It is like the Soviet joke about Rabinovitch, a Jew who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why; Rabinovitch answers: “There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union the Communists will lose power, there will be a counterrevolution, and the new power will put all the blame for the Communist crimes on us, Jews—there will again ...
别无选择。 In a classic line from a Hollywood screwball comedy, the girl asks her boyfriend: “Do you want to marry me?” “No!” “Stop dodging the issue! Give me a straight answer!” In a way, the underlying logic is correct: the only acceptable straight answer for the girl is “Yes!” so anything else, inclusive of a straight “No!” counts as evasion. This underlying logic, of course, is ag...
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 m...
One can even develop into a Hegelian triad the lines from Psalm 23:4: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” Its first negation would have been a radical reversal of the subjective position, as in the ghetto-rapper-version: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...
谎言形式的真实。 A phenomenon can thus tell the truth precisely by presenting itself as a lie, like the Jew in the Freudian joke often quoted by Lacan who reproaches his friend: “Why are you telling me that you are going to Cracow and not to Lemberg, when you’re really going to Cracow?” (Telling the truth represented a breach of the implicit code of deception that ruled their relationship: w...
为了满足淫秽的大他者。 This inherent reference to the Other on account of which “there is no Don Giovanni without Leporello” (Don Giovanni obviously rates the inscription of his conquests into Leporello’s register higher than the pleasure provided by the conquests themselves) is the theme of a low-class joke on a poor peasant who, after surviving a shipwreck, finds himself on a desert island...
爱学习的列宁。 In the good old days of “actually existing Socialism,” every schoolchild was told again and again of how Lenin read voraciously, and of his advice to young people: “Learn, learn, and learn!” A classic joke from Socialism produces a nice subversive effect by using this motto in an unexpected context. Marx, Engels, and Lenin were each asked what they preferred, a wife or a mist...
弗洛伊德笑话：人无完人。 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 accustom...
巧克力泻药：对治疗手段上瘾。 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” ...
波兰老笑话：建成社会主义。 Although “really existing socialism” has already receded into a distance that confers upon it the nostalgic magic of a postmodern lost object, some of us still recall a well-known Polish anticommunist joke from the epoch of “really existing socialism”: “Socialism is the synthesis of the greatest achievements of all previous modes of production: from preclass trib...
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