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Popular Culture Review
ironic humiliation” (63). All of the trappings of civilization—^the refinement of
bands playing, the inspirational sayings such as “Arbeit macht frei!”^—are
simply in service to that joke.^ For Zizek, conceiving of the Holocaust as a
monstrous joke played on the Jews provides a way out of the temptation to
isolate causal factors and to declare once and for all a particular determinant of
the atrocities. ^ The Holocaust is meaningless to Zizek, not in H