French postmodernists are all a bunch of charlatans

>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]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense

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I'm pretty sure this book has a lot of misunderstandings and misquotations in it, especially in parts where it quotes postmodern philosophers using math in a metaphorical way and, not knowing this fact, accuses them of being wrong.

Sokal, by the way, is the same guy who sent a fake paper filled with gibberish to a non peer-reviewed postmodern journal and, when they published it, used it as proof that postmodernism misuses science. So clearly this guy has a history of arguing in bad faith and making logical leaps.

>arguing in bad faith a
The people who use this term are the most dishonest fuckers alive

Bad Faith is derived from the common legal term Good Faith, its meaning is pretty succinct

>I'm pretty sure
didn't read

It sure feels like projection half the time.

It's a rhetorical trick used to paint your opponents as dishonest when you can't answer their claims. The term itself is the closest thing there is to a genuine bad faith argument, and out of all the leftist buzzwords, it might be the most irritating because of the blatant hypocrisy inherent to its use.

I honestly don't see why they take such an issue with the way french intellectuals borrowing concepts as models for certain kinds of ideas without understanding the finer details. For example, Lacan's description of desire as asymptomatic borrows from a mathematical idea, but its simplicity as an idea is useful in demonstrating how desire is perpetually approaching, yet never reaching fulfilment. We all have an intuitive grasp on mathematics (if nurtured correctly), so its a neat way of playing off people's preexisting knowledge, even if 'proving' the legitimacy of that model as desire is difficult. I can't speak for Irigaray's use of E=mc2 though.

Well I agree it is usually misused by people who didn't even read Sartre. I didn't know it had become a buzzword. I think the other user was right however, instead of answering the claims of the postmodernists, he merely lampooned them which says more about the ignorance of publishers than it does about the philosophers themselves.
Having said that, most academics are charlatans, who are perceived as wise due to their success (or privilege), the French have always maintained an intellectual elitism, the killed Van Gogh the bastards.

Holy shit you're a retard. Arguing in bad faith means deliberately misunderstanding or misrepresenting things. It's not inherently "leftist". Liberals deliberately misconstrue gun laws and gay marriage debates as "you want more dead kids", or "you hate gay people". Similarly, I've seen plenty of brain dead conservatives doing this same thing. For fucks sake, the vast majority of "postmodern critiques" fall into this category, blatant misreads and quotations stripped of any context. Fuck sake, almost all of JBP's arguments against postmodernism are completely made up or misreadings.

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, multidimensional 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. A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis. The notion of scale needs to be expanded to consider fractal symmetries in ontological terms.
What fractal machines traverse are substantial scales. They traverse them in engendering them. But, and this should be noted, the existential ordinates that they “invent” were always already there. How can this paradox be sustained? It’s because everything becomes possible (including the recessive smoothing of time, evoked by René Thom) the moment one allows the assemblage to escape from energetico-spatiotemporal coordinates. And, here again, we need to rediscover a manner of being of Being—before, after, here and everywhere else—without being, however, identical to itself; a processual, polyphonic Being singularisable by infinitely complexifiable textures, according to the infinite speeds which animate its virtual compositions.
The ontological relativity advocated here is inseparable from an enunciative relativity. Knowledge of a Universe (in an astrophysical or axiological sense) is only possible through the mediation of autopoietic machines. A zone of self-belonging needs to exist somewhere for the coming into cognitive existence of any being or any modality of being. Outside of this machine/Universe coupling, beings only have the pure status of a virtual entity. And it is the same for their enunciative coordinates. The biosphere and mecanosphere, coupled on this planet, focus a point of view of space, time and energy. They trace an angle of the constitution of our galaxy. Outside of this particularised point of view, the rest of the Universe exists (in the sense that we understand existence here-below) only through the virtual existence of other autopoietic machines at the heart of other bio-mecanospheres scattered throughout the cosmos. The relativity of points of view of space, time and energy do not, for all that, absorb the real into the dream. The category of Time dissolves into cosmological reflections on the Big Bang even as the category of irreversibility is affirmed.

Again, you clearly haven't read any of his books. He even adresses this point directly in Fashionable Nonsense and Beyond the Hoax.

Residual objectivity is what resists scanning by the infinite variation of points of view constitutable upon it. Imagine an autopoietic entity whose particles are constructed from galaxies. Or, conversely, a cognitivity constituted on the scale of quarks. A different panorama, another ontological consistency. The mecanosphere draws out and actualises configurations which exist amongst an infinity of others in fields of virtuality. Existential machines are at the same level as being in its intrinsic multiplicity. They are not mediated by transcendent signifiers and subsumed by a univocal ontological foundation. They are to themselves their own material of semiotic expression. Existence, as a process of deterritorialisation, is a specific inter-machinic operation which superimposes itself on the promotion of singularised existential intensities. And, I repeat, there is no generalised syntax for these deterritorialisations. Existence is not dialectical, not representable. It is hardly livable! (Guattari 1995, pp. 50–52)

>Yea Forums will defend this

No I haven't read him, I was just judging his actions at face value tbhfam

Imagine being someone who consumes a large number of books and information but does not have the ability to contribute to discoveries about the universe - like scientists - or to create beautiful things, like artists.

I would never want to be in he shoes of people like Lacan, Derrida, Barthes or Deleuze during the dark hours and silence of the night, when, lying in our beds, we have to think about and face what we really are.

These guys knew they were producing garbage and would be forgotten in the future.That must be painful.

>we have to think about and face what we really are.
bro these are french guys we are talking about, they don't do this

Their rodent brains clearly have deep enough introspection to allow them to devise a philosophy which rationalizes their own pedophilia.
You see, THIS is an argument in bad faith. **Which, coincidentally, has a correct conclusion.**

Never said it's was inherently leftist. It's just their latest meme word. It's been popping up in their spaces, and like any hip term they find convenient, it spreads like a virus.

If these misreadings are intentional, then they should be easily refuted. If they can't, then it your position is too weak to stand up to rhetoric. Most of the time it's just a way to dismiss people's honest arguments in order to avoid them. I, the brilliant leftist intellectual, know what those rural and suburban retards true intentions are, and coincidentally, they're exactly what is most convenient to me.

Pomo is the genre of bad faith. Its preeminant authors have consistently deployed pseudoscience exploiting the audience's expected ignorance in advanced scientific and mathematical topics, a technique which is well catalogued in Sokal and Bricmont's work.

J'avais lu "Alain Soral". Quel drôle de possible lapsus mental contextuel.

Univocity is an old as shit theological idea from John Duns Scotus who Deleuze applies to Spinoza. It basically means that words describing you are different in kind when applied to God; it is by analogy to God that those words have meaning. A wise man is wise, not as wise as a God, but wise like a god. Guattari is flipping the script here by suggesting that cognition doesn't operate at a level of constructing a monistic being (IE. Being as a being, God), but rather that consciousness is an activity of matter that wills itself into existence. Unlike spinoza, for whom all modes turn around God, D&G turn the universe around the modes.

If you actually did your homework, you wouldn't be struggling so hard.

I mean it's not that there aren't a few salvageable granules among the heaps of florid schizobabble designed to dazzle midwits, it's that this is a disreputable embarrassment to philosophy.

>misreadings.
Those are not bad faith arguments though, assuming they desire clarification.

>thoroughly btfo by a simple demonstration.
>"the rest is bad !"
>buzzwords

Checks out

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>pomo accusing anyone of buzzwords

Would Sokal's prank have succeeded if he had used a bigger, peer-reviewed publication? It would have been a gamble, but he really seems to have thought he was onto something significant, he should've taken it. Not taking ST's advice on editing down the article also really crippled the attempt.