Tom and Jerry
example · cartoon: Tom and Jerry ·
retold in 12 talks
Cartoons like Tom and Jerry feature characters being run over or cut into pieces, only to reappear instantly in the next scene, demonstrating the same 'undead' logic as games.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 11
“In one scene Tom or Jerry is I don't know run over by a truck, cut into pieces. Okay, catastrophe but hop in next scene it is here and so on.”
“The brutality of our competitive life which as such cannot be directly represented in a film with real actors... you can do it in cartoons.”
“You slice them you kill them they return again and again.”
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
Pablo Picasso3Wolfgang Schäuble3Louis Aragon2Damir Arsenijević2Laurent de Sutter2Germaine Greer2Marquis de Sade5Simone de Beauvoir2
alongside works
Every retelling 11
Cartoons like Tom and Jerry feature characters being run over or cut into pieces, only to reappear instantly in the next scene, demonstrating the same 'undead' logic as games., illustrating undeadness
Tom and Jerry cartoons represent the betrayal, cutting, and violence of competitive life that cannot be shown with real actors, the cartoon form allows the repressed brutality of social existence to appear., illustrating truth has the structure of a fiction,ideology in popular culture
Tom and Jerry cartoons exemplify the death drive as obscene immortality: characters are sliced, killed, and return again and again, the compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) as spectral persistence beyond death., illustrating death drive,undead,Wiederholungszwang
Classic cartoons like Tom and Jerry enact obscene immortality: the cat is run over, cut to pieces, but immediately reconstitutes and begins again, an undead circular universe predating video games, analogous to the Sadean victim in de Sade's Juliette., illustrating obscene immortality,denial of castration,undeadness
Žižek compares his reaction to Aleksandr Dugin’s praise of J.D. Vance as a 'Lacanian intervention' to Tom and Jerry’s eyes popping out, highlighting the absurdity of claiming Trump/Vance are Lacanian subjects., illustrating libidinal level,ideology
In Tom and Jerry cartoons, when Tom's skin is torn away a human body in shorts is revealed beneath. Žižek reads this as deep ideological truth: cartoon animals are basically humans dressed as animals, the human is the universal template., illustrating das Tier / human as the animal,anthropomorphism,universality as human projection