Zizek's Jokes (11 page)

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 shape. 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

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.