Yes. The most illuminating contrast is that Gadamer treats difference as something that can generate a new shared horizon of understanding, whereas Žižek treats certain differences as symptomatic of an irreducible antagonism that no shared horizon can finally absorb.

One caveat: “shared horizons of meaning” is not quite Gadamer’s standard phrase; the more precise term is “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung). Gadamer does not mean that two people simply arrive at a pre-existing common worldview. The encounter itself transforms the horizons of both participants.

The basic contrast

Gadamer	Žižek
Hermeneutics	Dialectical materialism / Lacanian theory
Difference is something to be interpreted	Difference can be an antagonistic gap
Understanding proceeds through dialogue	Contradiction can reveal an impossibility internal to the object
Horizons can fuse/expand	The gap may be irreducible
Meaning emerges through mediation	The truth may appear precisely where mediation fails
Otherness can become intelligible within a transformed horizon	Some forms of otherness expose the limits of the horizon itself
Ideal movement: “I understand this differently now.”	Dialectical movement: “The incompatibility itself tells me something about the object.”

1. Gadamer: difference expands the horizon

For Gadamer, we never encounter the world from nowhere. We approach it from a historically constituted horizon: language, tradition, prejudices, expectations, inherited concepts, etc. But these limitations aren't simply obstacles. They are what make understanding possible in the first place.

Suppose I encounter a historical text whose meaning initially seems alien to me. I don't solve the problem by abandoning my own standpoint and pretending to occupy the author's standpoint. Nor do I simply impose my contemporary meanings on the text.

Instead, there is a dialogue between horizons. My questions encounter the text's claims, those claims disrupt my assumptions, and my horizon changes. The result is a new horizon in which the text and I become intelligible to one another.

So Gadamer's basic model is:

difference → dialogue → transformation → enlarged understanding

And importantly, the resulting “fusion” isn't necessarily permanent consensus. Gadamer's horizon remains open and revisable.

---

2. Žižek: sometimes there is no higher horizon

Žižek's parallax begins from a rather different intuition.

A parallax is a displacement in the appearance of an object when the observer changes position. But Žižek radicalizes this: sometimes two perspectives aren't simply two partial descriptions that can be combined into a fuller description.

Instead, the two perspectives are mutually incompatible—and that incompatibility belongs to the thing itself.

This is what Žižek calls the parallax gap: a gap between positions that cannot be reconciled through ordinary mediation or synthesis. MIT's description of the book emphasizes precisely this: the two points are separated by a gap for which “no synthesis or mediation is possible.”

Hence:

difference → contradiction → irreducible gap → insight into the structure of the object

This is why Žižek's “dialectical” Hegel is not simply someone who says:

thesis + antithesis = synthesis.

For Žižek, the crucial insight is often that the contradiction cannot be overcome because the contradiction is constitutive of the object.

---

3. The really interesting difference: “horizon” versus “gap”

This is where the comparison becomes philosophically powerful.

Imagine two people arguing about a political issue.

Gadamer

Gadamer asks:

What historical and linguistic horizons make each person's position intelligible?

Perhaps they discover that they were using “freedom” differently. Through dialogue, each modifies their conception of freedom.

They haven't necessarily discovered an objective position outside both perspectives. Rather, they have produced a new shared context in which the disagreement can be understood differently.

Žižek

Žižek asks a more disturbing question:

What if the disagreement isn't merely produced by different horizons? What if the antagonism is built into the social reality itself?

For example, two classes may have genuinely incompatible interests. Their disagreement isn't simply a misunderstanding that can be resolved by discovering a broader shared vocabulary.

Indeed, a supposed “shared horizon” might itself be ideological: it could conceal the antagonism by making incompatible interests appear to be compatible.

This is why Žižek's book identifies political parallax with social antagonism that permits no common ground.

---

4. So Žižek can be read as a radical challenge to Gadamer

You could formulate the disagreement like this:

Gadamer:

We misunderstand one another because our horizons differ; through dialogue, our horizons can transform and partially fuse.

Žižek:

Sometimes what appears as a difference between horizons is actually an antagonism that no enlarged horizon can reconcile.

Or even more sharply:

Gadamer asks: What new horizon can contain this difference?

Žižek asks: What if the inability to contain this difference is itself the truth?

That is the crucial distinction.

---

5. But there is an important similarity

They are not simply opposites.

Both reject the fantasy of a completely neutral, objective “view from nowhere.”

Gadamer says our situatedness is constitutive of understanding; there is no interpretation from outside history and language.

Žižek likewise rejects the idea that we can simply step outside our position and obtain a neutral representation of reality. His parallax structure instead suggests that changing positions can reveal something about the object that neither position, considered in isolation, captures.

So both are anti-naïve perspectivists, but they draw very different conclusions.

Gadamer's response to situatedness is roughly:

Let the encounter transform your horizon.

Žižek's response is:

Look at the contradiction produced when horizons collide; don't rush to reconcile it.

---

6. A useful way of putting the distinction

I'd summarize the philosophical difference as:

Gadamer is a philosopher of productive mediation; Žižek is a philosopher of constitutive non-mediation.

For Gadamer, mediation is what makes understanding possible. The encounter with alterity can produce a new horizon that neither party possessed beforehand.

For Žižek, however, there are cases where the failure of mediation is itself philosophically productive. The gap between two perspectives isn't merely something we haven't yet managed to bridge. It may reveal a contradiction that cannot be dissolved without falsifying the object.

This also explains why Žižek's use of Hegel is so important: dialectical “synthesis” is not necessarily the elimination of contradiction; it can be the recognition that contradiction is internal to the thing.

In one sentence

Gadamer thinks understanding occurs when different horizons enter into a transformative dialogue; Žižek thinks that, at certain points, the very impossibility of bringing two perspectives into a common horizon is what reveals the truth of the situation.

And there's a particularly interesting further question here: Žižek's critique of “shared horizons” comes very close to his critique of ideology, because a supposedly universal horizon can conceal the antagonism that produced it. That gives you a strong bridge from Gadamer → Žižek → ideology/antagonism, especially if you're thinking about this in relation to Hegel.