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Jordan Peterson vs. Slavoj Žižek
Video Podcast Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugp6RooQjjM&t=
I’ve always liked Slavoj Žižek. Last year I read 3 massive tomes of his work, for their richness of sources and entertaining stories. Getting lost in the forest of Žižek is like being in a dense jungle: eventually you get to a clearing and discover a flash insight, even if most of the time you feel lost in the somewhat impenetrable tangle of Lacanian theory. I kept reading for those flashes of insight and provocation and yet never really got what Žižek stood for — his essence remained obscure to me. Žižek is a master storyteller, a great comedian, a feast of words, perhaps a black magician, but ….
This year I also discovered Jordan B Peterson’s work, and have often meditated on the differences between the two men. Not just their political differences — Peterson calls himself a classical liberal and Žižek a communist — but their essential differences as personality types as well. Peterson’s work on ‘The Big Five Personality Traits’ has helped me some in this respect: Žižek and Peterson are obviously high in ‘trait openness’ and IQ —or creativity and abstraction — but Peterson is far more conscientious and Žižek far more neurotic. The differences can be seen in body language: Peterson’s suits and gentlemanly demeanour vs Žižek’s designer t-shirts and wild hair; Žižek’s apparent indifference to personal hygiene and constant twitching, vs Peterson’s poised, charismatic presence.
Of course, while grooming and style might seem like an irrelevant subject, it is analogous to how they both write and talk. Žižek comes up with a huge book every couple of years, whereas Peterson spent many years writing and re-writing his first book Map’s of Meaning. Peterson has said that he wrote and rewrote every sentence of that book over 50 times. Žižek, on the other hand, seems to write at the speed he thinks and speaks, in a voluminous cloud. In interviews, Žižek tends to swarm his opponent in this cloud; whereas Peterson, while he also talks a lot, appears to listen to what the other is saying.
Recently Žižek wrote an uncharacteristically short “hit piece” on Peterson in The Independent that surprised the hell out of me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he obviously hadn’t done any research: he had fallen for every kind of caricature which the…
