“Is Something Funny, Asshole?": Joker’s Nihilist Violence

Abstract

Joker is a film that explores the forms of nihilism and their intertwinement in contemporary society. Thus, it can be viewed as a piece of theorizing and social diagnosis.We start with looking at the Joker’s violence.Why is it nihilistic and what sort of nihilism is that? But we can also see the Joker’s violence as an act of anti-nihilism, as a way of challenging society’s inherent nihilism. We discuss this in the following section. Is the Joker a revolutionary that criticizes society and opens up for a space for a new politics? In the third section, the article focuses on the film not as a narrative but as form: is it a comedy of pain or an attempt at overcoming nihilism? And, finally, by way of a conclusion, we ask what we should do with the Joker’s obscene laughter. The pivotal intuition in our discussion is that the concept of nihilism is a central and necessary tool for a diagnosis of our political predicament and a way to rethink the possibility of a radical emancipatory act within it today. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.