The Postmodern Hoax
Beyond the Hoax Reading Alan Sokal’s Beyond the Hoax brought back the question that haunted my university teaching career: How much of postmodernism was intellectual fraud? "Transgressing Boundaries" and Social Tex t Sokal is the physicist who submitted a deliberately bogus article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the cultural studies journal Social Text . Post-structuralism as Mummery After it was accepted and published (Spring/Summer 1996), Sokal announced that the article was nonsense, a parody of postmodernist half-baked arguments and verbiage. Sokal and the Belgian physicist/philosopher, Jean Bricmont, subsequently published Impostures Intellectuelles (1997) in which they systematically unmasked the mummery of leading lights of post-structuralist theory such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. Jacques Lacan as Charlatan The most compelling essay I have read on Lacan