> If you think Lacan is full of it, you should show that by taking on the
> body of his work, not mocking some badly appropriated scientific metaphors.
> The exercise proves nothing.
Note also that mathematics was held up by the post-WW II European technocracies (especially in France) as the ideal model of social processes; the hard sciences were the "hard currency", as it were, of discourse, meaning that if you didn't talk/think like a technocrat, you were excluded from the Establishment, in much the same way that the Eastern bloc pushed physics and engineering and banned sociology and psychology as idle, counter-revolutionary pursuits. Lacan is reacting against the Western version of this, trying to find holes in the technocratic ideology by pointing to contradictions in the field of math, which is in reality incredibly diverse, complicated, contradictory and by no means reducible to a power-ideology. Derrida does the same thing, in a different way, by constantly harping on philosophy, which seems pointless to US intellectuals who were never great fans of the ontologies anyway, but in the European situation philosophy, math, etc. were virtual state ideologies. You couldn't ignore them; you had to fight them on their own turf. If Sokal and Bricmont want to talk science, they should do what Stephen Jay Gould does, and *talk about the science* and *questioning* the division of intellectual labor, instead of policing such.
-- Dennis