Intellectuals on the Couch: The Sokal Hoax and Other Impostures intellectuelles

Abstract

IT WOULD BE AMUSING BUT RATHER FRUITLESS to trot out once again the details of the Sokal Hoax, and to savor one more time the stances assumed by the wide range of persons who have made pronouncements upon it. Any good search engine will lead the reader to dozens of internet sites devoted to the affair, and a quick look at the tables of contents of journals in a variety of fields will confirm the obvious: the hoax was a hit. Ever since the truth about Transforming the boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (Social Text 46/47) was revealed in Lingua Franca in spring of 1996, there has been a veritable explosion of articles and debates involving scientists (including a Nobel recipient), internationally-known scholars in the humanities and social sciences, writers, editors, and students in a range of fields. And things are heating up again now that Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Impostures intellectuelles (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997) has been published in translation in the US by St. Martin's Press. (The British edition was published by Profile Books in July, 1998.) I don't wish to join the fray, but I do think it important to ask questions about the implications of the phenomenon itself. I'd like to investigate what is at stake here, over and above (serious) issues of sloppy adjudicating, weak scholarship, strange inter-disciplinarity, bizarre French-US relations in academia, and the ever-problematic cult of personalities. What is there about this hoax that could possibly justify articles in such prominent venues as the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Le Monde, Dissent and the Times Literary Supplement? Why have we heard so much about roundtables at Yale, Princeton, Duke, the University of Michigan and New York University, news conferences in a range of places, and