Zizek's Jokes

by Slavoj Zizek

  ANOTHER JOKE POSSESSES exactly the same structure, but this is usually overlooked—we are referring to the joke about the Door of the Law from the ninth chapter of Kafka’s Trial, to its final turnaround when the dying man from the country asks the doorkeeper: “Everyone strives to attain the law; how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?” The doorkeeper perceives that the man is at the end of his strength and his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since the door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”81

  We could even invent another ending for Kafka’s story to bring it nearer to the joke about the Pole and the Jew: after the long wait, the man from the country breaks out in fury and begins to cry at the doorkeeper: “You dirty rascal, why do you pretend to guard the entrance to some enormous secret, when you know very well that there is no secret beyond the door, that this door is intended only for me, to capture my desire!” and the doorkeeper (if he were an analyst) would answer him calmly: “You see, now you’ve discovered the real secret: beyond the door is only what your desire introduces there.”82

  THE LACANIAN “TITLE OF THE LETTER” is closer to the title of a picture; for example, that described in a joke about “Lenin in Warsaw.” At an art exhibition in Moscow, there is a picture showing Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, in bed with a young member of the Komsomol. The title of the picture is “Lenin in Warsaw.” A bewildered visitor asks a guide: “But where is Lenin?” The guide replies quietly and with dignity: “Lenin is in Warsaw.”83

  IF THE JOKE ABOUT LENIN IN WARSAW exemplifies the logic of the master-signifier, there is another joke—in a way its symmetrical inversion—that exemplifies the logic of the object: the joke about the conscript who tries to evade military service by pretending to be mad. His symptom is that he compulsively checks all the pieces of paper he can lay his hands on, constantly repeating: “That is not it!” He is sent to the military psychiatrist, in whose office he also examines all the papers around, including those in the wastepaper basket, repeating all the time: “That is not it!” The psychiatrist, finally convinced that he really is mad, gives him a written warrant releasing him from military service. The conscript casts a look at it and says cheerfully: “That is it!”

  The Lacanian objet a is such a paradoxical entity that emerges as the result of the subject’s search for it.84

  THAT IS WHY IT CAN BE ILLUSTRATED by a multitude of jokes based on the same matrix: “Is this the place where the Duke of Wellington spoke his famous words?” “Yes, this is the place, but he never spoke those words.” These never-spoken words are a Lacanian Real. One can quote examples ad infinitum: “Smith not only doesn’t believe in ghosts; he isn’t even afraid of them!” … up to God himself who, according to Lacan, belongs to the Real: “God has all perfections except one—he doesn’t exist!”85

  IT IS LIKE THE SOVIET JOKE about Rabinovitch, a Jew who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why; Rabinovitch answers: “There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union the Communists will lose power, there will be a counterrevolution, and the new power will put all the blame for the Communist crimes on us, Jews—there will again be anti-Jewish pogroms …” “But,” interrupts the bureaucrat, “this is pure nonsense, nothing can change in the Soviet Union, the power of the Communists will last forever!” “Well,” responds Rabinovitch calmly, “that’s my second reason.”86

  VARIATIONS

  The structure of this reconciliation in mature Hegel is, again, that of the joke on Rabinovitch: “There are two reasons modern society is reconciled with itself. The first is the interaction of civil society …” “But the civil society interaction is a constant strife, the very mechanism of disintegration, of ruthless competition!” “Well, this is the second reason, since this very strife and competition makes individuals thoroughly interdependent and thus generates the ultimate social link.”87

  Are we here not back at the structure of the Rabinovitch joke? “Why do you think you are exploited?” “For two reasons. First, when I work, the capitalist appropriates my surplus value.” “But you are now unemployed; no one is appropriating your surplus value because you create none!” “That is the second reason.” Everything hinges here on the fact that the capitalist totality of production not only needs workers, but also generates the “reserve army” of those who cannot find work: the latter are not simply outside the circulation of capital, they are actively produced as not-working by this circulation. Or, to refer again to the Ninotchka joke, they are not simply not-working, their not-working is their positive feature in the same way as “coffee without milk” is its positive feature.88

  So, to retell the experience in the terms of the Rabinovitch joke: “We are going to Jerusalem for two reasons. First, we want to find Christ’s tomb, to dwell in the presence of divinity.” “But what you will discover in Jerusalem is that the tomb is empty, that there is nothing to find there, that all you have is yourself, Christians who are there.” “Well, this community of spirit IS the living Christ, and this is what we were really looking for!” The same goes for resurrection itself: “Christ will be resurrected!” “But we, his followers, who are waiting for him, we see nothing.” “True, you don’t see—what you don’t see is that the spirit of this community of yours, the love that bonds you, IS the resurrected Christ!” And the same goes even more for the entire topic of the Second Coming: nothing will “really happen,” no miracle of a God appearing, people will just realize that God IS ALREADY HERE, in the Spirit of their collective.89

  An unexpected version of the Rabinovitch joke was circulating in the former Yugoslavia: an officer wants to educate a gypsy soldier by teaching him poetry; so, in order to explain to him what rhyme is, he gives an example: “I play the balalaika, and I screw your mother.” (In Serb, this line rhymes: Igram balalaiku, yebem tvoiu maiku.) The gypsy answers: “Oh, I got it! Here is another one: I play the balalaika, I screw your wife.” The officer comments: “But this is not a rhyme!” The gypsy retorts: “It is not a rhyme, but it is true.” The catch is that, in Serbian, this last line loosely rhymes (Nije rima, ali je istina), so that we finally do get a rhyme, but as a second answer to the officer’s reaction to the first answer which was wrong (providing no rhyme).90

  This is what Hegel deployed as the dialectical shift in which the predicate itself turns into the subject—a shift that, again, can be retold as a version of the Rabinovitch joke: “I found the essence of femininity.” “But one cannot find it, femininity is dispersed, displaced.” “Well, this dispersion IS the essence of femininity.”91

  Today, however, Jews effectively fear that, with the disintegration of communism and the emergence of nationalistic forces openly advocating anti-Semitism, the blame will again be put on them, so that today we can easily imagine the reversal of the joke, with Rabinovitch answering the bureaucrat’s question: “There are two reasons why. The first is that I know that communism in Russia will last forever, nothing will really change here, and this prospect is unbearable for me.” “But,” interrupts the bureaucrat, “this is pure nonsense, communism’s crimes will be severely punished!” “That’s my second reason!” responds Rabinovitch.92

  A PHENOMENON CAN THUS tell the truth precisely by presenting itself as a lie, like the Jew in the Freudian joke often quoted by Lacan who reproaches his friend: “Why are you telling me that you are going to Cracow and not to Lemberg, when you’re really going to Cracow?” (Telling the truth represented a breach of the implicit code of deception that ruled their relationship: when one of them was going to Cracow, he was supposed to tell the lie that his destination was Lemberg, and vice versa).93

  VARIATIONS

  The elementary semantic axis that legitimizes party rule is the opposition between self-managing socialism and “bureaucratic” state-and-party socialism—in other words, the party-and-state bureaucracy legitim
izes its rule by an ideology which designates itself as the principal enemy, so that an ordinary Yugoslav subject could address to the ruling bureaucracy the same question as was addressed by one Jew to another in the joke recounted earlier. “Why are you telling me that the greatest enemy of workers’ self-management is the party-and-state bureaucracy, when the greatest enemy is really the party-and-state bureaucracy?”94

  As in a new version of the old Jewish joke: “You are polite, so why do you act as if you were polite?”95

  This mystery of the symbolic order is exemplified by the enigmatic status of what we call “politeness”: when, upon meeting an acquaintance, I say “Glad to see you! How are you today?” it is clear to both of us that, in a way, I “do not mean it seriously” (if my partner suspects that I am really interested, he may even be unpleasantly surprised, as though I were probing at something that is too intimate and of no concern to me—or, to paraphrase the old Freudian joke: “Why are you saying you’re glad to see me, when you’re really glad to see me!?”).96

  This difference between the two appearances (the way things really appear to us versus the way they appear to appear to us) is linked to the structure of the Freudian joke about a Jew who complains to his friend, “Why are you telling me you are going to Lemberg when you are really going to Lemberg?”: say, in the case of commodity fetishism, when I immediately perceive money as just a knot of social relations, not any kind of magic object, and I only treat it like a fetish in my practice, so that the site of fetishism is my actual social practice, I could effectively be reproached with: “Why are you saying that money is just a knot of social relations, when money really is just a knot of social relations?”97

  Consequently, one cannot but recall here the old Freudian joke of the Jew lying to his friend about the true destination of his voyage in the guise of truth itself: “Why did Clinton say that they should listen to the protesters, when they should effectively listen to the protesters?”98

  So, in the vein of Freud’s well-known Jewish joke, “Why are you telling me that you are going to Lemberg, when you are effectively going to Lemberg?,” the basic implicit reproach of the sucker-partner to the femme fatale could be formulated as “Why do you act as if you are just a cold manipulative bitch, when you really are just a cold manipulative bitch?”99

  THE EFFECT OF THE REAL occurs in the joke about a patient who complains to his analyst that there is a big crocodile under his bed. The analyst explains to him that this is his paranoiac hallucination and gradually cures him, so the patient stops seeing him. A couple of months later, the analyst encounters on the street a friend of his ex-patient with the crocodile-idea and asks how him how the patient is doing; the friend replies: “Which one do you mean? The one who is now dead since he was eaten by a crocodile that was hiding under his bed?”100

  THIS, HOWEVER, IS ONLY ONE SIDE of the phallus paradox; its reverse is indicated by a riddle/joke: “What is the lightest object on earth?—The phallus, because it is the only one that can be elevated by mere thought.”101

  VARIATION

  Erection depends entirely on me, on my mind (as the joke goes: “What is the lightest object in the world? The penis, because it is the only one that can be raised by a mere thought!”), yet it is simultaneously that over which I ultimately have no control (if I am not in the right mood, no amount of willpower will achieve it—that is why, for St. Augustine, the fact that erection escapes the control of my will is the divine punishment for man’s arrogance and presumption, for his desire to become master of the universe.)102

  “DID YOU HEAR THE ONE about a stupid worm trying to penetrate a puffy doughnut?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did I.”

  NOTES

  Unless otherwise indicated, all of the jokes are from unpublished manuscripts.

  1. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London: Verso, 2012), 39–40.

  2. Less Than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012), 599.

  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.

  Comedy is a legitimacy crisis

  followed by the sudden appearance

  of a cornucopia

  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.