Monsieur de La Palice dying
joke · French/La Palice tradition ·
retold in 3 talks
French tautological jokes about Monsieur de La Palice: 'half a minute before he was dead, he was still alive.' Žižek uses this to articulate his attitude to death, not domesticating it but accepting it as a stupid contingent detail.
As told 2
“half a minute before he was dead, Monsieur de La Palice was still alive. That's my attitude.”
“Eno minuto predno je umrl, je bil gospod La Palice še živ.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti)1Branko Milanović1Hans-Georg Gadamer1Lea Ypi1Enver Hoxha1Kevin Costner1Yevgeny Zamyatin1Wim Wenders1
alongside works
Every retelling 2
French tautological jokes about Monsieur de La Palice: 'half a minute before he was dead, he was still alive.' Žižek uses this to articulate his attitude to death, not domesticating it but accepting it as a stupid contingent detail., illustrating attitude to death,living dead
French mythic figure of obvious truths: 'one minute before he died, M. de La Palice was still alive', used to frame Jameson's life-committed-to-ideas-until-the-end., illustrating communist commitment,vocation vs. job