How Old is 15 Really

In one of his earlier talk shows, Dave Chappelle asked a question: “How old is 15 really?” For one, as he pointed out, 15 years old is the age where you are allowed to mess shit up—kidnapped girls from Utah are allowed to be “stupid” when taken by their captor (she, as Dave recounted, had multiple opportunities to escape, including the fact that her detainment location was merely eight miles away from her home). On the other hand, a young Black boy at the age of 15 who also did a stupid thing—accidentally killing his neighbor while they were play-wrestling—got sentenced to life.

“If this motherfucker can kill at 15, imagine what he can do grown up” (paraphrased).

The two examples are shit, but reasonable when you consider the context of offensive comedy. But such absurdities exist in surplus in society: why can children as young as 14 in China buy sex toys online but not register online gaming accounts (trust me, I tried)? Why is 15 too young to consent to sex but old enough to be sentenced to life in prison (where they likely would be raped)? Why can someone join the army and die at 18 but not have a beer? To philosophy, this surplus of absurdity points only to one answer: the contradictions, the symptoms, the surplus of society.

This is where the philosophies of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and many more begin—the unconscious of the world—eventually culminating into something holistic (as with Žižek totalizing the contradictions in our ideological space), something precise (as with Derrida pointing out the exact confrontations within the text), and something grand (as with Deleuze crafting the grand scheme of the organs of our society). Following this tradition, this will also be the project of our Phenomenology of Quips in 2025—starting now, we will be examining the absurd to carve out reason.