Asshole Norm Levitt sent this to a list I'm on. I particularly like the way Dawkins shows his complete ignorance of Lacan by talking about "erect penises" instead of "the phallus."
frances
>From R: Dawkins [to Amazon.com]
Dear Miss Fried
For my 'Favorite Book of 1998', I've chosen Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. I've attached my remarks as a Microsoft Word file called Amazon Favorite (Word 6 for Macintosh, compatible with Word for Windows 95). Please let me know, one way or the other, whether you can read this file.
With best wishes Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins's Favorite Book of 1998: Fashionable Nonsense by Alan=
Sokal and Jean Bricmont (Picador. Previously published in Britain by Profile Books as Intellectual Impostures).
A colleague mentioned to a postmodernist scholar that she found his book extremely difficult to understand. "Oh, thank you very much!" he gushed, obviously delighted at the compliment. An epidemic of pretentious obscurantism has spread from French to Anglo-American academic departments of literature and anthropology, and now threatens (not very effectively) to infect science. This was ably documented by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in Higher Superstition (Johns Hopkins Press, 1994), a superb if chilling book, which inspired the American physicist Alan Sokal to perpetrate his heroic and now famous hoax. Sokal submitted "A transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity" to Social Text, a journal of postmodern metatwaddle, and they accepted it without troubling to have it refereed. Sokal then revealed that his paper was the purest rubbish, meaningless where it was not larded with elementary errors that any undergraduate student of physics would have picked up.
If the "Editorial Collective" of Social Text had been true to their deconstructive pretensions, they should have welcomed Sokal's anarchic prank and cheerfully admitted that they had been caught with their postmodern pants down. Instead, their shrieks of pompous huffiness had the predictable effect of elevating l'affaire Sokal to the status of cause celebre.
Now, Sokal has teamed up with the Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont to write Fashionable Nonsense, a full documentation of the academic charlatanry that Sokal so devastatingly imitated. The book is worth buying for the horrible fascination of the quotations alone. I reproduced a selection of these in my review in Nature (now posted at http://www.spacelab.net/~catalj/postmodernism_disrobed.htm). My favorite is Lacan's identification of the erect penis with the square root of minus one, closely followed by Irigaray's diagnosis of the difficulties "masculine physics" experiences with understanding fluid dynamics. In case you are wondering, it turns out that masculine physics, fatally lacking in wet vaginal fluids, hampered by rigidly protruding penises, just can't hack it when it comes to the theory of fluid dynamics. (The real reason for the difficulty, as Sokal and Bricmont drily explain, is that the Navier-Stokes equations are hard to solve.)
Richard Dawkins's latest book is Unweaving the Rainbow