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Comment by abyssin | Hacker News Reader

For those interested in reading a great book exposing Deleuze and others like him, I recommend Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal & Bricmont.

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I am not a big fan of the Sokal Hoax and the follow ups. They made cheap money out of obvious misinterpretations, and did much more harm than anything else. While Chomsky, maybe from a US perspective, found some value, I am more with Derrida who analysed it as what it was: sad. I recommend his perspective https://philpapers.org/rec/DERPM

This post may also be of interest to people: http://byfat.xxx/chomsky

And it's not like other fields don't have their own Sokal Hoax either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair

I don't like to side with Chomsky, but he's right. The French postmodernists invented a nonsense language primarily to sell books. Postmodernism is the last dying gasps of a branch of philosophy which has found itself increasingly irrelevant since its main thinkers turned out to be utterly wrong about every single political position they held dearest

I think there is a significant difference between “I don’t think they were right,” which is a real, meaningful criticism, and “this is impenetrable nonsense,” which is a surface level criticism.

It's impossible to disagree with substance if there is no substance. If the point is to sound smart without saying anything at all. Postmodernism (especially french postmodernism) is a scam designed to sell books to pretentious undergrads

In think Sokal is right. The postmodern academic left is a phenomenon of decay and is not helpful for traditional left-wing goals such as social justice.

On the other hand, I think Deleuze has a deep understanding of philosophy and, to some extent, mathematics. Deleuze always tries to make a transition from traditional theories to his extreme conception of difference and repetition.

It's crazy, but it has a certain genius.

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