Zizek, Nietzsche, and Language

Zizek, Nietzsche, and language
by doctorzamalek
January 14, 2009

Actually, there’s a lot of stuff I want to say about the philosophy of language, and not in the relatively dull way that analytic philosophers do it. It’s been done too much with meaning and reference in mind, with little or no eye toward the sorts of complaints I’ve made recently about the inherent stupidity of all content.

While on campus today (just got back; a 45-minute ride from our new distant but gorgeous desert compound) I dug out my copy of Zizek’s Ages of the World commentary where the rip on proverbs is, and I’ll think about it a bit more and make some more serious posts about it in February or so.

My other thoughts on the philosophy of language have to do with Nietzsche and Sade, both of them among the finest stylists the world has ever produced (overshadowed in Nietzsche’s case by specific philosophical doctrines that I could often take or leave, and in Sade’s case by all the salacious distractions that are really only a part of who he is, not the whole).

You’ve heard what I want to do with Sade– rewrite parts of him with the focus being on anything but lust, because… well, transgression is getting sort of boring, isn’t it? How many traditional social mores remain in our midst to be desecrated? Hasn’t “innocence” already been violated 70,000 times over? Haven’t we already shocked the clergy and our grandparents quite enough to get a lifetime’s adrenaline rush as intellectuals?

With Nietzsche, the same thing can be done as for Sade (as when I rewrote part of Zarathustra with the same style but in praise of democratic socialism and the virtues of the common man), but I have a different technique in mind… Some years ago, a friend and I tried to debunk jokes by making their enthymemes as explicit as possible. It ruins the jokes, of course, but that in itself can be funny. For instance, does everyone remember all those “blonde” jokes? Here was one of them:

“Q: How does a blonde turn on the lights after sex? A: She opens the car door.”

Get it? He ha ho. But it’s kind of funny to make the enthymemes explicit, one by one, and in doing so you get further and further away from joke territory.

1. “Q: Where do blondes have sex? A: In cars.”

I doubt anyone would laugh at that riddle in isolation, though it’s kind of funny in an exercise like this one.

The next step turns from a riddle into a simple kind of insulting syllogism:

2. “Blondes have sex in cars. Having sex in cars is sleazy. Therefore, blondes are sleazy.”

(My high school friend Michael Herrick is the one who first performed this analysis of the joke.)

But what does it have to do with Nietzsche? One of his best-liked lines is about Shakespeare. I don’t have it with me, but it’s something like: “how much a man must have suffered to find it necessary to play the buffoon!” You know the one I mean; the exact wording isn’t so important.

Here again, there is a tendency to rush too quickly toward a reflection on the content of the statement– scholars will rush ahead to some sort of claim about master vs. slave morality, or “the psychology of the affects,” or whatever. But what makes Nietzsche who he is is the power of his rhetoric, the way he plays games with the ratio between tacit and explicit aspects of the themes he discusses. Nietzsche could easily be rewritten to be incredibly boring and banal– all you have to do is perform a “blondes are sleazy” sort of operation on him.

Instead of doing that, however, I think it would be interesting to place Nietzsche in the company of other figures making neighboring statements to his own riff on Shakespeare, and see what that tells us about Nietzsche. In the following list, each of the imagined speakers damages or ruins Nietzsche’s statement in some way, and from seeing how they do so, we might learn some important things about why Nietzsche’s real “philosophy” lies in his rhetoric– not in the postmodernist antirealist sense of rhetoric, but in the realist sense of rhetoric (found in both Aristotle and McLuhan, and implicitly in Heidegger) as the attention to the unstated background over the visible dialectical figure. Not rhetoric as “language,” but as that which undermines all language.

Here they are, an army of well-meaning people who will manage to ruin Nietzsche somehow.

THE SIMPLETON: “Shakespeare must have been such a happy person to play the buffoon all the time.”

THE TEDIOUS BORE: “Shakespeare must really have suffered to play the buffoon all the time. It’s a sort of overcompensation. He really suffers inside, and so he jokes on the outside in order to forget his pain.”

THE MORALIST: “Shakespeare must really have suffered to play the buffoon all the time. And personally, I’m a bit annoyed that he feels the need to drag all of us down with him.”

THE PEDANT: “Shakespeare’s plays display instantiations of a ludic affect, which, one suspects, bespeak an inversion of his ‘true’ state of mind. Much work has been done in this area, but a full consideration lies beyond the scope of this essay (but see Johnson 1994a, Miner & Shaltgrover et al. 1997).”

THE CORNBALL: “Whenever he has those comical scenes, I ain’t fooled. I know Ole Billy’s got somethin’ stickin’ in his craw.”

THE SELF-ABSORBED: “Shakespeare must really have suffered to play the buffoon all the time. And that’s why I don’t envy him. Personally, I’ve never had those sorts of issues.”

I’ve misplaced my list, but at one point I’d come up with around 25 degenerate rewritings of Nietzsche’s outstanding phrase, and they do give insight into the complexities of any sentence by Nietzsche, which need to be rolled over the tongue like a fine wine.

Actually, while I’m at it, Zizek has a similar discussion in The Parallax View, where he hilariously glosses Hölderlin’s danger/saving power line as: “if you’re ever having trouble, the solution could be closer than you think. Help may be just around the corner.”

The funny thing is, as banal as that sounds, it’s not bad advice. It does contain useful, practical content that would benefit any one of us stuck in a tough situation. So why does it sound so comically stupid when it serves as a rephrasing of Hölderlin?

More on this later. As you can probably all tell by now, I’ve been thinking a lot about the inherent stupidity of content, and the limits of that stupidity.