[.ca] Intellectual Impostures (ISBN 1861976313)

The merde hits the fan:
This book grew out of the famous hoax in which Alan Sokal published a parody article in the American postmod journal Social Text. The article was filled with non sequiturs and nonsensical quotations about maths and physics by prominent French and American intellectuals, yet it was published unaltered. Sokal then revealed that it was a deliberate parody, to the great consternation of the editors. Intellectual Impostures broadens the investigation to demonstrate how intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari have repeatedly abused scientific concepts and terminology. They have either used these ideas completely out of context without justification or they have thrown scientific jargon around with no regard for its meaning or relevance, obviously to try to impress their readers. In the preface to the first edition, Sokal and Bricmont provide the background to the controversy whilst in the preface to the second edition they discuss the four types of criticisms of their book. These are: critics who tried to refute them, critics who attributed to them ideas that the authors themselves had rejected, name-calling and ad hominem attacks, and finally those who agreed but thought that the authors did not go far enough. Here one is tempted to partly agree with Anne Applebaum who, in her review of the book, claimed that of course post-structuralist theory is rubbish and that we don't need a book to tell us that. I disagree with the second statement, because Intellectual Impostures is mostly an amusing read that will have you rolling on the floor and because it is vitally important that intellectual frauds be exposed. In this regard I also highly recommend The Illusions Of Postmodernism by Terry Eagleton and The Anti Chomsky reader by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. The introduction provides the history of the Sokal Hoax and the response to it. The major part of the book consists of an analysis of various texts by Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Paul Virilio. Brief explanations of the relevant scientific concepts plus references to popular and explanatory texts are provided. The authors also investigate certain philosophical and scientific confusions behind much of postmodernist thinking, like cognitive relativism, certain misunderstandings concerning chaos theory and so-called postmodern science. Appendix A is the full text of the famous hoax article: Trangressing The Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Appendix B consists of comments on the parody and Appendix C serves as an afterword on the hilarious incident. This amusing and illuminating book concludes with a 14-page bibliography and an index.

Conceptual Deliriums:
This is a most necessary book, which shows with overpowering force that the apostles of postmodernism are naked emperors. It is deadly devastating for Jacques Lacan (Freud is much more important than Darwin), Julia Kristeva (the novel as a text), Luce Irigaray (the sexual charge of E=Mc2), the tandem Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (science promotes accelerations), Paul Virilio (a dromocrat) or Jean Baudrillard (the war space became non-Euclidian). It shows blatantly that structuralism and other postmodernisms are not more that conceptual deliriums (the words of Jean Fourastie, who criticized vehemently the hype pseudo-intellectuals). Their high-brow phraseology is not more than bluff to hide outspoken banalities. Some parts of Europe and France in particular lost (and are still losing) generations of students by forcing them to swallow this debilitating idiotologies. What is most shameful is the fact that the whole leftist community incensed those false apostles, that the author's incensed themselves mutually (others were also involved like Foucauld, Derrida, Barthes or Serres), and that the whole leftist press spread the incense over the whole population. Whorenalism at its worst. On the literary front, this pseudo-movement culminated in the impotent 'nouveau roman', which reduced literature to texts ... to be explained by structuralism. The French novel sank in the morass of linguistics. It is a wonder that in this environment Alain Aspect produced his crucial quantum tests. This book should constitute a warning for all European universities: stop the conspiracy of the pseudos. On the other hand, in a period where George Orwell's doublespeak (war is peace) is again the main sinister message (which became reality), when obscurantism, religious fanaticism and nationalism are the basis of party politics, we should return to at least some sort of rationalism. Therefore, I strongly disagree with the author's attack on cognitive relativism and more specifically Popper's critical rationalism. I believe that, when we don't know 90 % of the matter in the universe, perhaps 1 % of all virusses on earth, when 'I' exists only by comparison (V. Ramachandran) and when 'is' is an illusion (L. Smolin), some kind of critical rationalism (and testing) is more than needed. Popper's proposition of falsification instead of inductivism with its illimited corroborations gave scientific research a jump of lightyears. Nevertheless, this book is a brilliant exposure of phraseologies and a most painful blame for European philosophy.