LRB on AS

[Brad De Long]

Re:
>
>[Here, for all you fans of copyright law, is the London Review of Books
>review of the Sokal/Bricmont book.]
>
>London Review of Books, July 16, 1998
>
>LE PAUVRE SOKAL
>by John Sturrock
>
>review of: Intellectual Impostures, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.
>Profile, 274 pp., £9.99, 2 July, ISBN 1-86197-074-9
>
>...
>
>The authors are both professors of physics, Sokal in New York, Bricmont in
>Belgium, and it's as hard scientists that they make their complaint against
>the intellectual charmers they have singled out, who have all of them at
>one time or another introduced concepts drawn from physics or the higher
>mathematics into their work without showing, we now learn, more than the
>skimpiest understanding of their true formulation or the place they occupy
>in the body of scientific knowledge from which they have been so recklessly
>abducted....
>
>Poor Sokal and poor Bricmont believe that the garlanded French thinkers who
>have been leading the American young (and some of the not-so-young)
>intellectually astray don't deserve to have any influence at all, that
>someone capable, as is Lacan, of playing fast and loose with ideas taken
>over from topology in what is at best semi-ignorance of the facts of the
>matter should be cast into the oubliette as an all-weather charlatan.

I remember--coming from mathematics--being unable to make head or tail of
Louis Althusser because he used the mathematical term "overdetermination"
in what struck me as a nonsensical, incoherent, and inconsistent way that
had nothing to do with its *real* mathematical definition in meaning.

Hence I put down _Reading Capital_ after 100 pages and never picked it or
anything else up again (except when one of my professors assigned an
absolutely awful book by Hindess and Hurst).

Can't say today that my allergic reaction to Althusser was a mistake.

A basic failure to understand the meaning of the sources from which you
draw your metaphors and concepts *is* in all probability a sign that the
rest of your thinking is confused and faulty as well...

Brad DeLong