Fashionable Nonsense
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont |
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| Original title | Impostures Intellectuelles |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Subject | Postmodernism, Philosophy of science |
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| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | xiv, 300 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 770940534 |
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (French: Impostures Intellectuelles), published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures, is a book by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Sokal is best known for the Sokal Affair, in which he submitted a deliberately absurd article to Social Text, a critical theory journal, and was able to get it published.
The book was published in French in 1997, and in English in 1998; the English editions were revised for greater relevance to debates in the English-speaking world. As part of the so-called science wars, Sokal and Bricmont criticize postmodernism in academia for what they consider misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. According to some reports, the response within the humanities was "polarized."
Critics of Sokal and Bricmont charge that they lack understanding of the writing they were criticizing. Responses from the scientific community were more supportive.
Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics:
The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general ... [but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism." In particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing."
The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who, in terms of the quantity of published works, invited presentations, and citations received, are some of the leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
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