by James Warner
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Lacan.
Lacan who?
Lacan for whom the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being the symbol only of an absence.
- - - -
“Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I’m a doctor.”
“You cretin, you are talking to yourself in the mirror again!”
- - - -
Q: What makes a Lacanian joke funny?
A: Its signifier by its very nature anticipates meaning, unfolding its dimension before it.
- - - -
Pablo Picasso had a problem: all he could paint nowadays was salad.
Admitting at last that he needed psychiatric help, he took a few paintings of arugula to the rue de Lille, to show to Lacan, his private doctor.
When Picasso saw a celebrated art dealer waiting at the Solférino Métro station, he didn’t want the word getting around that he could only paint arugula, so he shamefacedly left his work behind him on the train.
Reaching Lacan’s waiting room, he was astonished to see his paintings already hanging on the wall, beautifully framed and signed with a grandiloquent flourish. “You should know by now,” Lacan beamed, “that a lettuce always arrives at its destination.”
- - - -
Q: What is the difference between a Lacanian and an elephant?
A: A Lacanian resituates Freudian concepts in a context that is not biologically determined, while an elephant has a huge trunk.
“First of all,” the man enthuses, “I want to be Slavoj Žižek.”
“You cretin!” the genie replies. “You already are Slavoj Žižek!”
- - - -
Lacan once had a patient who believed he was a chicken.
At last, the man was cured. When he was released from the asylum, he crossed the road. Lacan called out, “Why are you crossing the road?”
“To get to the other of the Other,” the patient replied.
“You cretin!” Lacan said. “The other of the Other does not exist.”
“I know,” the patient replied, “but tell that to the fox!”
“I guess he’s cured,” Lacan thought to himself, “at least by Parisian standards.”
- - - -
Q: How is a Lacanian psychoanalytic session like a penis?
A: They are both of variable length.
“No, but it is a bit perverted,” Lacan replies, “considering that I’ve been dead for 27 years.”
- - - -
A Freudian, a Jungian, and a Lacanian walk into a bar.
The Freudian orders a cigar.
The Jungian orders an Etruscan mask to conceal his face.
“You cretins!” says the Lacanian. He then orders a beer, which, however, he does not desire.
wanna hear some Žižek's jokes?
- For decades, a classic joke has been circulating among Lacanians…
- There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida…
- One can well imagine a truly obscene version of the “aristocrats” joke…
- The logic of the Hegelian triad can be perfectly rendered by the three versions of the relationship between sex and migraines…
- When the Turkish Communist writer Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the mid- 1930s, the time of the big purges…
- The reason I find Badiou problematic is…
- This also makes meaningless the Christian joke…
- In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic,…
- There is an Israeli joke about Bill Clinton…
- In the good old days of “actually existing Socialism,” every schoolchild was told again and again…
Source: Lacanian Jokes of the Day (5/30/2008)
