Yugoslav army chaos
anecdote · Slovenian/Yugoslav ·
retold in 3 talks
A self-described lover of order, he was shocked by the chaos, nasty rituals and unwritten rules of his Yugoslav military service, proof that every civilization has a dark, transgressive underside.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“the chaos, at least in the Yugoslav army, all the nasty rituals, unwritten rules that you have to obey”
“the way you greeted your friend in the morning was not hello, good morning, it was smoke my brick... i'll smoke your prick glad i will do it after”
“you you arrive at a result only through the failure. The failure is never simply a failure.”
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
Nicaragua1Norman Kemp Smith1Ferdinand de Saussure1Ryszard Kapuściński1Philip K. Dick1Spike Lee1Giorgia Meloni1Émile Durkheim1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
A self-described lover of order, he was shocked by the chaos, nasty rituals and unwritten rules of his Yugoslav military service, proof that every civilization has a dark, transgressive underside., illustrating American ideology,common ethical substance
Žižek recounts his time in the Yugoslav army where, despite official homophobia, soldiers greeted each other with 'Smoke my brick' (a sexual innuendo). This illustrates how traditional authoritarian spaces included 'regulatory transgressions' that were permitted and thus stripped of subversive power., illustrating regulatory transgression,ideology
A soldier pretends madness by looking at every paper and saying 'this is not that.' Doctors eventually give him a discharge paper; he looks at it and says 'this is that.' The punchline is that the object (the paper that is that) emerges only through the endless series of 'this is not that.', illustrating negativity,Hegelian speculative process,determinate negation