Chomsky on Žižek and Lacan

Note Chomsky’s view of Jacques Lacan: “a total charlatan.”

This assessment came from Chomsky’s personal experience of Lacan, as he recounts here in a discussion of the three big Poststructuralists:

“So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted. Again, sorry to make unsupported comments, but I was asked, and therefore am answering.

Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I’ve met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible – he speaking French, me English); Lacan (who I met several times and considered an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, …);”
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html

Why was Lacan a charlatan? I suspect the reason was that most of his “work” was based on the pseudo-science of Freudian psychology.

Finally, Slavoj Žižek is probably the worst buffoon and windbag on the Left today. Žižek draws on (what else?!) the pseudo-science of Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as Marxism and German idealism.

It is an utter mystery to me why people think he is some kind of profound intellectual. Of course, I can hazard a guess: the reason is that many people on the Left have had their reasoning faculties poisoned by Postmodernist nonsense.

Apparently, the great man Žižek has criticisms of Postmodernism, and you can attempt to read a summary of his “critique” here. If you can make any sense of these incoherent ramblings, you are doing better than I am.