Kirata
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
Post-structuralist thinking is...
Your incessant reliance on references to "post-structuralism," an evidence-free invention of leftists, critical theorists and psychoanalysts, demonstrates nothing so much as your inability to distinguish between ideology and reality, one might even fairly say between gobbledygook and reality.
Post-Structuralism
Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and Julia Kristeva
Taking them in the order given above:
Jacques Derrida
his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine, as pseudophilosophy or sophistry . . . On Derrida's scholarship and writing style, Noam Chomsky wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood" . . . Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt also criticized his work for misusing scientific terms and concepts in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1994).
Michael Foucaultt
In February, Foucault gave a speech denouncing police provocation to protesters at the Latin Quarter of the Mutualité. Such actions marked Foucault's embrace of the ultra-left, undoubtedly influenced by Defert, who had gained a job at Vincennes' sociology department and who had become a Maoist. Most of the courses at Foucault's philosophy department were Marxist-Leninist oriented . . . While the right-wing press was heavily critical of this new institution, new Minister of Education Olivier Guichard was angered by its ideological bent and the lack of exams, with students being awarded degrees in a haphazard manner. He refused national accreditation of the department's degrees
Gilles Deleuze
Prior to his death, Deleuze had announced his intention to write a book entitled La Grandeur de Marx (The Greatness of Marx) . . . In the 1960s, Deleuze's portrayal of Nietzsche as a metaphysician of difference rather than a reactionary mystic contributed greatly to the plausibility and popularity of "left-wing Nietzscheanism" as an intellectual stance . . . In the 1970s, the Anti-Oedipus, written in a style by turns vulgar and esoteric, offering a sweeping analysis of the family, language, capitalism, and history via eclectic borrowings from Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and dozens of other writers, was received as a theoretical embodiment of the anarchic spirit of May 1968 . . . In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his works.
Judith Butler
Since 1993, she has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is now Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory.In sociology and political philosophy, the term "critical theory" (or "social critical theory") describes the neo-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorist Max Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them." Frankfurt theorists drew on the critical methods of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. ~Source In 1998, Denis Dutton's journal Philosophy and Literature awarded Butler first prize in its fourth annual "Bad Writing Competition," which set out to "celebrate bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles."
Jacques Lacan
For some, "the impenetrability of Lacan's prose... [is] too often regarded as profundity precisely because it cannot be understood" . . . In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticize Lacan's use of terms from mathematical fields such as topology, accusing him of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, accusing him producing statements that are not even wrong.
Other critics have dismissed Lacan's work wholesale. François Roustang called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish", and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan". The former Lacanian analyst, Dylan Evans, eventually dismissed Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and as harming rather than helping patients, and has criticized Lacan's followers for treating his writings as "holy writ". Richard Webster has decried what he sees as Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant "Cult of Lacan". Others have been more forceful still, describing him as "The Shrink from Hell" and listing the many associates -- from lovers and family to colleagues, patients, and editors -- left damaged in his wake.
See also:Stavrakakis, Yannis, The Lacanian Left, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007
Jon Simons (ed.), Contemporary Critical Theorists: From Lacan to Said, Edinburgh University Press, 2004 Jean Baudrillard
a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism...
Denis Dutton, founder of Philosophy & Literature's "Bad Writing Contest"-- which listed examples of the kind of willfully obscurantist prose for which Baudrillard was frequently criticised -- had the following to say:Some writers in their manner and stance intentionally provoke challenge and criticism from their readers. Others just invite you to think. Baudrillard's hyperprose demands only that you grunt wide-eyed or bewildered assent. He yearns to have intellectual influence, but must fend off any serious analysis of his own writing, remaining free to leap from one bombastic assertion to the next, no matter how brazen. Your place is simply to buy his books, adopt his jargon, and drop his name wherever possible. Mark Poster, Baudrillard's editor, said:Baudrillard's writing up to the mid-1980s is open to several criticisms. He fails to define key terms, such as the code; his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view of the world from that limited base. He ignores contradictory evidence such as the many benefits afforded by the new media. Julia Kristeva
Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural studies and feminism . . .She trained in psychoanalysis, and earned her degree in 1979. In some ways, her work can be seen as trying to adapt a psychoanalytic approach to the poststructuralist criticism. For example, her view of the subject, and its construction, shares similarities with Sigmund Freud and Lacan. However, Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense; instead, she favors a subject always "in process" or "on trial". In this way, she contributes to the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures, whilst preserving the teachings of psychoanalysis.
K.
< Message edited by Kirata -- 11/15/2016 3:33:03 PM >
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RE: Of species, race, and ethnicity.... - 
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