Chomsky / Zizek Debate
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky[December 2012]

[Vince Emanuele]
Now, in one of our previous conversations you mentioned that theory is not really of an interest to you nor do you think that its useful, at times, for practical application in attempting to combat and change these systems of power. However, one of the more wide ranging left intellectuals of our time, Slavoj Žižek, takes almost the exact opposite approach to his work. He draws on the work of Derrida, Lacan and various others to illuminate his critique of global capitalism empire ideology and so forth. Can you talk about why you personally haven't written more books on, say, political or economic or social theory and then what are your thoughts on Slavoj Žižek's work with regards to how much of it you're aware of or have read or engaged with. And then his use of French psychoanalyst Lacan's work and then, of course, any words on Derrida's work - deconstructionism and his legacy.

[Noam Chomsky]
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. So many you can tell me why you think there's something significant. I don't see it. But yeah I'm not interested in that kind of theoretical posturing which has no content.

[Vince Emanuele]
And would you, I think it would be interesting for a lot of folks particularly because this work has become more and more popular. I remember just hearing Žižek's name a few years ago and then now when I go into different organizing circles or if I go to different protests, events or rally or so forth, assemblies, I hear his name and his work being brought up often. It seems just recently you just had a conversation with Angela Davis, VJ Prashad of course moderated the conversation in Boston, and I would like to see more of those conversations take place even from, say, folks coming from different angles. People such as yourself and, say, someone as Slavoj Žižek whose work is becoming more influential. Do you think that's helpful to have those, maybe not even debates but at least, conversations with people on the left who are providing worth for people who do find it influential. Do you think this is something we should think about?

[Noam Chomsky]
You say his work is becoming influential, well I would quetiton that. I think his posturing is becoming influential. Can you tell me what the work is? I can't find it. He's a good actor, he makes things sound exciting but can you find any content? I can't. I would have no interest in having a conversation with him and I suppose the converse is true as well I imagine.Slavoj Žižek[July 2013]

What is that about, again, the academy and Chomsky and so on? Well with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my first point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate, not just some crazy Lacanian speculations and so on… well I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong in his descriptions in his whatever! Let’s look… I remember when he defended the demonization of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.” And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that “No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know enough, so… you know.” But I totally reject this line of reasoning.

For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: Even if we have no data about their prisons and so on, isn’t it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have a regime which in the first two years (’75 to ’77) behaved towards itself, treated itself, as illegal? You know the regime was nameless. It was called “Angka,” an organization — not communist party of Cambodia — an organization. Leaders were nameless. If you ask “Who is my leader?” your head was chopped off immediately and so on.

Okay, next point about Chomsky, you know the consequence of this attitude of his empirical and so on — and that’s my basic difference with him — and precisely Corey Robinson and some other people talking with him recently confirmed this to me. His idea is today that cynicism of those in power is so open that we don’t need any critique of ideology, you reach symptomatically between the lines, everything is cynically openly admitted. We just have to bring out the facts of people. Like “This company is profiting in Iraq” and so on and so on. Here I violently disagree.

First, more than ever today, our daily life is ideology. how can you doubt ideology when recently I think Paul Krugman published a relatively good text where he demonstrated how this idea of austerity, this is not even good bourgeois economic theory! It’s a kind of a primordial, common-sense magical thinking when you confront a crisis, “Oh, we must have done something wrong, we spent too much so let’s economize and so on and so on.”
My second point, cynicists are those who are most prone to fall into illusions. Cynicists are not people who see things the way they really are and so on. Think about 2008 and the ongoing financial crisis. It was not cooked up in some crazy welfare state; social democrats who are spending too much. The crisis exploded because of activity of those other cynicists who precisely thought “screw human rights, screw dignity, all that matters is,” and so on and so on.

So as this “problem” of are we studying the facts enough I claim emphatically more than ever “no” today. And as to popularity, I get a little bit annoyed with this idea that we with our deep sophisms are really hegemonic in the humanities. Are people crazy? I mean we are always marginal. No, what is for me real academic hegemony: it’s brutal. Who can get academic posts? Who can get grants, foundations and so on? We are totally marginalized here. I mean look at my position: “Oh yeah, you are a mega-star in United States.” Well, I would like to be because I would like power to brutally use it! But I am far from that. I react so like this because a couple of days ago I got a letter from a friend in United States for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation, and he told me “I didn’t get the job, not in spite of your letter but because of your letter!” He had a spy in the committee and this spy told him “You almost got it, but then somebody says “Oh, if Žižek recommends him it must be something terribly wrong with him.”

So I claim that all these “how popular we are” is really a mask of… remember the large majority of academia are these gray either cognitivists or historians blah blah… and you don’t see them but they are the power. They are the power. On the other hand, why are they in power worried? Because you know… don’t exaggerate this leftist paranoia idea that ”we can all be recuperated” and so on and so on. No! I still quite naively believe in the efficiency of theoretical thinking. It’s not as simple as to recuperate everything we do. But you know there are different strategies of how to contain us. I must say that I maybe am not innocent in this, because people like to say about me, “Oh, go and listen to him, he is an amusing clown blah blah blah.” This is another way to say “Don’t take it seriously.”Noam Chomsky[July 2013]

I've received a number of requests to comment on the post: "Slavoj Žižek Responds to Noam Chomsky: 'I Don't Know a Guy Who Was So Often Empirically Wrong'".

I had read it, with some interest, hoping to learn something from it, and given the title, to find some errors that should be corrected -- of course they exist in virtually anything that reaches print, even technical scholarly monographs, as one can see by reading reviews in the professional journals. And when I find them or am informed about them I correct them.

But not here. Žižek finds nothing, literally nothing, that is empirically wrong. That's hardly a surprise. Anyone who claims to find empirical errors, and is minimally serious, will at the very least provide a few particles of evidence -- some quotes, references, at least something. But there is nothing here -- which, I'm afraid, doesn't surprise me either. I've come across instances of Žižek's concept of empirical fact and reasoned argument.

For example, in the Winter 2008 issue of the German cultural journal Lettre International, Žižek attributed to me a racist comment on Obama by Silvio Berlusconi. I ignored it. Anyone who strays from ideological orthodoxy is used to this kind of treatment. However, an editor of Harper's magazine, Sam Stark, was interested and followed it up. In the January 2009 issue he reports the result of his investigation. Žižek said he was basing the attribution on something he had read in a Slovenian magazine. A marvelous source, if it even exists. And anyway, he continued, attributing to me a racist comment about Obama is not a criticism, because I should have made such remarks as "a fully admissible characterization in our political and ideological struggle." I leave it others to decode. When asked about this by Slovene journalist/activist Igor Vidman, Žižek answered that he had discussed it with me over the phone and I had agreed with him. Of course, sheer fantasy.

It's not the only case. In fact, he provides us with a good example of his practice in these comments. According to him, I claim that "we don't need any critique of ideology" -- that is, we don't need what I've devoted enormous efforts to for many years. His evidence? He heard that from some people who talked to me. Sheer fantasy again, but another indication of his concept of empirical fact and rational discussion.

Accordingly, I did not expect much.

Žižek's sole example is this: "I remember when he defended this demonstration of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: 'No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.' And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that 'No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn't yet know enough, so… you know.' But I totally reject this line of reasoning."

Let's turn the empirical facts that Žižek finds so boring.

Žižek cites nothing, but he is presumably referring to joint work of mine with Edward Herman in the '70s (Political Economy of Human Rights) and again a decade later in Manufacturing Consent, where we review and respond to the charges that Žižek apparently has in mind. In PEHR we discussed a great many illustrations of Herman's distinction between worthy and unworthy victims. The worthy victims are those whose fate can be attributed to some official enemy, the unworthy ones are the victims of our own state and its crimes. The two prime examples on which we focused were Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in the same years. A long chapter is devoted to each. These are very telling examples: comparable atrocities, in the same region, in the same years. Victims of the Khmer Rouge are "worthy victims," whose fate can be blamed on an enemy. The Timorese are "unworthy victims," because we are responsible for their fate: the Indonesian invasion was approved by Washington and fully supported right through the worst atrocities, labeled "genocidal" by a later UN investigation, but with ample evidence right at the time, as we documented. We showed that in both cases there was extraordinary lying, on a scale that would have impressed Stalin, but in opposite directions: in the case of the KR vast fabrication of alleged crimes, recycling of charges after they were conceded to be false, ignoring of the most credible evidence, etc. In the case of ET, in contrast, mostly silence, or else denial.

The two cases are of course not identical. The ET case is incomparably more significant, because the atrocities could have easily been brought to an end, as they finally were in September 1999, merely by an indication from Washington that the game is over. In contrast, no one had any proposal as to what might be done to end KR atrocities. And when a Vietnamese invasion brought them to an end in 1979, the Vietnamese were harshly condemned by the government and the media, and punished, and the US turned at once to diplomatic and military support for the KR. At that point commentary virtually ceased: the Cambodians had become unworthy victims, under attack by their KR torturers backed by Washington. Similarly, they had been unworthy victims prior to the KR takeover in April 1975 because they were under vicious assault by the United States in the most intensive bombing in history, at the level of all allied bombing in the Pacific theater during World II, directed against the defenseless rural society, following the orders transmitted by Henry Kissinger: "anything that flies on anything that moves." Accordingly little was said about their miserable fate, then or until today.
Cambodia scholars have pointed out that there has been more investigation of Cambodia from April 1975 through 1978 than for the rest of its entire history. Again, not surprising, given the ideological utility of the suffering of worthy victims, another topic that we discussed.

In these books and elsewhere we compiled extensive documentation showing that the pattern is quite normal: Cambodia under the KR (but, crucially, not before and after) and ET constitute a particularly dramatic example. We also observed that the pattern cannot be perceived, giving many examples and offering the obvious explanation.

What we wrote about the vastly more important case of ET, then and since, has been virtually ignored. The same is true of what we and others have written about Cambodia during the periods when they were unworthy victims, under US attack. In contrast, a considerable industry had been created, with much hysteria, seeking to find some errors in our review of the evidence on Cambodia under the KR and how it was treated -- so far, without success. I am sure I speak for Ed Herman in saying that we'd be glad to have it reprinted right now, along with the much more important work on the unworthy victims, just as we were happy to review the facts and the storm of criticism a decade later.

It is not too surprising that no errors have been found. We did little more than review what was in print, making it very clear -- as one of the commentators on Žižek quotes -- that "our primary concern here is not to establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina, but rather to investigate their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task," and a far simpler one. We wrote that we cannot know what the actual facts are, but suggested that commentators keep to the truth, and that they pay attention to the documentary record and the most qualified observers, in particular to the conclusions we quoted from US State Department intelligence, recognized to be the most knowledgeable source. Furthermore, the chapter was carefully read by most of the leading Cambodia scholars before publication. So the lack of errors is no great surprise.

Of much greater general interest is the fact that to this day, those who are completely in the grip of western propaganda adhere religiously to the prescribed doctrine: a show of great indignation about the KR years and our accurate review of the information available, along with streams of falsification; and silence about the vastly more significant cases of ET and Cambodia under US attack, before and after the KR years. Žižek's comments are a perfect illustration.

As the reader can easily determine, Žižek provides not the slightest evidence to support his charges, but simply repeats what he has probably heard -- or perhaps read in a Slovenian journal. No less interesting is Žižek's shock that we used the data that were available. He "totally rejects" this procedure. There is no need to comment on a remark that gives irrationality a bad name.

The remainder of Žižek's comments have no relation to anything I've said or written, so I will ignore them.

A question remains as to why such performances are taken seriously, but I'll put that aside as well.
Write the lyrics for a misc song made in 2013, titled "Chomsky / Zizek Debate", by artist "Noam Chomsky".