Books January 2015
Philosophical roughage
A review of Zizek's Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation? (MIT Press) by Slavoj Žižek.
There are many good jokes in Žižek’s book, particularly the Jewish jokes and the old Eastern European jokes ridiculing socialism. This is hardly surprising since these were and indeed remain two of the greatest sources and traditions of joke-telling in the twentieth century. But Žižek’s Jewish jokes are not the best of Jewish jokes and his understanding of them is limited. As a Slovenian survivor of the Tito era, he has rather more insight into the jokes about the now defunct socialist system, which Žižek, socialist though he is, freely recognizes was a complete disaster. But there are many other much better collections of and commentaries on the jokes of socialism by sounder scholars than Žižek, notably the works of Bruce Adams, David Brandenberger, Seth Benedict Graham and Arvo Krikmann—and there is another, but modesty prevents me from naming him. The jokes in Žižek’s book are not even...
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