[Peace-discuss] Chomsky & Zizek on politics and ideology

[C. G. Estabrook]

At tonight's AWARE meeting, a question arose about the recent exchanges between Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek. Most of what's been written about the debate is worthless - notably pieces in the WSJ and the Guardian - but what Chomsky and Zizek themselves have written is rather straightforward and surprisingly easy to understand.   

There are (so far) only four important texts, all relatively brief:

[1] "Noam Chomsky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Empty ‘Posturing,’" by Mike Springer (28 June 2013)
<http://www.openculture.com/2013/06/noam_chomsky_slams_zizek_and_lacan_empty_posturing.html>, as follows:

Noam Chomsky’s well-known political views have tended to overshadow his groundbreaking work as a linguist and analytic philosopher. As a result, people sometimes assume that because Chomsky is a leftist, he would find common intellectual ground with the postmodernist philosophers of the European Left. Big mistake. In this brief excerpt from a December, 2012 interview with Veterans Unplugged, Chomsky is asked about the ideas of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. The M.I.T. scholar, who elsewhere has described some of those figures and their followers as “cults,” doesn’t mince words:

"What you’re referring to is what’s called 'theory.' And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. Jacques Lacan I actually knew. I kind of liked him. We had meetings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential."

[2] Slavoj Žižek Responds to Noam Chomsky: ‘I Don’t Know a Guy Who Was So Often Empirically Wrong’ (15 July 2013)
<http://esjaybe.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/zizeks-response-to-chomsky/>

[3] "Fantasies," by Noam Chomsky (21 July 2013)
<http://chomsky.info/articles/20130721.htm>

[4] "Some Bewildered Clarifications: A Response to Noam Chomsky by Slavoj Žižek" (25 July 2013)
<http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1365-some-bewildered-clarifications>

If there's interest in this debate among AWAREists, we might devote a half-hour in a meeting to discussing it - or perhaps a half-hour on "AWARE on the Air."