Noam Chom­sky has issued a state­ment in reac­tion to our July 17 post, “Slavoj Žižek Responds to Noam Chom­sky: ‘I Don’t Know a Guy Who Was So Often Empir­i­cal­ly Wrong.’ In an arti­cle post­ed yes­ter­day on ZNet titled “Fan­tasies,”  Chom­sky says Žižek’s crit­i­cism of him is com­plete­ly unground­ed. “Žižek finds noth­ing, lit­er­al­ly noth­ing, that is empir­i­cal­ly wrong,” writes Chom­sky. “That’s hard­ly a sur­prise.”

The rift between the two high-pro­file intel­lec­tu­als began, as you may recall, when Chom­sky crit­i­cized Žižek and oth­er con­ti­nen­tal philoso­phers for essen­tial­ly talk­ing non­sense — for cloak­ing triv­i­al­i­ties in fan­cy lan­guage and using the sci­en­tif­ic-sound­ing term “the­o­ry” to describe propo­si­tions that could nev­er be test­ed empir­i­cal­ly. Žižek lashed back, say­ing of Chom­sky, “I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empir­i­cal­ly wrong.” He went on to crit­i­cize Chom­sky’s con­tro­ver­sial ear­ly posi­tion on Amer­i­can assess­ments of the Khmer Rouge atroc­i­ties in Cam­bo­dia. (To read Žižek’s com­ments, click here to open the ear­li­er post in a new win­dow.) In response yes­ter­day, Chom­sky said he had received numer­ous requests to com­ment on our post:

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 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.

Chom­sky goes on to recount an instance when he says Žižek mis­at­trib­uted a “racist com­ment on Oba­ma” to Chom­sky, only to explain it away lat­er and say that he had dis­cussed the issue with Chom­sky on the tele­phone. “Of course,” writes Chom­sky, “sheer fan­ta­sy.” Chom­sky then moves on to Žižek’s com­ments report­ed by Open Cul­ture, which he says are typ­i­cal of Žižek’s meth­ods. “Accord­ing to him,” writes Chom­sky, “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.”

Chom­sky devotes the rest of his arti­cle to defend­ing his work with Edward Her­man on the Khmer Rouge atroc­i­ties. He claims that no fac­tu­al errors have been found in their work on the sub­ject, and he draws atten­tion to a pas­sage in their book After the Cat­a­clysm, quot­ed last week by Open Cul­ture read­er Poyâ Pâkzâd, in which they write, “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.”

You can read Chom­sky’s com­plete rebut­tal to Žižek here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Slavoj Žižek Responds to Noam Chom­sky: ‘I Don’t Know a Guy Who Was So Often Empir­i­cal­ly Wrong’

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971