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Comment by Gimpei | Hacker News Reader

For a second, I thought this was about Homi K. Bhabha, notorious among other things for this gem of a sentence:

"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalise' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."

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I find it incredibly strange how this guys work is so prevalent in the arts in academia. I see it a lot when non-philosophy students get to PhD-level and suddenly encounter the problem of needing to include some philosophical thought to justify their work, and they use that of Bhaba, which just leads to them now having two problems. Total word salad. I'm sure he knows what he's talking about, but like all good Hegelians, nobody else does.

One of my undergraduate literature courses was on postcolonial studies, so unsurprisingly we talked about Bhaba quite a bit, and I was confused for a second just like GP. The teacher of that class went on to be dean and also head of the entire university's honors program a year or two later, IIRC. So FWIW this seems to have been a hot topic in academia at that time, too (mid-2000's). I think given the global political climate at that time, the years of OIF when accusations of imperialism were being leveled at the US on a daily basis, it was a fairly interesting and relevant course relative to much of the rest of the department.

Wow, that's a great negative sample for any reading class--uselessly abstruse and verbose.

Took me multiple turns even with ChatGPT to simplify it:

Using desire for control may seem manageable at first, but it leads to negative consequences and people try to justify it using false reasoning and fake authority to make it seem acceptable, even though it goes against rational thinking.

It reminds me of something Postmodernism Generator would generate.

https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

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