Interesante reflexión de Zizek pero quizás no sea tan gracioso como cuando habla en serio. ( )

Žižek is a bit like the font comic sans, be wary of anyone who is too much in love with or too much opposed to the media personality of Slavoj Žižek. He is in many ways someone I deeply enjoy, and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in his more abrasive moments and assume, given what he says clearly, that he tries to make a clever wraparound argument via jokes and "silliness" and often falls flat or says something that reinforces the thing I _think_ he is attempting to mock. (Or, he ends up being crude because that's how he's decided to be funny, who knows?)

In a weird way I hope he's the last of his generation of comedians (I know this won't be the case, because that's not how influence or culture works :) ... I want to see someone with his intersection of interests and his willingness to be obtuse, but with an upgraded baseline where sexual violence or boring hetero battles of the sexes are not considered for lazy punchlines, for example.

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But to the jokes. They're not funny :) But they give me exactly what I want, which is awkward delivery of cynicism and shaggy dog stories while using a casual philosophical understanding and soviet humour tropes. They remind me a lot of my friends, nerdy academicians or nerdy programmer types, where we try to tell a joke but it's clear that we're [badly] using the humour to actually explore some geeky thing underneath ... why is why our jokes are bad and most people roll their eyes, but so it goes.

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I get that Zizek is about as philosophically sound as Ayn Rand, but I do appreciate at least his approach. And I _feel_, though perhaps I am wrong, that his arguments are trying to further the world to a better place or at least point people to if even if I don't think his audience necessarily sees it that way or if it's even all that effective in the first place. There's an amount of cynical distrust of everything, authority, truth, belief, other people, etc... that I really respect, but I feel like with the one glaring exception of needing to have really gendered humour at women's expense [probably less because of any opinions re: women but just because "that's just the way jokes are, jokes about shrill wives is a classic avenue"]. Maybe I'm wrong, I'm not a zizek junkie, but what little I've read of his stuff makes me feel its a weak point as compared to a foundational position even if I would not begrudge people who decide they have no time for this.

Anyway this is awesome dad joke humour, but that means it falls within the same constraints and flows of traditional dad joke humour even if it's covering a fresh space within that realm.

( )

3.25 Stars
2.20 for the Jokes,
1.05 for Lacan and Hegelian connotations.

In the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink:

“Everybody is wonderful here: stores are full, good is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair — the only thing unavailable is red ink”

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants - the only thing missing is the “red ink”: we ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate out unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict - “war on terror,” “democracy and freedom,” “human rights,” etc. - are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it.
The task today is to give the protestors Red ink. ( )

This is a collection of jokes and remotely humorous passages in Zizek's writing and manuscripts. There is a lot of repetition and no context at all, which makes it close to impossible to grasp the philosophical ideas. Some of the passages are actually funny, but that cannot make up for the lack of substance. ( )

Merci à Babelio et aux Editions PUF pour l'envoi de cet petit opuscule dans le cadre de la Masse Critique de Juin 2014.

Le titre m'avait attiré et me semblait intéressant. Associer l'humour très typé des blagues avec une réflexion philosophique était une démarche relativement incongrue et qui pouvait révéler de belles pistes de réflexions.

Slavoj Zizek, l'auteur de cet petit ouvrage, semble être un philosophe contemporain reconnu et connu et son humour ou tout du moins les blagues qui sont la base de sa réflexion sont très orientées autour du sexe, des juifs, de la religion et du communisme. Des blagues qui sont souvent assez drôles et qui parfois m'ont bien fait rire.

Néanmoins le but de cet essai n'est pas un recueil de bonnes blagues à raconter lors d'une soirée entre amis, mais un recueil de philosophie et c'est là que les difficultés commencent. Car si la démarche m'a semblé intéressante à chercher des préceptes et réflexions philosophiques dans des blagues, il m'a manqué assez souvent une étape importante que saute allègrement l'auteur. On passe directement de la blague au concept brut philosophique, sans explication ou démonstration pédagogique, par exemple la triade Hégélienne. On a du mal alors, pour ceux, comme moi, qui ne maîtrise pas forcément tout les concepts philosophiques et psychanalytiques à suivre la réflexion de ZIzek et apprécier son raisonnement.

Ce petit ouvrage a tout le même une qualité à nous obliger à réfléchir, à rechercher dans ses souvenirs de classe de philo, à reprendre des notions et concepts.
Il a aussi le mérite dans la toute première partie de s'interroger sur "la blague", qui n'a généralement pas d'auteur, qui apparaît comme cela ex-nihilo et se propage de manière virale.

Un petit opuscule amusant à lire, difficile à comprendre et enrichissant. ( )