by Slavoj Zizek
The underlying mistake is not difficult to identify—it is the same as in the joke: “My fiancée is never late for an appointment, because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancée!” This is how today’s apologist of the market, in an unheard-of ideological kidnapping, explains the crisis of 2008: it was not the failure of the free market which caused it but the excessive state regulation, that is, the fact that our market economy was not a true one, that it was still in the clutches of the welfare-state.
What we have here is a somewhat crueler version of the joke: “My fiancée never misses an appointment with me because the moment she misses one, she is no longer my fiancée”—the people always support the party because any member of the people who opposes party rule automatically excludes himself from the people.24
Let us, in passing, be attentive to the homology between this “skeptical paradox” and the structure of a joke Lacan often refers to: “My fiancée never misses an appointment with me, since the moment she misses it, she is no longer my fiancée.”—”I never make a mistake in applying a rule, since what I do defines the very rule.”25
ALTHOUGH “REALLY EXISTING SOCIALISM” has already receded into a distance that confers upon it the nostalgic magic of a postmodern lost object, some of us still recall a well-known Polish anticommunist joke from the epoch of “really existing socialism”: “Socialism is the synthesis of the greatest achievements of all previous modes of production: from preclass tribal society it takes primitivism, from the Asiatic mode of production it takes despotism, from antiquity it takes slavery, from feudalism it takes the social domination of lords over serfs, from capitalism it takes exploitation, and from socialism it takes the name.” Does the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew not obey exactly the same logic? It takes from great capitalists their wealth and social control, from the hedonists sexual debauchery, from commercialized popular culture and the yellow press their vulgarity, from the lower classes their filth and bad smell, from intellectuals their corrupted sophistry, and from Jews their name.26
IT IS NOT THAT THIS CALL for more passion in politics is in itself meaningless (of course the contemporary Left needs more passion); the problem is rather that it resembles all too much the joke quoted by Lacan about a doctor asked by a friend for free medical advice: unwilling to give his services without payment, the doctor examines the friend and then calmly states: “You need medical advice!”27
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, a charming publicity spot for a beer was shown on British TV. Its first part staged the well-known fairy tale: a girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, and kisses it; of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story wasn’t finished: the young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her toward himself, and kisses her—and she turns into a bottle of beer, which the man holds triumphantly in his hand. For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signaled by the kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence; for the man, it is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (the objet petit a). On account of this asymmetry, there is no sexual relationship: we have either a woman with a frog or a man with a bottle of beer. What we can never obtain is the natural couple of a beautiful woman and man: the fantasmatic support of this ideal couple would have been the figure of a frog embracing a bottle of beer—an inconsistent figure that, instead of guaranteeing the harmony of the sexual relationship, renders palpable its ridiculous discord. (Of course, the obvious feminist point would be that what women witness in their everyday love experience is rather the opposite: one kisses a beautiful young man and, after one gets too close to him, that is, when it is already too late, one notices that he is effectively a frog.) This opens up the possibility of undermining the hold a fantasy exerts over us through the very over-identification with it: by way of embracing simultaneously, within the same space, the multitude of inconsistent fantasmatic elements. That is to say, each of the two subjects is involved in his or her own subjective fantasizing—the girl fantasizes about the frog who is really a young man, the man about the girl who is really a bottle of beer. What modern art and writing oppose to this is not objective reality but the “objectively subjective” underlying fantasy that the two subjects are never able to assume, something similar to a Magrittesque painting of a frog embracing a bottle of beer, with a title “A man and a woman” or “The ideal couple.”28
IN THE VULGAR JOKE about a fool having intercourse for the first time, the girl has to tell him exactly what to do: “See this hole between my legs? Put it in here. Now push it deep. Now pull it out. Push it in, pull it out, push it in, pull it out …” “Now wait a minute,” the fool interrupts her, “make up your mind! In or out?”29
THERE IS A YUGOSLAV RIDDLE-JOKE: “What is the difference between the pope and a trumpet? The pope is from Rome, and the trumpet is [made] from tin. And what is the difference between the pope from Rome and the trumpet [made] from tin? The trumpet [made] from tin can be from Rome, while the pope from Rome cannot be [made] from tin.” In a similar way, we should redouble the Parisian graffiti joke: “What is the difference between ‘God is dead’ and ‘Nietzsche is dead’? It was Nietzsche who said ‘God is dead,’ and it was God who said ‘Nietzsche is dead.’ And what is the difference between Nietzsche, who said ‘God is dead,’ and God, who said ‘Nietzsche is dead’? Nietzsche, who said ‘God is dead,’ was not dead, while the God who said ‘Nietzsche is dead’ was himself dead.” Crucial for the proper comic effect is not a difference where we expect sameness but, rather, a sameness where we expect difference; this is why, as Alenka Zupančič has pointed out, the materialist (and therefore properly comic) version of the above joke would have been something like: “God is dead. And, as a matter of fact, I don’t feel too well either …”30
THE MOMENT WE INTRODUCE the paradoxical dialectics of identity and similarity best exemplified by a series of Marx Brothers’ jokes (“No wonder you look like X, since you are X!”; “This man may look like an idiot and act like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you—he really is an idiot!”), the uncanniness of cloning becomes clear. Let us take the case of a beloved only child who dies, and the parents then decide to clone him and so get him back: is it not more than clear that the result is monstrous? The new child has all the properties of the dead one, but this very similarity makes the difference all the more palpable—although he looks exactly the same, he is not the same person, so he is a cruel joke, a terrifying impostor—not the lost son, but a blasphemous copy whose presence cannot fail to remind us of the old joke from the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera: “Everything about you reminds me of you—your eyes, your throat, your lips, … everything except you!”31
FOR DECADES, A CLASSIC JOKE has been circulating among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a kernel of grain is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a kernel of grain but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a kernel of grain but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back, trembling and very scared—there is a chicken outside the door, and he is afraid it will eat him. “My dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a kernel of grain but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?”
Therein resides the true stake of psychoanalytic treatment: it is not enough to convince the patient about the unconscious truth of his symptoms; the unconscious itself must be brought to assume this truth. The same holds true for the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism: we can imagine a bourgeois subject attending a Marxism course where he is taught about commodity fetishism. After the course, he comes back to his teacher, complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells him “But you know now how things stand, that commodities are only expressions of social relations, that there is nothing magic about them!” t
o which the pupil replies: “Of course I know all that, but the commodities I am dealing with seem not to know it!” This is what Lacan aimed at in his claim that the true formula of materialism is not “God doesn’t exist,” but “God is unconscious.”32
VARIATIONS
This, at least, seems to be the predominant status of beliefs today, in our era that claims for itself the title “postideological.” Niels Bohr, who already aptly answered Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice” (“Don’t tell God what to do!”), also provided the perfect example of how a fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology: seeing a horseshoe on his door, the surprised visitor said that he doesn’t believe in the superstition that it brings luck, to which Bohr snapped back: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works even if one does not believe in it!”33
So, again, the true task is not to convince the subject, but the chicken-commodities: not to change the way we speak about commodities, but to change the way commodities speak among themselves. Zupancic goes here to the end and imagines a brilliant example that refers to God himself: “In the enlightened society of, say, revolutionary terror, a man is put in prison because he believes in God. With different measures, but above all by means of an enlightened explanation, he is brought to the knowledge that God does not exist. When dismissed, the man comes running back, and explains how scared he is of being punished by God. Of course he knows that God does not exist, but does God also know that?”
It is in this precise sense that today’s era is perhaps less atheist than any prior one: we are all ready to indulge in utter skepticism, cynical distance, exploitation of others “without any illusions,” violations of all ethical constraints, extreme sexual practices, etc., etc.—protected by the silent awareness that the big Other is ignorant about it.34
In the last years of President Tito’s life, he was effectively such a chicken: some archives and memoirs show that, already in the mid-1970s, the leading figures around Tito were aware that Yugoslavia’s economic situation was catastrophic; however, since Tito was nearing his death, they made a collective decision to postpone the outbreak of a crisis until his death—the price was the fast accumulation of external debt in the last years of Tito’s life, when Yugoslavia was, to quote the rich bank client from Hitchcock’s Psycho, buying off its unhappiness. When, in 1980, Tito finally died, the economic crisis did strike, leading to a 40 percent drop in the standard of living, to ethnic tensions and, finally, to civil and ethnic war that destroyed the country—the moment to confront the crisis adequately was missed. One can thus say that what put the last nail in the coffin of Yugoslavia was the very attempt by its leading circle to protect the ignorance of the leader, to keep his gaze happy.
THIS IS WHY “What is the difference between …” jokes are most efficient when difference is denied, as in: “What is the difference between toy trains and women’s breasts? None: both are meant for children, but it is mostly adult men that play with them.”35
SIGNIFICANTLY, THE ONLY JOKE—or, if not a joke, then at least a moment of irony—in Heidegger occurs in his rather bad-taste quip about Lacan as “that psychiatrist who is himself in need of a psychiatrist” (in a letter to Medard Boss).36
THUS, SINCE THE BASIC TWIST OF THIS JOKE resides in the inclusion in the series of the apparent exception (the complaining patient is himself dying), its “negation” would have been a joke whose final twist would, on the contrary, involve exclusion from the series, that is to say, the extraction of the One, its positing as an exception to the series, as in a recent Bosnian joke in which Fata (the proverbial ordinary Bosnian wife) complains to a doctor that Muyo, her husband, makes love to her for hours every evening, so that, even in the darkness of their bedroom, she cannot get enough sleep—again and again, he jumps on her. The good doctor advises her to apply shock therapy: she should keep a bright lamp on her side of the bed, so that when she gets really tired of sex, she can suddenly illuminate Muyo’s face; this shock is sure to cool his excessive passion. The same evening, after hours of sex, Fata does exactly as advised—and recognizes the face of Haso, one of Muyo’s colleagues. Surprised, she asks him: “But what are you doing here? Where is Muyo, my husband?” The embarrassed Haso answers: “Well, last time I saw him he was there at the door, collecting money from those waiting in line.” The third term here would be a kind of joke-correlative of “infinite judgment,” tautology as supreme contradiction, as in the anecdote about a man who complains to his doctor that he often hears the voices of people who are not present with him in the room. The doctor replies: “Really? In order to enable me to discover the meaning of this hallucination, could you describe to me in what precise circumstances you usually hear the voices of people who are not with you?” “Well, it mostly happens when I talk on the phone.”37
THIS POINT BECOMES CLEARER through a particularly morbid joke. A patient in a large hospital room with many beds complains to the doctor about the constant noise that other patients are making, which is driving him crazy. The doctor replies that nothing can be done; one cannot forbid the patients from expressing their despair, since they all know they are dying. The first patient responds: “Why don’t you then put them in a separate room for those who are dying?” The doctor replies calmly and glibly: “But this is a room for those who are dying.”38
THERE IS ANOTHER KETTLE that the title of this booklet aims at—the one from the joke evoked by Freud in order to render the strange logic of dreams: (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. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms per negationem what it endeavors to deny—that I returned to you a broken kettle. Did the same inconsistency not characterize the justification of the attack on Iraq in early 2003? (1) Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction that pose a “clear and present danger” not only to his neighbors and Israel, but to all democratic Western states. (2) So what to do when, in September 2003, David Kay, the CIA official in charge of the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, had to concede that no such weapons have so far been found (after more than thousand US specialists spent months looking for them)? One moves to the next level: even if Saddam does not have any WMD, he was involved with al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attack, so he should be punished as part of the justified revenge for 9/11 and in order to prevent further such attacks. (3) However, again, in September 2003, even Bush had to concede: “We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 attacks.” So what to do after this painful concession, with regard to the fact that a recent opinion poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans believed the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks? One moves to the next level: even if there is no proof of the link with al-Qaeda, Saddam’s regime is a ruthless dictatorial regime, a threat to its neighbors, and a catastrophe to its own people, and this fact alone provides reason enough to topple it, The problem, again, was that there were TOO MANY reasons for the attack.
Interestingly, Key himself offered three theories for the failure of finding the WMD: (1) the WMD are in Iraq; it is just that Saddam, the “master of deceit,” hid them well; (2) the WMD are not in Iraq, because Saddam moved them outside the country just before the war; (3) Saddam never had them at all, and just bluffed to appear strong. (And, as a curiosity, there is an additional eccentric twist: Saddam’s scientists were fooling Saddam himself, and were simply too afraid to tell him he didn’t possess any weapons.)—And, incidentally, opponents of the war seemed to repeat the same inconsistent logic: (1) it is all really about the control of oil and American hegemony—the true rogue state that terrorizes others is the United States itself; (2) even if it is not only about oil and hegemony and the attack is justified, since Saddam is a murderer and torturer, and his regime a criminal catastrophe, it will be counterproductive—it will give a big boost to a new wave of anti-American terrorism; (3) even if successful, the attack on Iraq de
stined to overthrow Saddam will cost too much, and the money could be better spent elsewhere.39
VARIATION
The joke evoked by Freud in order to render the strange logic of dreams gives us a useful gloss on the strange logic at work here: (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. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms by negation what it endeavors to deny—that I returned your kettle broken. Doesn’t this very inconsistency characterize the way radical Islamists respond to the Holocaust? (1) The Holocaust did not happen. (2) It did happen, but the Jews deserved it. (3) The Jews did not deserve it, but they have lost the right to complain by doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to them.40
IN THE EARLY DAYS of his government, Tony Blair liked to paraphrase the famous joke from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (“All right, but apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”) in order ironically to disarm his critics: “They betrayed socialism. True, they brought more social security, they did a lot for healthcare and education, and so on, but, in spite of all that, they betrayed socialism.”41
THE ULTIMATE EXAMPLE of this ambiguity is arguably the chocolate laxative available in the United States, with the paradoxical injunction “Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!” that is, the very thing that causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Richard Wagner’s famous line “Only the spear that caused the wound can heal it” from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today’s “biopolitics.” Solutions are desperately sought that would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is “safe sex”—a term that makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying “Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?” The ultimate goal would be, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent “opium without opium”: no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it—it already IS a kind of “opium without opium.”42