it's not that—you see, for us, Jews, that call counts as a local call!”

Interestingly, in the Soviet version of the joke, God is replaced by hell: when Nixon visits Brezhnev and sees a special phone, Brezhnev explains to him that this is a link to hell; at the end of the joke, when Nixon complains about the price of the call, Brezhnev calmly answers: “For us in the Soviet Union, the call to hell counts as a local call.”
⁵⁶

ONE SHOULD THEREFORE ASSUME the paradox that concentration camps and refugee camps for the delivery of humanitarian aid are the two faces, “human” and “inhuman,” of the same socio-logical formal matrix. In both cases, the cruel joke from Lubitch's
To Be or Not to Be
applies: when asked about the German concentration camps in the occupied Poland, the character called “Concentration Camp Erhardt” snaps back “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.” (And does the same not hold for the Enron bankruptcy in January 2002, which can be interpreted as a kind of ironic commentary on the notion of risk society? Thousands of employees who lost their jobs and savings were certainly exposed to a risk, but without any true choice—the risk appeared to them as blind fate. Those, on the contrary, who effectively did have an insight into the risks as well as a possibility to intervene into the situation [the top managers], minimized their risks by cashing in their stocks and options before the bankruptcy—actual risks and choices were thus nicely distributed. So, again, apropos of the popular notion that today's society is that of risky choices, one can say that some [the Enron managers] do the choices, while others [the common employees] do the risking.)
⁵⁷

IN ONE OF THE FUNNIEST SCENES in
To Be or Not to Be
, the pretentious Polish actor Josef Tura who, as the part of a secret mission, has to impersonate the cruel high Gestapo officer Erhardt, does this impersonation in an exaggerated way, reacting to the remarks of his interlocutor about his cruel treatment of the Poles with a loud vulgar laughter and a satisfied reply, “So they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt, hahaha!” We, the spectators, see this as a ridiculous caricature—however, a little bit later, Tura has to escape and the real Erhardt arrives; when the conversation again touches rumors about him, he reacts to his interlocutors
in exactly the same ridiculously exaggerated way
as his impersonator did. The message is clear: even Ehrhardt himself is not immediately himself, he also imitates his own copy or, more precisely, the ridiculous idea of himself. While Tura acts him, Erhardt acts himself.

In Hitchcock's
Vertigo
, we find a more tragic version of the same uncanny coincidence: the low-class Judy who, under the pressure exerted by Scottie and out of her love for him, endeavors to look and act like the high-class and ethereal Madeleine, turns out to BE Madeleine: they are the same person, since the “true” Madeleine Scottie encountered was already a fake. However, this identity of Judy and Judy-Madeleine again renders all the more palpable the absolute otherness of Madeleine with regard to Judy—the Madeleine that is given nowhere, who is present just in the guise of the ethereal “aura” that envelops Judy-Madeleine.
⁵⁸

JEREMY BENTHAM deployed the unique notion of “self-icon,” that is, the notion that a thing is its own best sign (as in the Lewis Carroll joke about Englishmen using ever larger maps, until they finally settled on using England itself as
its own map
).
⁵⁹

IN SO FAR AS THE MELANCHOLIC MOURNS what he has not yet lost, there is an inherent comic subversion of the tragic procedure of mourning at work in melancholy, as in the old racist joke about gypsies: when it rains, they are happy because they know that after rain there is always sunshine; when the sun shines, they feel sad because they know that after sunshine it will, at some point, rain.
⁶⁰

IN AN OLD SOVIET JOKE, a listener asks Radio Erevan: “Did Rabinovitch win a new car in the state lottery?” Radio Erevan replies: “In principle, yes—he did. Only it was not a car but a bicycle, it was not new but old, and he did not win it, it was stolen from him!”
⁶¹

THERE IS AN OLD RACIST JOKE, popular in the former Yugoslavia, about a gypsy being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist first explains to the gypsy what free associations are: you immediately say what is on your mind in response to the psychiatrist's cue. Then the psychiatrist proceeds to the test itself: he says “table”; the gypsy answers: “fucking Fatima”; he says “sky”; the gypsy answers: “fucking Fatima,” and so on, until the psychiatrist explodes: “But you didn't understand me! You must tell me what crops up in your mind, what you are thinking of, when I say my word!” The gypsy calmly answers: “Yes, I got your point, I'm not stupid, but I think
all the time
about fucking Fatima!”
⁶²

THIS JOKE, which clearly displays the structure of Hegelian “abstract universality,” has none the less to be supplemented by the crucial final twist at work in another joke about a pupil being examined by his biology teacher about different animals, and always reducing the answer to the definition of a horse: “What is an elephant?” “An animal that lives in the jungle, where there are no horses. A horse is a domestic mammal with four legs, used for riding, working in the fields or pulling vehicles.” “What is a fish?” “An animal that has no legs, unlike a horse. A horse is a domestic mammal …” “What is a dog?” “An animal that, unlike horses, barks. A horse is a domestic mammal …” and so forth, until finally, the desperate teacher asks the pupil: “OK, what is a
horse
?” Perplexed and totally thrown off balance, the poor surprised pupil starts to mumble and cry, unable to provide an answer.
⁶³