/lit/ - Literature

From Wikipedia:
>"Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (1998; UK: Intellectual Impostures), first published in French in 1997 as Impostures intellectuelles, is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.[1] As part of the so-called science wars, Sokal and Bricmont criticize postmodernism in academia for the misuse of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. The book was published in English in 1998, with revisions to the original 1997 French edition for greater relevance to debates in the English-speaking world.[2] According to some reports, the response within the humanities was "polarized;"[3] critics of Sokal and Bricmont charged that they lacked understanding of the writing they were scrutinizing. By contrast, responses from the scientific community were more supportive. Similar to the subject matter of the book, Sokal is best known for his eponymous 1996 hoaxing affair, whereby he was able to get published a deliberately absurd article that he submitted to Social Text, a critical theory journal.[4]"

Derrida's response:
>Le Monde asks for my comments on Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s book Impostures intellectuelles, although they consider that I am much less badly treated in it than some other French thinkers. Here is my response:
>This is all rather sad, don’t you think? For poor Sokal, to begin with. His name remains linked to a hoax—”the Sokal hoax,” as they say in the United States—and not to scientific work. Sad too because the chance of serious reflection seems to have been ruined, at least in a broad public forum that deserves better.
>It would have been interesting to make a scrupulous study of the so-called scientific “metaphors”—their role, their status, their effects in the discourses that are under attack. Not only in the case of “the French”! and not only in the case of these French writers! That would have required that a certain number of difficult discourses be read seriously, in terms of their theoretical effects and strategies. That was not done.

How do postmodernist larpers combat this? They critique physics without knowing physics and critique enlightenment while taking an enlightenment skeptic’s view of morality.

Et voila

>>17484759
Woah dude so sick

When did you realize postmodernism is bullshit? For me it was my first exposure

> We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

Good read. Changed my perspective on the philosophers discussed, but also made me think that maybe philosophy is not a relevant discipline anymore. Tired of these pseudo-intellectual fraudulent hacks.

No, just read Fashionable Nonsense instead and spare yourself of these glib charlatans

>>15202924
Alan Sokal. See pic related.

Reminder that Sokal forever BTFO'd continental philosophy.

>French postmodernists are all a bunch of charlatans

The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general ... [but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism."[5] In particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing."[6]

The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who, in terms of the quantity of published works, invited presentations, and citations received, are some of the leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.

Sokal and Bricmont claim that they do not intend to analyze postmodernist thought in general. Rather, they aim to draw attention to the abuse of concepts from mathematics and physics, subjects they've devoted their careers to studying and teaching. Sokal and Bricmont define abuse of mathematics and physics as:

Using scientific or pseudoscientific terminology without bothering much about what these words mean.
Importing concepts from the natural sciences into the humanities without the slightest justification, and without providing any rationale for their use.
Displaying superficial erudition by shamelessly throwing around technical terms where they are irrelevant, presumably to impress and intimidate the non-specialist reader.
Manipulating words and phrases that are, in fact, meaningless.
Self-assurance on topics far beyond the competence of the author and exploiting the prestige of science to give discourses a veneer of rigor.
The book gives a chapter to each of the above-mentioned authors, "the tip of the iceberg" of a group of intellectual practices that can be described as "mystification, deliberately obscure language, confused thinking and the misuse of scientific concepts."[7] For example, Luce Irigaray is criticised for asserting that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation" because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us"; and for asserting that fluid mechanics is unfairly neglected because it deals with "feminine" fluids in contrast to "masculine" rigid mechanics.[8] Similarly, Lacan is criticized for drawing an analogy between topology and mental illness that, in Sokal and Bricmont's view, is unsupported by any argument and is "not just false: it is gibberish".[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense