A reader kindly draws our attention to a further major demolition of Slavoj Zizek by Johann Hari at the New Statesman:

So is Zizek a kind of philosophers’ Borat, taking ludicrous positions to see how far he can push them?

His followers dismiss every depraved political statement as an ironic joke. At times he insists he is not a comedian, that he means every word. Then he confesses in a moment of self-awareness: "My eternal fear is that if for a moment I stopped talking the whole spectacular appearance would disintegrate [and] people would think there is nobody and nothing there. They would think I am a nobody who has to pretend all the time to be a somebody."

As he watches his hero Jacques Lacan deliver an incomprehensible lecture on video, Zizek exclaims: "There is nothing behind this obscurity. This is just bluffing."

It is a plain moment of projection, and an unwitting confession of charlatanism. His political thought quickly descends into contradictory drivel, where he claims he is against the people who condemn the bombing of Kosovo and against the people who condone it, and calls for "a revolution without revolution"…

… This kind of thought can only be entertained because nobody would ever take it seriously enough to act on it. When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say we should all become schizophrenic, when the gay Michel Foucault embraces the murderously homophobic Ayatollah Khomeini, when Zizek suggests a return to Leninist terror – these very positions are admissions that postmodernism is merely an unserious confection by intellectuals. It leads nowhere except to demoralisation and disaffection…

… You do not end up hating Zizek, not even when he says with Stalinist relish that he wants to rehabilitate "notions of discipline, collective order, subordination". Rather, you end up hating the academics who take this non-thought seriously.

Are they really saying you can advocate tyranny as long as you throw in a few gags about Keanu Reeves? In the end, they leave us nothing but a theory-clown with bloody tears.

Sounds good to me.

Yet here we are, facing the dire fact that the greater the volume and quantity of Zizekian nonsense, the more elaborate the effort seemingly needed in heavyweight publications to attack it.

Perhaps this takes us back to ancient theological wrangling over the nature and moral quality of Laughter.

This is one of the superbly turned themes in The Name of The Rose, Umberto Eco’s murder mystery set in a mediaeval monastery. The story turns on efforts to keep secret a supposedly long-lost treatise by Aristotle praising laughter and mirth as a necessary part of the human condition. Could/would its re-emergence lead to all Authority being undermined by public facile tittering?

Read for yourselves the moving yet profoundly witty final scenes as the rival monks debate the issues to and fro, before a deadly struggle ensues and fire breaks out…

Laughter is one thing: it has a largely constructive, rueful quality: taking the human condition and making the best of it in a democratic ‘we’re-all-in-this-together’ sort of way..

Sneering is quite another – an essentially destructive, undemocratic, inhuman attempt to assert superiority.

Zizekists try to belittle Zizekian sneering, relegating it to the allegedly benign or even helpfully insightful category of post-modern irony. The New Statesman piece helps civilisation by shooting that to pieces with unerring accuracy.

Here by contrast to all this awful nihilism is an elegant article by David Heim on the broader theme of religion and humour, including unexpected lightbulb jokes involving Christian Scientists and Presbyterians – and others:

How many United Methodists does it take to change a light bulb?

United Methodists do not have a policy on changing light bulbs, but if you feel called to change a light bulb they will provide resources and support in your journey…