------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 1998 02:11:07 -0500
Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Ka Chun Yu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: wallace-l: Philosophical Phonies on the Left Bank (fwd)
Status:
This recently appeared on the David Foster Wallace mailing list which
might be of interest for skeptic-lers. The comments on there seem to
have been added by the person who originally sent this to that list:
Forwarded message:
> From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fri Mar 13 16:03:27 1998
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Date: 13 Mar 1998 18:03:06 EDT
> Subject: wallace-l: Philosophical Phonies on the Left Bank
>
> ( from _World_Press_Review_ January 1998, p. 17 )
>
> Furor on the Left Bank: Philosophical Phonies?
> -----------------------------------------------
>
> Only in France do postmodern structuralists and relativist
> post-structural modernists become television stars. Only in Paris
> can people seriously state their profession as thinker. And only on
> the Left Bank could a slim but plain-speaking volume written by two
> foreign scientists cause such an uproar.
>
> American Alan Sokal and Belgian Jean Bricmont have dared to say what
> no one else would: Modern French philosophy is a load of tosh.
> "Our aim is to say that the emperor has no clothes," the pair write
> in the introduction to _Les_Impostures_Intellectuelles_
> (Intellectual Imposters, available in French only, published by
> Editions Odile Jacob). Even before publication, the book was a
> topic of furious -- and unfathomable -- debate in Latin Quarter
> cafes. "We want to 'deconstruct' the reputation that these texts
> have of being difficult because they are deep," write Sokal and
> Bricmont. "If they seem incomprehensible, it is for the very good
> reason that they have nothing to say."
>
> The authors -- a physics professor at New York University and a
> theoretical physicist from the University of Louvain in Belgium --
> slaughter the sacred cows of contemporary French thought one by one,
> from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the semiotician Julia
> Kristeva to Bruno Latour, the scientific sociologist, and prominent
> left-wing philosopher Regis Debray.
>
> "They talk abundantly of scientific theories of which they have, at
> best, a very vague understanding. They display a superficial
> erudition by throwing words at the reader in a context where they
> have no relevance. They demonstrate a veritable intoxication with
> words, combined with a superb indifference to their meaning," Sokal
> and Bricmont write.
>
> Quoting extensively from some of France's greatest minds, Sokal and
> Bricmont set about systematically demolishing their writings as
> deliberately obscure, excessively convoluted, pseudo-scientific
> claptrap.
>
> Jacques Lacan, one of the best-known psychoanalysts of the century,
> is criticized for "arbitrarily mixing key words of mathematical
> theory without in the least caring about their meaning." The
> authors take particular exception to one of Lacan's lesser-known
> theories, in which he argues that "the erect male organ, not as
> itself, not even as image, but as the missing piece of the desired
> image, is thus equal to the square root of -1 of the highest
> produced meaning."
>
> In attempting to construct a mathematical formula for poetic
> language, Kristeva, too is guilty of "trying to impress the reader
> with scientific words that she manifestly does not understand."
>
> The works of Gilles Deleuze, a leading contemporary French
> philsopher who died recently, are "principally characterized by
> their lack of clarity ... stuffed with very technical terms used out
> of context and with no apparent logic."
>
> And of Jean Baudrillard, an influential sociologist and regular
> columnist for [the leftist daily] _Liberation_, the authors
> conclude: "In the final analysis, one could ask what would actually
> remain of Baudrillard's thoughts if one removed the verbose veneer
> that cloaks them."
>
> Unsurprisingly, the unprecedented attack has inflamed the Left Bank,
> home to the cream of France's intellectuals since the days of
> Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and prompted outrage in the
> press. "This is war," the daily [conservative] newspaper
> _Le_Figaro_ proclaimed, while the cover of the [leftist] weekly
> _Le_Nouvel_Observateur_ demanded: "Are our philosophers imposters?"
>
> Stung, thinkers have hastened to respond: "What's the point of such
> a polemic, so far removed from present-day preoccupations?" asked
> Kristeva. "It's an anti-French intellectual escapade." Writer
> Roger-Pol Droit saw the broadside as part of a sinister new vogue
> for "scientific, as opposed to political, correctness."
>
> ( oh my, "scientific correctness" is a no-no ... )
>
> It is clear the philosophers have been shaken. In the words of
> another of the book's targets, the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari:
> "Existence, as a process of de-territorialization, is a specific
> inter-mechanic operation that superimposes itself in the promotion
> of singularized existential intensities. It is barely livable."
> ^^^^^^^^^^^
> ( guess we don't want to use the defindum in the definens, eh? )
>
> - Jon Henley, "The Guardian" (liberal) London, Oct 1, 1997
--kachun +** Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, CB 389 **+
+** University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309 **+
+** Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] **+
+** http://casa.colorado.edu/~kachun **+
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