For a good number of years, probably a decade now, I’ve looked up to both Žižek and Chomsky. Both are prominent left-leaning academics on the world-stage. Ironically, they were at loggerheads not too long ago regarding Chomsky’s frustration with the abstractions of continental philosophy, which Chomsky largely views as distraction from real political issues.
It is true that Žižek deals more with abstract thought (philosophical ‘meanderings’), whilst Chomsky’s linguistics is more science-based and his political activism based on raw and incisive fact-finding and a concern with global social justice – particularly to help avert the threat of nuclear annihilation and run-away climate change. Žižek’s cognitive labour is of a much different flavour to Chomsky’s, but I think that Chomsky was wrong to dismiss the utility of Žižek’s approach to thinking about thinking.
Žižek has strong left social justice stances on global issues, as well as his talent for philosophizing about social issues such as that on ‘tolerance’, racism, the new social fantasy of ‘the end of history’ as ‘capitalism with a human face’, and brilliant philosophical concepts like ontological incompleteness to describe our innermost being or even as a characteristic of the natural universe.
Henry Willoughby's Social Justice Blog 