Date: Sat, 4 Oct 1997 10:39:20 -0400
Subject: M-TH: M-I: Physicists Take Philosophers to Task in Paris (N.Y. Times)
From: farmelantj-AT-juno.com (James Farmelant)


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      October 4, 1997
      
     
Physicists Take Philosophers to Task in Paris

      By CRAIG R. WHITNEY
      
     
     
     
     
     P ARIS -- In the country that invented Cartesian logic, the
     philosopher is king. So Alan Sokal, professor of physics at New York
     University, and Jean Bricmont, a colleague at the University of
     Louvain in Belgium, may be in big trouble.
     
     In a book published here Friday, "Intellectual Impostures," they
     argue that such revered French philosophers as Jacques Lacan, Luce
     Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze just don't know what they're talking
     about when they try to use scientific and mathematical concepts.
     
     Indeed, they dare to suggest that some postmodern philosophizing may
     just be "true intoxication by words, combined with complete
     indifference to what they mean."
     
     Sokal, who has said he considers himself a leftist, insisted in an
     interview in the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur that their intention
     was not to attack the American left but to awaken it from cult-like
     fascination with postmodern notions like the idea that modern
     scientific theories can be deconstructed like novels and debunked as
     sexist fallacies.
     
     "Our goal," he and Bricmont say in their book, "is precisely to say
     that the emperor has no clothes."
     
     But hell hath no fury like a nation of philosophers with its honor
     at stake, and the book was attacked even before Editions Odile Jacob
     officially brought it out Friday.
     
     "What can be the real reason for such a polemic, so far removed from
     present-day concerns?" one target, the philosopher and psychoanalyst
     Julia Kristeva, said in Le Nouvel Observateur. "It seems to be an
     anti-French intellectual enterprise."
     
     "Faced with the aura of French thinkers in the United States,
     francophilia has given way to francophobia," she said. Le Monde, in
     an article about the book that took up an entire page, sniffed that
     only in American academia was "postmodernism" recognized as a
     philosophical-cultural movement in any event.
     
     "I am very disappointed by the nationalist tone of the reaction to
     the book in France," Bricmont said in a telephone interview from
     Louvain. "Since I am not American at all, I don't think it's fair to
     see this as an American anti-French attack." He said they hoped to
     find an American publisher.
     
     Sokal is no stranger to controversy. Last year he got a respected
     American postmodern journal, Social Text, to publish a philosophical
     treatise that he later revealed was a hoax, a parody filled with
     scientific non sequiturs that had sailed right past infatuated
     editors.
     
     "I hope this book will not set off a war between France and the
     United States, or France and Belgium for that matter," he said in
     New York City before heading to Europe this week. "I hope it will
     provoke a discussion of the underlying issues."
     
     That may not be easy. Even in France, where Descartes, Diderot and
     Voltaire have long been held up as models of the cardinal French
     virtue of clarity, texts like the following, by Deleuze, were cited
     as evidence of his brilliance after his suicide last year:
     
     "An exhausted man is much more than a weary man. Does he exhaust the
     possible because he is himself exhausted, or is he exhausted because
     he has exhausted the possible? He exhausts himself by exhausting the
     possible, and inversely."
     
     Sokal and his colleague make only passing reference to that kind of
     wordplay, insisting that all they are qualified to criticize is the
     misuse of science and mathematics -- notably by Lacan, once, in a
     published lecture that compared the male sex organ to an imaginary
     number, the square root of -1.
     
     Postulating that a signifier, S, divided by what is signified, s,
     equals a statement, s, Lacan said that if the signifier is -1, the
     statement becomes the square root of minus one.
     
     "Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of enjoyment,
     not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part
     lacking in the desired image," he said. "That is why it is
     equivalent to the square root of minus one of the signification
     produced above, of the enjoyment that it restores by the coefficient
     of its statement to the function of the lack of signifier -1."
     
     Get it?
     
     Neither did the two physics professors. "Even if his 'algebra' made
     sense, obviously the 'signifier,' the 'signified' and the
     'statement' contained in it are not numbers," they wrote. There was
     also no attempt to explain what the male sex organ had to do with
     the square root of minus one. "We do recognize that it is worrisome
     to see our erectile organ identified with the square root of minus
     one," they wrote.
     
     Fragments taken out of context, perhaps? "His analogies between
     psychoanalysis and mathematics are more arbitrary than can possibly
     be imagined, and he gives absolutely no empirical or conceptual
     justification (neither here, nor elsewhere in his work) for them,"
     they wrote. "Finally, as far as showing off superficial erudition
     and manipulating sentences devoid of sense is concerned, we think
     the above texts speak for themselves."
     
     The Belgian-born psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray comes
     in for an equally hard time with her theories, eagerly adopted in
     some American feminist circles, that much science is sex-biased. Not
     that the idea should be dismissed out of hand, the authors say, but
     with better logic than she uses when suggesting that male science
     favors solid mechanics over fluid mechanics because men do not
     menstruate.
     
     "Irigaray, in sum, does not understand the nature of the physical
     and mathematical problems posed in fluid mechanics," Sokal and
     Bricmont conclude.
     
     In a long attempt to come to grips with Gilles Deleuze and Felix
     Guattari's writings, they quote extensively from passages running
     along these lines: "It happens that the constant-limit can itself
     appear as a link in the whole of the universe in which all the parts
     are subject to finite conditions (quantity of movement, force,
     energy ...)."
     
     The two iconoclasts say: "Obviously, it could be retorted that these
     texts are just profound, and that we do not understand them. But on
     examination, they contain a high density of scientific terms used
     out of context and without apparent logic, at least if these words
     are thought."
     
     But Roger-Pol Droit countered in a review in Le Monde: "By insisting
     that everything that is not mathematically proved or experimentally
     confirmed is 'devoid of sense.' They may be in favor, to fight the
     distortions of the 'politically correct,' of an equally impoverished
     'scientifically correct.' Is recess over?"
     
     Maybe. "The ultimate validity of our criticism," Sokal said, "has to
     be judged author by author, case by case."
     
     
     
     
     
     
   
   
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