Here is a great icebreaker to use when you want to engage a stranger at a cocktail party about repressive desublimation. You can say, "Hey, do you know what's worse than repressive desublimation?" When the person says no, you answer, "DEpressive REsublimation!" A few good laughs and a new friendship is born. Here's how the joke works: "depressive" sounds sad, and "resublimation" sounds as if you sublimated something, and then you finally opened up about it and acknowledged it and the healing process began, and then for some reason you had to sublimate it again! What a drag! It's a play on words. I just "googled" it to see if I was the first to think of switching up the first letters to create some hilarity with depressive resublimation. I was not. Jean Baudrillard said it once, apparently, on one page of one book. According to wikipedia, he was a "French cultural theorist, sociologist, philosopher, political commentator, and photographer." So we have a lot in common! Now, maybe you think that it sounds as if, in the joke, you are "putting down" repressive desublimation. But don't worry! It is a great way to get the conversation rolling as we head into 2010, "The Year of Repressive Desublimation."
