"Frances Bolton (PHI)" wrote:
> 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