Charges of frequent errors and empty theorizing. Sounds about right.
What to do when the two stars of the academic left collide? Grab the popcorn and sit back: The professoriate is engaged in a raucous family feud, complete with mutual accusations of charlatanry and bitter recriminations.
It started when Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist and leftist icon, denounced the jargon-ridden, French-inspired cultural studies that prevail in the humanities.
WSJ assistant books editor Sohrab Ahmari on a revealing tussle between Noam Chomsky and the academic left who subscribe to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Photos: Associated Press
"I'm not interested in posturing—using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever," Mr. Chomsky told an interviewer in December. "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."
Then he turned the knife: "Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don't see anything to what he's saying."
Mr. Chomsky was referring to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who is a celebrity of sorts in academic circles. His knack for combining pop-culture references with insights drawn from the likes of Marx and Freud—" 'Jurassic Park' is a chamber drama about the trauma of fatherhood"—has inspired a cultish following on campuses over the past two decades. The Chronicle of Higher Education has dubbed Mr. Žižek "the Elvis of cultural theory," and there is even an International Journal of Žižek Studies devoted to his thought.
Mr. Chomsky's remarks went unnoticed until this summer, when they were picked up by bloggers and received a wider circulation. Mr. Žižek fired back earlier this month. "Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical," he told a panel at the University of London. "Well, I don't think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong."
Depending on their inclinations, readers might be tempted to root for one over the other. But the truth is the professors are both right.
Regarding Mr. Žižek, it is "hard to see anything to what he's saying."
On the war on terror: "We are entering a new era of paranoiac warfare in which the greatest task will be to identify the enemy and his weapons. . . . And is not the obverse of this paranoiac omnipresence of the invisible war its desubstantialization?"
On Hitler: "The problem with Hitler was that he was 'not violent enough,' his violence was not 'essential' enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order would survive."
On toilets: "The Anglo-Saxon lavatory acquires its meaning only through its differential relation to French and German lavatories. We have such a multitude of lavatory types because there is a traumatic excess which each of them tries to accommodate."
Regarding Mr. Chomsky, he is "often empirically wrong."
For instance, there was the infamous 1977 Nation magazine essay—co-written with the economist Edward Herman while Pol Pot's butchery was raging—in which the authors pooh-poohed "alleged" Khmer atrocities in Cambodia and credited claims "that executions have numbered at most in the thousands" and "that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent." (Some 1.7 million Cambodians were exterminated by Khmer genocidaires.)
Mr. Chomsky on life behind the Iron Curtain: "In comparison to the conditions imposed by U.S. tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise."
On Pearl Harbor: "It's well understood that the Japanese attack on the colonial outposts of the United States, England, and Holland was in some respects highly beneficial to the people of Asia."
On 9/11: "Obama was simply lying when he said . . . that 'we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.' Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden's 'confession,' but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon."
The Chomsky-Žižek feud shows no sign of a truce. On July 21, Mr. Chomsky struck back, calling Mr. Žižek's recent charges "sheer fantasy." This prompted one blogger to plead: "Can the left please stop cannibalizing each other?" What, and spoil the fun?
Mr. Ahmari is an assistant books editor at the Journal.
A version of this article appeared July 29, 2013, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Chomsky vs. 'Elvis' in a Left-Wing Cage Fight.
