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…
