This chapter applies Alexander’s cultural sociological model of the celebrity-icon to two of today’s most renowned public intellectuals. It builds on their respective career trajectories and particularly on their 2019 debate to compare their performativity and its social meaning. Taking a dramaturgical approach and utilising cultural sociology and positioning theory, the chapter explores their different aesthetic and ethical performances. It then focuses on the model’s surface/depth relation through the notion of demonstration and shows how performativity should be added to contextuality and relationality to successfully form an iconic status as celebrity intellectuals in the digital age. The chapter argues, therefore, that Žižek and Peterson became iconic of opposing worldviews and the opposition between them, staged as “the debate of the century”, was dramatised accordingly.