Zizek's Jokes (6 page)

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 destined 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

THERE IS THUS AN ELEMENT OF TRUTH in a joke about a young Christian girl's ideal prayer to the Virgin Mary: “O thou who conceived without having sinned, let me sin without having to conceive!”—in the perverse functioning of Christianity, religion is, in effect, evoked as a safeguard allowing us to enjoy life with impunity.
⁴³

WAS CHRIST, in effect, occupying the position of the son in the wonderful joke about the rabbi who turns in despair to God, asking him what he should do with his bad son, who has deeply disappointed him; God calmly answers: “Do the same as I did: write a new testament!”
⁴⁴

SUCH A FALL by means of which God loses his distance and becomes involved, steps into the human series, is discernible in a classic joke from the German Democratic Republic in which Richard Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev, and Erich Honecker confront God, asking him about the future of their countries. To Nixon, God answers: “In 2000, the United States will be Communist!” Nixon turns away and starts to cry. To Brezhnev, He says: “In 2000, the Soviet Union will be under Chinese control.” After Brezhnev has also turned away and started to cry, Honecker finally asks: “And how will it be in my beloved GDR?” God turns away and starts to cry.

And here is the ultimate version: three Russians who share the same cell in Lubyanka prison have all been condemned for political offenses. While they are getting acquainted, the first says: “I was condemned to five years for opposing Popov.” The second says: “Ah, but then the party line changed, and I was condemned to ten years for supporting Popov.” Finally, the third one says: “I was condemned for life, and I
am
Popov.”
⁴⁵

THIS ALSO MAKES MEANINGLESS the Christian joke according to which, when, in John 8:1–11, Christ says to those who want to stone the woman taken in adultery, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone!” he is immediately hit by a stone, and then shouts back: “Mother! I asked you to stay at home!”
⁴⁶

IN HIS BOOK ON JOKES, Freud refers to the story of a middleman who tries to convince a young man to marry a woman he represents; his strategy is to change every objection into something praiseworthy. When the man says “But the woman is ugly!” he answers, “So you will not have to worry that she will deceive you with others!” “She is poor!” “So she will be accustomed not to spend too much of your money!” and so on, until, finally, when the man formulates a reproach impossible to reinterpret in this way, the middleman explodes, “But what do you want? Perfection? Nobody is totally without faults!”

Would it not also be possible to discern in this joke the underlying structure of the legitimization of a Real Socialist regime? “There is not enough meat and rich food in the stores!” “So you don't have to worry about getting fat and suffering a heart attack!” “There are not enough interesting theatrical and cinema performances or good books available!” “Does this not enable you to cultivate all the more an intense social life, visiting friends and neighbors?” “The secret police exerts total control over my life!” “So you can just relax and lead a life safe from worries!” and so on, until … “But the air is so polluted from the nearby factory that all my children have life-threatening lung diseases!” “What do you want? No system is without faults!”
⁴⁷

VARIATION

In an old Soviet joke, a customer goes to a bank, announces his intention to deposit 100 rubles, and inquires about how safe the deposits are. The bank clerk tells him that the bank guarantees all deposits, but the customer asks: “What if the bank collapses?” The clerk answers that the central bank also guarantees all local banks and their deposits. The customer persists: but what if the central bank itself collapses? The clerk again replies: “Then the Soviet state guarantees all bank deposits!” Still unconvinced, the customer raises the stakes to the top: “But what if the Soviet state itself disintegrates?” To this, the bank clerk explodes: “Are you telling me that you are not ready to lose the lousy 100 rubles as the price for such a wonderful event as the disappearance of the Soviet Union!”

WOULD IT NOT BE POSSIBLE to retell, in this way, the elementary story of Christianity, namely, as a joke with the final unexpected twist? A believer is complaining, “I was promised contact with God, divine grace, but now I am totally alone, abandoned by God, destitute, suffering, with only a miserable death awaiting me!” The divine voice then answers him, “You see, now you are effectively one with God—with Christ suffering on the cross!”
⁴⁸

RECALL THIS JOKE that perfectly renders the logic of the (in)famous Hegelian triad: Three friends have a drink at a bar; the first one says, “A horrible thing happened to me. At my travel agency, I wanted to say ‘A ticket to Pittsburgh!' and I said ‘A picket to Tittsburgh!'” The second one replies, “That's nothing. At breakfast, I wanted to say to my wife ‘Could you pass me the sugar, honey?' and what I said was ‘You dirty bitch, you ruined my entire life!'” The third one concludes, “Wait till you hear what happened to me. After gathering my courage all night, I decided to say to my wife at breakfast exactly what you said to yours, and I ended up saying ‘Could you pass me the sugar, honey?'”
⁴⁹

A COMIC HEGELIAN INTERLUDE:
DUMB AND DUMBER

How many people noticed that Hegelian dialectics is unconsciously practiced by Dan Quayle and George W. Bush? We thought we had seen it all with Quayle two decades ago; however, in comparison with Bush, Quayle emerges as a rather intelligent person. With regard to his famous mistake of correcting the spelling of “potato” into “potatoe,” I myself must admit it always seemed to me that Quayle was somehow right: “potatoe” comes closer to what Humboldt would have called the true “inner form” of potato. (Nonetheless, I must admit that I feel something similar apropos of Bush's recent “Grecians” instead of “Greeks”: “Keep good relations with the Grecians.” “Grecian” does seem somehow more dignified, like “thou art” instead of “you are,” while “Greek” sounds all too close to “geek”—were the founders of our noble Western civilization really just a bunch of geeks?)

How, then, does Bush compare with Quayle? Are Bush's slips, like those of Quayle at his best, at the level of the Marx Brothers' supreme slips (“No wonder you remind me of Emanuel Ravelli, since you ARE Ravelli!”), or of no less ingenious “goldwynisms,” the sayings attributed to the larger-than-life Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn (from “An oral agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on!” to the notorious “Include me out!”)? Most of Quayle's and Bush's slips follow the basic formula of what the French call
lapalissades
, the tautological statings of the obvious attributed to the mythical figure of Monsieur la Palice, like “One hour before his death, Monsieur la Palice was still fully alive.” Indeed, la Palice's ingenious “Why don't we build cities in the countryside where the air is much cleaner?” comes pretty close to a concise formulation of the Republican Party's ecological policy, rendered perfectly by Bush's truism: “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”

Here, then, are some examples of this elementary type of slip from Bush and Quayle: “If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure”; “A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls”; “For NASA, space is still a high priority.” These
lapalissades
get a little bit more interesting when pure tautology is emphatically offered as a causal explanation; see the following slip of Quayle: “When I have been asked who caused the riots and the killing in Los Angeles, my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.” (There is, of course, an implicit conservative political logic in this tautology, that is, this quote relies on an implicit negation: don't look for the “deeper” causes in social circumstances, it is the immediate perpetrators who bear the full responsibility.) Things get even more interesting when, in a strangely Hegelian way, Quayle explodes the identity by opposing the notion and its empirical exemplifications: “It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”

While Bush is not able to follow Quayle along this road, he often does catch up with him in producing slips in which a conceptual opposition is raised to the level of dialectical self-relating
Selbstbeziehung
. Recall how he posited the very opposition between irreversibility and reversibility as reversible: “I believe we are on an irreversible trend towards more freedom and democracy—but that could change.” So it's not simply that things are either reversible or irreversible: a situation that appears irreversible could change into a reversible one. Here is an even nicer example of this reflexivity: “The future will be better tomorrow.” The point is not simply that Quayle made a mistake, intending to claim that tomorrow things will be better: in the near future (tomorrow),
future itself
will look brighter to us. Did Bush not reproduce exactly the same structure in his statement “One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected”?