litcritter bashing and the academic factory

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Oct 27 06:49:39 PDT 1999


Steve Perry wrote:


>witness those academics
>who came out of the woodwork to whisper their thanks
>to sokal and bricmont for *fashionable nonsense*--
>they sounded like '50s reds (or pre-stonewall gays)
>who'd been too frightened to venture out of the
>closet.

And they took this incredibly brave step to praise a book that silly? As its authors say, "We make no claim to analyze postmodernist [sic] thought in general; rather, our aim is to draw attention to a relatively little-known aspect, namely the repeated abuse of and terminology coming from mathematics and physics." Thus, Lacan is busted for "confus[ing] irrational numbers with imaginary numbers, while claiming to be 'precise.'" Golly, doesn't that prove that Lacan is a worthless faker!

Socal & Bricmont were going so against the grain of intellectual fashion that they had to resort to being published by an imprint of St Martin's Press, while their science studies enemies get published by mighty university presses and the even mightier Verso! So unfair.

Doug



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