Youtube thread



haven't watched this yet but lol that it happened


I sat through the whole of this and enjoyed it a lot. Though for as much as I've been helped by JBP's lectures, I'm not sure how I'd rate him as an intellectual anymore. In this debate, it is dubious if he's read much of Zizek's work at all and he spends much of his opening statement criticizing The Communist Manifesto - after admitting he's just read it for the first time since he was 18. For someone who has so frequently and confidently diagnosed Marxism as a social pathology, that's a pretty serious blow to his credibility. Funnily enough Zizek ends up agreeing with his critique pretty much wholeheartedly. Once the opening statements are over with and they start addressing each other, they end up having a pretty interesting conversation and find a lot of common ground. At one point late in the debate, Peterson asks Zizek with an apparently sincere curiosity what attracts Zizek to Marxist theory when he agrees so much with Peterson's criticisms, and listens attentively to Zizek's thoughtful reply and as someone who's been getting increasingly sick of seeing Peterson in conservative pundit-mode it's such a welcome change.
 
How much of a blow is it to his credibility if Zizek, a Marxist, agrees with his criticism? And to be fair, who the fuck would even want to read The Communist Manifesto more than a couple of times?