Whatever you think of Foucault and Rorty, there is no doubt that they were intelligent writers and genuine scholars with a distinctive vision of reality. They opened the way to fakes but were not fakes themselves. Matters are quite otherwise with many of their contemporaries. Consider the following sentence:

"This is not just its situation 'in principle' (the one it occupies in the hierarchy of instances in relation to the determinant instance: in society, the economy) nor just its situation 'in fact' (whether, in the phase under consideration, it is dominant or subordinate) but the relation of this situation in fact to this situation in principle, that is, the very relation which makes of this situation in fact a 'variation' of the – 'invariant' – structure, in dominance, of the totality."
Or this:

"it is the connexion between signifier and signifier that permits the elision in which the signifier installs the lack-of-being in the object relation using the value of 'reference back' possessed by signification in order to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack it supports."
Those sentences are from the French philosopher Louis Althusser and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan respectively. These authors emerged from the revolutionary ferment of Paris in 1968 to achieve an astonishing reputation, not least in America, where between them they run up more references in the academic literature than Kant and Goethe combined. Yet it is surely clear that these sentences are nonsense. Their claims to scholarship and erudite knowledge intimidate the critic and maintain fortified defences against critical assault. They illustrate a peculiar kind of academic Newspeak: each sentence is curled round like an ingrowing toenail, hard, ugly, and pointing only to itself.

The fake intellectual invites you to conspire in his own self-deception, to join in creating a fantasy world. He is the teacher of genius, you the brilliant pupil. Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers. The arrival of fake thought and fake scholarship in our universities should not therefore be attributed to any explicit desire to deceive. It has come about through the complicit opening of territory to the propagation of nonsense. Nonsense of this kind is a bid to be accepted. It asks for the response: by God, you are right, it is like that.

And no doubt if you have earned your academic career by learning to push around the nonsensical mantras of the impostors, combining them in the impenetrable syntax that hoodwinks the person who composes it as much as the person who reads it, you will react indignantly to everything I have said so far.

*crowd goes OHHHHHHHHH* SHIT son is that a zizek diss i heard right there, cold dog, real cold. peace im out

deadken posted:

today two people found my blog by googling 'i've got maggots in my scrotum'

I hope you learned the importance of SEO from this

cleanhands posted:

deadken posted:

today two people found my blog by googling 'i've got maggots in my scrotum'

I hope you learned the importance of SEO from this

i never rly bothered w/ that & im still the top search result for "zizek fifty shades" which brings me a couple dozen hits a day

cleanhands posted:

Personally I'm sympathetic to the view that post Marxist theory is impenetrable to all but time-rich,hyper-patient NEETs, but its so awesome and mind-expanding that I consider it almost a holiday from reality's nonsense

pff, fucking effort? no thanks. my dad got me everything i'll ever need.

DildoMalone posted:

i wanted to amke it more clear that i was making fun of scrutons name for the benefit of the reader

thanks bro, all clear on the western front now

online poker"This is not just its situation 'in principle' (the one it occupies in the hierarchy of instances in relation to the determinant instance: in society, the economy) nor just its situation 'in fact' (whether, in the phase under consideration, it is dominant or subordinate) but the relation of this situation in fact to this situation in principle, that is, the very relation which makes of this situation in fact a 'variation' of the – 'invariant' – structure, in dominance, of the totality."

swirlsofhistory posted:

the history of philosophy is basically people talking past one another, a corpus of theories conjured out of each philosopher's unique use of language producing knowledge supposedly superior to that dirtied by empirical investigation and facts. that applies to its cousin religion too.

& Both are excellent

tpaine posted:

Crow posted:

swirlsofhistory posted:

the history of philosophy is basically people talking past one another, a corpus of theories conjured out of each philosopher's unique use of language producing knowledge supposedly superior to that dirtied by empirical investigation and facts. that applies to its cousin religion too.

& Both are excellent

george is the unmoved mover actually

Superabound posted:

if someone can show me a single societal problem ever cured by philosophy ill maybe start giving a shit about any of it, tia

socialist impulses were cured by edmund burke's rationalisation of prejudice and anti-intellectualism as common sense. your move, creep