> What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank? ^fda1aa ###### Explanation Joke by [[Bertolt Brecht]]. Relevant to [[systemic violence]]. [[Slavoj Žižek|Žižek]] quotes it a few times: > “As Bertolt Brecht puts it in his Threepenny Opera: ‘what is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?’” ([[The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)|Sublime]], 26) The one from [[Less Than Nothing (2012)]] is pretty weird: > “One can well imagine a truly obscene version of the famous “The Aristocrats” joke that easily beats all the vulgarity of family members vomiting, defecating, fornicating, and humiliating each other in all possible ways: when asked to perform, they give the talent agent a short course in Hegelian thought, debating the true meaning of negativity, of sublation, of Absolute Knowledge, and so forth, and, when the bewildered agent asks them the name of the weird show, they enthusiastically reply: “The Perverts!" Indeed, to paraphrase the good old Brecht’s slogan “What is the robbing ofa bank against a founding of a newbank?”: whatisthe disturbingshockoffamilymembers defecating into one another's mouths compared to the shock of a proper dialectical reversal? ” ([[Less Than Nothing (2012)|Less]], 17)