Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 09:43:01 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Alan Sokal's book party


I had an enjoyable time yesterday at Alan Sokal's home celebrating the
publication of "Intllectual Impostors", co-written with a Belgian
physicist. It is a broadside directed at all of the French postmodernists
who write really stupid things about science. The gosh-darned thing is
written in French, so it won't be of much use to me, but it should be
translated into English before long--I will keep you all posted.

I asked Alan about those bums Deleuze and Guattari, who he had a chapter
on. He got very excited and started hopping up and down. He translated a
section of their prose for me that he subjected to a withering critique.
Although my brain was a little foggy from all the champagne I had imbibed,
I am quite sure that the D&G passage said: "The hypotenuse of sensuality
reveals itself in the Heisenberg Principle, mediated by overdetermined
rhizomes." Or something like that.

Alan's apartment which overlooks the Hudson River was quite impressive. It
had rounded mouldings on the ceiling, dripping-water bronze sculptures and
a chartreuse leather sofa. Sort of an Architectural Digest vision of the
Marxist subculture. Alan, as always, looked as unassuming as the
prototypical highschool math genius geek we can all remember. This look,
plus his credentials of having taught math in Nicaragua, gives him the
clout he needs to take on the pomos.

His new book has caused a furor in France, which was reported on the front
page of Nouvelle Observatore. Apparently Luz Irrigary is especially
pissed-off and considers the book a racial attack on the French. She
sniffed, "Why didn't he write about the Italians or the Germans." I guess
everybody but her knows the answer to this. It has been the French who have
inflicted this plague of bad prose and shoddy ideas upon the rest of the
world, along with adoration of Jerry Lewis.

I ran into Norman Finkelstein there as well. We had a chat about his
article in NLR. He astonished me with the information that he read all of
the literature he cited on the genocide only *after* reading Goldhagen. For
those who have read the article, this is simply stunning. He refers to
dozens of books and articles and obviously knows them inside and out by
this point. He has a new book that is awaiting publication. It is an
elongated version of his NLR article on Goldhagen co-written with a woman
who is the world's leading expert on the police archives that Goldhagen
used to "substantiate" his claim that the holocaust was a product of the
German soul. Apparently efforts are under way to block publication of the
book by the Zionist establishment, including Goldhagen. Norman told me that
Goldhagen refuses to debate him and spends all of his time trying to
discredit him behind his back.

Alan introduced me to some of his colleagues, including Norman Levitt and
his wife, who is a fund-raiser for CUNY. Levitt is the author of "Higher
superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science". His wife,
whose name I can't recall, is a social democrat who started to give me a
hard time about dictatorship in Cuba and how Sandinista "privilege"
alienated the population into voting for Chamorro. I listened politely for
a few minutes and then explained to her that her hostility to Cuba is based
on her class outlook. The petty-bourgeosie left in the United States is all
for socialism, except in the forms that it takes in the 20th century in
countries under military and economic siege, with poor resources and labor
productivity, and weak democratic traditions.

Sometimes it is useful to remember that mass opinion, which is really what
revolutionary socialists have to deal with, regards Cuba as a bastion of
anticapitalist thought and deed. Our job is to defend Cuba's right to
self-determination. The sort of thing we hear from Lou Godena is magnified
all out of proportion to their importance in intellectual discourse because
he is a central figure on this mailing-list. Outside of the Spoons
universe, the notion that Cuba has a procapitalist orientation is limited
to Maoist subculture, which consists of MIM and the RCP and similar groups.
The people who hold such views will not be persuaded by facts and logic and
I for one have decided not to try to convince Lou Godena of the
intellectual and political fallacies of his Cuba "analysis". Besides which,
as Gary McLennan has said, it is boring, boring, boring.

Louis Proyect



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