Zizek's Jokes by Slavoj Žižek, Audun Mortensen Page B

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 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:
    â€œThat’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 …”
    â€œBut she was broken!”
    â€œYes, 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.”
    â€œHe’s a nutter!”
    â€œHe’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.”
    â€œHonestly! The fuckface!”
    â€œHe 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.”
    â€œHe 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: