by Slavoj Zizek
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:
1. That “the People always support the Party because any member of the People who opposes Party rule automatically excludes himself from the People.”
2. That “if you love God, you can do whatever you like, because when you do something evil, this is in itself a proof that you do not really love God.”
3. That “a Truth is never enforced, because the moment the fidelity to Truth functions as an excessive enforcement, we are no longer dealing with a Truth, with fidelity to a Truth-Event.”
4. That “I never make a mistake in applying a rule, since what I do defines the very rule.”
5. And that, most gnomically of all, “here also, the fiancée is reduced to her symbolic function of fiancée.” In the terms of another favorite Žižek joke, why do you claim to be a fiancée when you are actually a fiancée?
Allowing Žižek to boil complex situations down until they can be identified with jokes has benefits for the reader. It is as if the joke has become for Žižek what algebra is for his old ally and rival Badiou: the most concise way Žižek knows to sum up a universal situational sh
ape. Unlike algebra, however, the joke brings with it, simply by virtue of being a joke, the liberating implication that the situation described is no longer inherently legitimate or inevitable. Identifying it as something laughable gives us the impression that it is also something that can be left behind. Laughter is, in this sense, revolutionary.
Not content to use Žižek’s Freud Kettle joke just once in my Book of Jokes, I revisit in the form of a joke about a doll. Luisa is complaining that her father has borrowed a doll called Hanna and returned it broken:
“That’s the worst thing,” said Luisa. “He told me he’d never borrowed Hanna in the first place, and that when he’d given her back to me Hanna hadn’t been broken. Then he added that Hanna had already been broken when he’d first borrowed her, and that a broken doll is in fact more charming than an unbroken one, and that therefore it was a real shame Hanna wasn’t in fact broken …”
“But she was broken!”
“Yes, she was broken all right. Then he told me that, in a sense, every broken doll is whole and every unbroken doll is in fragments.”
“He’s a nutter!”
“He’s a nutter, all right. He followed that with the information that Hanna both was and was not broken, depending on how you looked at it. Then he said that, although the doll was mine, her brokenness was his, and that he had broken Hanna for her own good. Then Dad started to cry and said that nothing could replace my broken Hanna, so ‘Here’s nothing!’ And he made as if to hand me nothing.”
“Honestly! The fuckface!”
“He wasn’t finished, either. He told me—quite seriously—that what’s important now is not the unbroken doll, but how she has broken our hearts, therefore making us whole and joining us together. ‘We have all been broken by this non-doll Hanna,’ he said, ‘who has therefore healed us.’ I was weeping too by this point. He’s a clever old bastard, Dad.”
“He is, too.”
I’m not entirely joking when I say that Žižek is my father.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2012 The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London: Verso
2012 Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso
2010 Living in the End Times. London: Verso.
2009 Philosophy in the Present. Cambridge: Polity (with Alain Badiou).
2009 Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism. London/New York: Continuum International Publishing Group (with Markus Gabriel).
2009 First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. London: Verso.
2009 In Search of Wagner (Radical Thinkers). London: Verso (selected texts of Theodor W. Adorno with introduction by Žižek).
2009 The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (with John Milbank).
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press).
Audun Mortensen, born in 1985, is the author of two poetry books, a novel, and a coffee table book version of The Collected Jokes of Slavoj Žižek (2011) in a limited edition of 1. He lives in Berlin.
Momus, born Nick Currie in Scotland in 1960, is the author of more than twenty albums of songs and three books. His first novel, published in 2008, was The Book of Jokes, an account of an extremely dysfunctional family destined to live out their lives as characters locked in a series of dirty and cruel jokes. His latest album is Bibliotek (2012), cast in a genre he calls “pastoral horror.” Momus lives in Osaka, Japan.