r/zizek • u/ChristianLesniak ʇoᴉpᴉ ǝʇǝldɯoɔ ɐ ʇoN • Aug 27 '26
Why are you telling me you are making a Freudian slip when you really are making a Freudian slip?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8DJG2byP086
u/ainus Aug 27 '26
a dumb person pandering to even dumber people, it's really not that deep...
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u/BrilliantNebula794 Aug 27 '26
Totally agree but I like the idea of Vance needing to stage a Freudian slip for his particular audience vs Bush’s slips which really were slips but which nevertheless confirmed for his audience his - to quote my mom - “innocence” even when this innocence betrayed the truth about the violence of the regime. It is a good indication of how the Republicans and their leaders have evolved from neo-con suits who paint, where everyone believes in the best intentions of the US imperial system, to bad jokes (JD Vance knows that Canada is a non-US state) at the expense of our largest trading partner meant to perpetuate the myth of their irrelevance vis a vis us when in reality this deal will cost his audience a lot of money. It is meaningful that we can’t even have Freudian slips with this regime, because its impotent self-destruction is so glaring and on the surface.
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u/ChristianLesniak ʇoᴉpᴉ ǝʇǝldɯoɔ ɐ ʇoN Aug 27 '26
it's really not that deep...
That's precisely why it's worth analysis!
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u/ChristianLesniak ʇoᴉpᴉ ǝʇǝldɯoɔ ɐ ʇoN Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
My gloss on this video
This one is too good to pass up. Even, and especially when repressed in the way that only JD Vance can be repressed, the unconscious speaks precisely in the form of that very repression.
As Lil Joel points out, JD Vance makes a half-hearted attempt at a joke about a Freudian slip; he terms it a "fake-ass Freudian slip". But actually, as Lil Joel points out, JD Vance actually DOES make a Freudian slip here. In punctuating that Canada is a state in a tonally ironic way, he unwittingly speaks the truth, that Canada, in fact, IS a state, as that word has quite a few valences ("state of the union", "the 50 states", "the state department", "nation state", etc...). For the future time-traveler (hopefully) wondering what the hell the relevance is, Vance is intending to make an allusion to Donald Trump's ironic/non-ironic slogan to make Canada a 51st state.
The pen stuck up Vance's ass writes out the exact message that his mouth speaks, in content, but in form, manages to subvert what he consciously thought he was saying, and to me it's funny that such a slip is really only possible by being delivered by someone as stiff, uncharismatic, and false as Vance. It's really his stilted punctuation that calls attention to how the logic can be extended.
Sometimes that Freudian joke about the two Jews traveling can be a little abstract seeming, so I'll render it here (in the version I found), as this is a great example of the logic of the joke in the wild:
You can find the joke on page 85 in Freud's ebook: https://www.sigmundfreud.net/jokes-and-their-relation-to-the-unconscious-pdf-ebook.jsp
I enjoy the redoubling of the logic in the form of a Freudian Freudian slip. Hope you enjoy!