Excellent Jordan Peterson rebuttal

In this article by Shuja Haider. Some excerpts:

"Neither Derrida nor Foucault is cited in 12 Rules for Life. Apparently, not only has Peterson never bothered to actually read them. [...] Peterson is left making statements that are not only mired in factual error, but espouse a comically reductive conception of how social life and history work. He takes a common misunderstanding at face value, proceeding to build a whole outlook on it."

"In actual fact, Derrida’s work was rooted in constant dialogue with the history of Western philosophy. He was a classical philosophical scholar, often presenting detailed and rigorous research on figures like Plato, Hegel, and Rousseau. His conversance with European thought extended into the 20th century as well. He can be considered one of the foremost critics of structuralism, but his early works addressed phenomenology, presenting both translations of and commentary on the writing of the turn-of-the-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Derrida drew on a wide range of influences, especially Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, both thinkers Peterson deems acceptable, as well as Martin Heidegger. Applying their skeptical outlook to the phenomenology and structuralism in which he had achieved mastery, Derrida was able to interrogate these methods from within."

"In departing with the seemingly drastically different approaches of structuralism and phenomenology, Derrida and Foucault left behind a totalizing idealism shared by both schools of thought, which had left their adherents unable to explain the differentiated and uneven realities of both philosophy and history. It is not Derrida and Foucault who reproduce this totalizing idealism, but Peterson. Contrary to his self-professed reputation for straight talk and hard truths, Peterson’s conception of all the various phenomena of social life as expressions of a curiously interpreted intellectual episode happens to be consistent with the most speculative of philosophies: an idealism that claims ideas descend from heaven to earth."

"If Derrida’s work was appropriated by American academics to simply express a banal form of suspicion of all forms of objective truth, in service of some kind of moralizing politics of identity – and indeed, this did take place throughout the 1980s and 1990s – it is an appropriation which completely misses the point. We do not need to produce a myth of the pure and uncorrupted writings of Derrida to point out that this is a misreading; rather, we simply need to recognize, as Derrida both insisted and practiced in his own work, that the “deconstruction” of a metaphysics of presence requires close reading. This begins at least with something Peterson has not done: actually opening the book."