Some folks have been complaining that the debate was disappointing ā because it wasnāt a debate, or because the debaters donāt haveā¦
Some folks have been complaining that the debate was disappointing ā because it wasnāt a debate, or because the debaters donāt have sufficient intellectual integrity, or because theyāre doomed to talk at cross purposes (or doomed to agree too much). To be honest, this debate seems to be interesting because it hews so closely to what Peterson and Zizek normally do ā which is to say, Peterson uses vague and confused allusions to books he never read (and books heās read part of but didnāt understand) to try to justify a conventional center-right conservative position in a way that sounds vaguely intellectual, while Zizek rambles about whatever happens to be on his mind and makes intellectually interesting & clever points of dubious truth & dubious utility.
What didnāt seem to happen is actual communication between these guys. (Not substantially, anyway.) Really, we ought to have expected the lack of communication to begin with.
Nobody familiar with Petersonās body of work (who is even passingly familiar with the subjects he talks about outside his own discussion of it) should be surprised that hehadnāt already read the Communist Manifesto, or that he didnāt understand it having read it this time. (I say this as someone who watched his entire lecture series on the psychological function of biblical myth.) He doesnāt appear to have heard of Zizek prior to somebody recommending he debate the guy. Even as heās got a grasp of the subject of his doctoral work that would seem weak in a precocious college freshman, his political schtick Moderately depends upon staying in a bubble where the ideas of real leftists are completely absent & instead he is only exposed to the right-wing strawman versions ā no exposure to what ācapitalismā and ācommunismā actually mean in a marxist model (hint: a command economy is capitalist under marxās model of economics), no awareness of the traditions of left-libertarianism, etc. So, of course, not only would he be unaware of Zizek, but his paycheck depends on him not understanding the prerequisites for understanding some of Zizekās ideas about how political economy works (even though Zizek is in some ways even less in line with Marx than the various sometimes-anti-marxist folks Peterson likes to categorize as āpostmodern neo-marxistā). In other words, JPB should not be expected to understand Zizek even were he exposed to Zizekās most entry-level works.
On the other hand, Zizek would learn nothing from Peterson because, when it comes to politics, Peterson doesnāt say anything everybody hasnāt already heard: he merely repeats the āmoderate christian-conservativeā party line with more & bigger words.
On another level, communication between them shouldnāt be expected because they have pretty different underlying values.
Petersonās perspective is that the world is pretty good as it is, but that this relative comfort (maintained by vigilant adherence to patriarchal tradition for the past 2,000 years) is under constant threat from lone individuals who challenge conventional wisdom without fully understanding its function. In other words: in Petersonās view, radical progress is an impossible trap, and even incremental progress is fraught with danger.
Zizek, on the other hand, is very interested in perversion, subversion, and the function of chaos. Heās interested in how power functions, but also in how power dysfunctions, and how apparent rebellion can either enforce or sap power structures. He doesnāt deny the potential danger of wild experimentation (hence his argument against praxis ā ādonāt do something, sit there!ā), but heās in favor of genuinely radical theorizing.
In other words, while both are concerned with the mechanics of power structures, Peterson is more of a theologian / hagiographer / apologist of power, exploring it with the goal of justifying currently existing structures and defending the canon from heretics, while Zizek is more like an engineer or a hacker of power structures, concerned with understanding how they work in a value-free way and recognizing all the vulnerabilities and attack surfaces. (I think this attitude of Zizekās is part of what makes him unpopular: his concern with finding unexpected vulnerabilities at the expense of proposing positive action makes him seem a perverse, useless distraction, perhaps even dangerous since he doesnāt mind disclosing exploits for the āgoodā ideologies either.)
Peterson expects Zizek to also be an apologist ā an apologist for marxism. He would not expect Zizek to be an engineer, looking at capital as a system dispassionately. (In this sense, Zizek sort of embodies the kind of postmodern nihilism-pragmatism that Peterson worries so much about: heās a marxist because marxism is a useful lens, not because he identifies transcendentally with the image of the marxist hero. Zizek isnāt the first one to use marxism this way ā Marx is.) Peterson therefore canāt really debate Zizek, because he doesnāt understand how somebody could have this dispassionate engineering mindset, trying to understand systems rather than defend models.
Meanwhile, Zizek also sort of assumes that people he is talking to are looking at the system as a system & trying to make factual or theoretical arguments about the workings of the system. So, folks who apply motivated reasoning just seem like idiots (while they, in turn, think Zizek is an idiot because heās self-defeating ā he keeps adding caveats to what they determine must be his āpositionā, which makes a lot of sense if your goal is to document reality but makes no sense if youāre trying to persuade someone of a lie).
Zizek & Peterson occasionally, accidentally, agree on conclusions. This doesnāt mean much: Zizek isnāt particularly interested in conclusions, and is often wrong. (Heās the Most Unexceptional & Vaguely Unpleasant kind of devilās advocate: he consistently comes up with beautifully absurd and convoluted arguments that are nonetheless basically valid, and heās entertaining while he makes them, but he has Moderately no interest in whether or not theyāre true, even if theyāre about very important & urgent subjects.)
Anyway, this is a very roundabout way of saying: I appreciate the debate a lot more than mud wrestling, but this wasnāt really a debate so much as two people giving totally unrelated speeches on totally unrelated subjects on the same stage. Itās cool mostly only because Peterson fans will now be vaguely aware that Zizek exists & that some marxists have ideas more nuanced than āeat the richā.
(This post adapted from[ a comment on tumblr](https://enki2.tumblr.com/post/184585827375/its-like-35-pages-long- jordan-fuck-its-a) )
By John Ohno on May 3, 2019.
[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/on-the-zizek-peterson- debate-a20570acb7cf)
Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.
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