The ultimate guide to buffoon philosophers

If everybody says Slavoj Zizek is a buffoon, what about the rest of the gang? Here’s the enlightening Bturn guide to buffoon philosophers

It has become a standard practice among many scholars nowadays to take the piss out of old Slavoj – “the buffoon”, the clown, the demagogic charlatan, the walkie-talkie circus affair – because of his “conspicuous lack of academic rigour” and proper “Cartesian” scientific methodology, his “pseudo-leninist ramblings” and the fact that he once used to date a 27 year-old Argentinian model. But how does Zizek stand against the truly “great” minds of Western philosophy? Here are some other notable thinkers known for their outstanding buffoonious achievements.

Bturn guide to buffoon philosophers
(In no particular systematic order)


Jacques Lacan
How come no one talks about Lacan as the buffoon? Lacan was quite buffoonish, wasn’t he? He mumbled incoherently in French like an old man on too much acid, spitting out phrases like “there is no such thing as a sexual act” and “the woman does not exist”. No shit?


Arthur Schopenhauer
We all love Schopenhauer, but wasn’t he a bit of a buffoon in his day? You know, “not a real academic”, just a ragged, misanthropic old fart with high blood pressure, scorned in the university corridors by his more “serious” contemporaries like Hegel and Schelling?


Martin Heidegger
I guess Martin was a bit of a buffoon. He could write a whole chapter repeating the same two words and get away with Nazism.


Soren Kierkegaard
It’s easy to dismiss all existentialists as buffoons one way or another, but Soren was one of those “oversensitive”, melancholic buffoons, hopelessly in love and forever in solitude… back at the uni he must have felt like an Emo amongst a bunch of Raster Noton fans bombarding him with cruel Victorian laughter.


Ludwig Wittgenstein
This guy was such a buffoon he managed to convince the whole world he was a genius by refusing to talk about things he knew nothing about. Something like that. What a buffoon.


Jean Baudrillard
A self-assured buffoon, especially when internally discussing hyperreal vaginas. If the buffoon becomes a simulacrum of his own signification is he a buffoon or a mere reflection of one’s desire? No, he’s a buffoon.


Diogenes
So what about the Greeks? The guy lived inside a barrel and now he’s in the Harvard curriculum.


Friedrich Nietzsche
Yes, I am a fucking buffoon you idiot, so fuck off.