Comments on: The Sokal Hoax, Friedrich Nietzsche, Attacks on Deconstruction, and More Bad Writing

By: April Fools: Seven Literary Hoaxes « biblioklept

April Fools: Seven Literary Hoaxes « biblioklept — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:02:34 +0000

[...] The same day the essay was published, he announced the hoax in the journal Lingua Franca. Ouch. Biblioklept wrote a post about the incident a few years ago, if you’re [...]

By: ed biblioklept

ed biblioklept — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:38:36 +0000

Thanks for your comment. I’m currently reading Zizek’s new books, *Violence*, where he has quite a bit to say about an idea you bring up that postmodern thinking is so overtly concerned with — the idea of engagement, practice, “doing.” He writes of the importance of thinking and learning divorced from action, that a will/mandate to “act,” to do, tends to lead to recapitulations of systemic violence. Hopefully, I’ll have a review up in the next day or two.

By: frank furt

frank furt — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 06:10:29 +0000

A brief and all-too-personal pointlet about the Nietzsche-Derrida comparison. I have heaps more time for Nietzsche because he ties his critique of philosophy into a critique of the age – of society (despite his assumption that everything can be attributed to psychology). Deconstruction wants to be topical – and is perceived by its followers as tying directly into contemporary concerns about freedom and an overpowering system – but really it keeps itself aloof from the contingent. It insists on the purity of its philosophical reflection. “This is philosophy – it is not some crass psychological or sociological reductionism. This is Paris. It is not Frankfurt.” And so the student radical is given a post-Kantian reflection on the conditions for the possibility of lying, for instance (see the transcript of Derrida’s piece on redelephant.wordpress.com) which is meant to point to a radical conception of the public sphere (?). Of course, there was always the promise of truth in that long line of acts of lying over the millennia. The question remains as to what has happened to truth now and of the value of truth (or truths) now. Is the age to be condemned simply because there is not enough transcendental relfection – because the age is not Derridean enough? Actually the effect seems to be very affirmative. To grasp (even in part) deconstruction is to get the sense that the liberating transformation has already occured (had always already occured). To put it in rather crude terms, this is just a liberation in thought which ought not to be so affirmative while the liberation in practice is still such a hell of a long way off.

Thanks though for a piece which is intelligent and worth reading – it took a lot of searching through the blog catalogue with a painfully slow internet connection to find something of that calibre.

By: Noam Chomsky, Intellectual Elitism, Po-Mo Gibberish, More Attacks on Deconstruction, and Bad Writing Revisited « biblioklept

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:59:42 +0000

[...] as little beyond “pseudo-scientific posturing.” Immediately, my thoughts jumped to the discussion of the Sokal Hoax I posted a few weeks back. Chomsky continues his affront to post-structuralism, arguing, much like Sokal, that the major [...]

By: ed biblioklept

ed biblioklept — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 15:42:02 +0000

Thanks for your kind words…love your site, by the way!

By: Roger

Roger — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 16:59:31 +0000

When you wrote:
“The greatest value of the hoax is that it reinforces the tenets of deconstruction: to upset the places we feel are comfortable and safe, prompting constant re-examination of our aims and goals.”
I said to myself–yes, that’s it. Thanks for your thoughtful piece on the Sokal Hoax.