After several months of verbal sparring and rumor, the hotly anticipated debate between Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson has been arranged, with the philosophers scheduled to go tete-a-tete later this year.
Announcing the intellectual bout in a YouTube video on Thursday, the media-savvy Peterson said he would face off against the reclusive Slovenian Marxist in Toronto’s Sony Center on April 19. The topic? Happiness: Capitalism versus Marxism.
The philoso-fight comes after Zizek fired the first shots against Peterson during a Cambridge Union event last November. Labeling the Canadian best-selling author as his “enemy,” Zizek went on to slam Peterson’s ideas as “pseudo-scientific,” and took umbrage with Peterson’s obsession with cultural Marxism.
Peterson responded to the Cambridge broadsheet by tweeting he would meet Zizek “any time, any place” to debate their differences in public, much to the delight of fans and detractors. The callout followed an earlier attempt to contact Zizek via Twitter only for Peterson to discover he was conversing with a Zizek quote bot account.
However, not everyone is as excited about the event, lamenting it pales in comparison to when veteran anarchist Noam Chomsky debated the French postmodernist Michel Foucault in the 1970s.
Chomsky has previously slammed fellow leftist Zizek. Speaking in 2013, he said:
“I don’t see anything in what he’s [Zizek] saying.” He also took aim at Zizek’s hero, Jacques Lacan, by calling him a “total charlatan.”
Who knows, maybe he’ll take on the winner.
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