Real Talk.

Yeah, it's kind of like this.

About 3 months ago I predicted on this blog that Slavoj Zizek would start taking shots at Noam Chomsky.*Anyone who knows how competitive the contest for the title of world's most revered public intellectual is could have seen this coming. And after seeing both Zizek! and Chomsky's own Zeitgeist films produced documentary Manufacturing Consent I was shaken once again by this epiphany. A day later, Zizek did the predictably dramatic, or REAL dramatic, thing and gave this piece of wisdom away for free on the LRB website

Noam Chomsky called for people to vote for Obama ‘without illusions’. I fully share Chomsky’s doubts about the real consequences of Obama’s victory: from a pragmatic perspective, it is quite possible that Obama will make only some minor improvements, turning out to be ‘Bush with a human face’. He will pursue the same basic policies in a more attractive way and thus effectively strengthen the US hegemony, damaged by the catastrophe of the Bush years.
There is nonetheless something deeply wrong with this reaction – a key dimension is missing from it. Obama’s victory is not just another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all the pragmatic calculations and manipulations that involves. It is a sign of something more.

Blam! Blam! Ether!!**

Zizek continues with this typically thoughtful and deeply contemplative judgement:

This is why an American friend of mine, a hardened leftist with no illusions, cried when the news came of Obama’s victory. Whatever our doubts, for that moment each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity.

I wonder how Chomsky is going to respond. I don't want to push this rap beef is like the London Review of Books analogy too far, but I suspect Chomsky is gonna drop a mixtape of a lectures in which he shoots back at Zizek REALly soon. The image on the cover will probably look something like this...





*Footage not found.
** Rap jargon you won't understand. Consult your Urban Dictionary.