Dear Sundeep...

J J R (jrovira@juno.com)
Sat, 12 Dec 1998 18:08:21 -0500 (EST) 

Your efforts were not in vain.  I went to the links you posted--they were
both good, but the second one is especially a riot (and very pertinent to
our discussion).  Here's a quote from it below....

******************************

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with 
strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of 
reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages 
with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would 
you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your 
lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like 
the following:


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, multi-dimensional 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.


This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many 
fashionable French ‘intellectuals’ outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont 
in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, which caused a sensation 
when published in French last year, and which is now released in a 
completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on 
indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and 
Bricmont, "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific 
and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered." Guattari’s 
close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze had a similar talent for 
writing:-

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