Zizek's Jokes by Slavoj Žižek, Audun Mortensen Read Free Book Online

 
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    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.
    Å½ižek 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