Slavoj Žižek is the archetypal intellectual, in his inscrutability, his charlatanry, his black t-shirt emblazoned with “I WOULD PREFER NOT TO”:

I want to avoid all misunderstanding: this is no condemnation of Professor Žižek; on the contrary…I am not against charlatans; I even admire them if they are amiable, as of course the vast majority of them are (an unamiable charlatan is almost an oxymoron). To be able to glide through life in the knowledge that one is bogus is a great achievement, far greater than that of the majority of genuinely earnest people. If the world, including academia, were to be purged of its charlatans, how dull life would be!