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Le pauvre Sokal

John Sturrock: The Social Text Hoax, 16 July 1998

Intellectual Impostures 
by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.
Profile, 274 pp., £9.99, October 1999, 1 86197 074 9
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... its most prominent targets, Julia Kristeva, as ‘an anti-French intellectual escapade’, while Jacques Derrida, on whom the authors could for once find nothing to pin, responded with a seen-it-all-before sigh, ‘le pauvre Sokal’.Poor Sokal and poor Bricmont believe that the garlanded French thinkers who have been leading the American young (and ...

Dolls, Demons and DNA

Barbara Herrnstein Smith: Bruno Latour, 8 March 2012

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods 
by Bruno Latour.
Duke, 157 pp., £12.99, March 2011, 978 0 8223 4825 2
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... he has little but ill to say about the contemporary figures, such as Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, whom he identifies as postmoderns. Latour’s account of the strictly contingent reality of scientific entities and the highly conditional but not merely subjective reality of demons and divinities puts him at odds not only with so-called ...

Spiritual Rock Star

Terry Eagleton: The failings of Pope John Paul II, 3 February 2005

The Pope in Winter: The Dark Face of John Paul II’s Papacy 
by John Cornwell.
Viking, 329 pp., £20, February 2005, 0 670 91572 6
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... political priests, of whom he himself was once one. He has even been known to take a smack at Jacques Derrida. As the 1980s wore on, John Paul rolled back one Vatican Council agenda after another. To do so, however, he needed to smash the Council doctrine of collegiality, which in impeccably orthodox fashion saw the Church as governed by the bishops ...

Lend me a fiver

Terry Eagleton: The grand narrative of experience, 23 June 2005

Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme 
by Martin Jay.
California, 431 pp., £22, January 2005, 0 520 24272 6
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... Plato and Spinoza saw it as a realm of illusion, to be contrasted with the pure light of reason. Jacques Derrida deeply disliked the notion, suspecting it of dark metaphysical tendencies. For William Blake, from whom Martin Jay takes the title of his absorbing new study, experience is a domain of false consciousness and fruitless desire. For Romantics ...

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

Terry Eagleton: Richard Dawkins, 19 October 2006

The God Delusion 
by Richard Dawkins.
Bantam, 406 pp., £20, October 2006, 0 593 05548 9
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... right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a ...

Dynasty

Sherry Turkle: Lacan and Co, 6 December 1990

Jacques Lacan and Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985 
by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman.
Free Association, 816 pp., £25, December 1990, 9781853431630
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... life. Ready to satisfy it was the brand of psychoanalytic thinking embodied in the work of Jacques Lacan. His Cartesian, poeticised and linguistic psychoanalysis constituted a French reinvention of Freud. Towards the end of the decade, what might have been confined to the hothouse world of the intellectuals was carried beyond by the passions of May ...

Hawkesbiz

Frank Kermode, 11 February 1993

Meaning by Shakespeare 
by Terence Hawkes.
Routledge, 173 pp., £30, October 1992, 0 415 07450 9
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Shakespeare’s Professional Career 
by Peter Thomson.
Cambridge, 217 pp., £24.95, September 1992, 0 521 35128 6
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Shakespeare’s Mouldy Tales 
by Leah Scragg.
Longman, 201 pp., £24, October 1992, 0 582 07071 6
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Reading Shakespeare’s Characters 
by Christy Desmet.
Massachusetts, 215 pp., £22.50, December 1992, 0 87023 807 8
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Bit Parts in Shakespeare’s Plays 
by Molly Mahood.
Cambridge, 252 pp., £35, January 1993, 0 521 41612 4
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... which shape character, and her concern with rhetoric extends from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. There is a suggestion that reading characters is a form of ‘ethical self-fashioning’, even if the character is a villain or, for male readers, ‘woman as Other’. Desmet offers at the outset what is intended to be a ...

Why didn’t he commit suicide?

Frank Kermode: Reviewing T.S. Eliot, 4 November 2004

T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews 
by Jewel Spears Brooker.
Cambridge, 644 pp., £80, May 2004, 0 521 38277 7
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... to compare the recent obituary responses of some of our intellectual leaders to the work of Jacques Derrida. Yet it may be too easy to enjoy what in retrospect seems the blank imperceptiveness of these reviewers. The vulgarity of Squire (editor of the important London Mercury) remains disgraceful, but a response of bewilderment, perhaps leading to ...

The Deconstruction Gang

S.L. Goldberg, 22 May 1980

Deconstruction and Criticism 
by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller.
Routledge, 256 pp., £8.95, January 1980, 0 7100 0436 2
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... represented in the book under review: all of them professional stars (or, in the case of Professor Derrida, a strong influence and occasional presence) in some of the literature departments at Yale. The book offers, not an argued defence of their line – though Professor Hillis Miller does occasionally fall into something like argument between one fundamental ...

Elton at seventy

Patrick Collinson, 11 June 1992

Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study 
by G.R. Elton.
Cambridge, 128 pp., £16.95, October 1991, 0 521 41098 3
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... high-priestly figures, whom Elton hints will prove no less evanescent: Foucault, Barthes and M. Jacques Derrida, who is expected to share Sir Geoffrey’s company when honorary degrees are conferred in Cambridge Senate House this summer. While many in the English historical tradition will identify with the robustness of Elton’s exposure of ...

Diary

Adam Shatz: Ornette Coleman, 16 July 2015

... sacred and profane, electric and acoustic – dissolved. It’s no wonder he got on so well with Jacques Derrida, another slayer of binary oppositions. There was a racial subtext to Coleman’s deconstruction of musical boundaries. He had grown up in the Jim Crow South, when recordings by black blues artists were released as ‘race records’, and saw ...

The Ramsey Effect

Kieran Setiya, 18 February 2021

Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers 
by Cheryl Misak.
Oxford, 500 pp., £25, February 2020, 978 0 19 875535 7
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... analytic and Continental philosophy, the latter epitomised by the likes of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. But the taxonomy is bizarre, as Bernard Williams once complained, since it contrasts a method or approach to philosophy with a geographical region, ‘rather as though one divided cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese’. Even the term ...

Different Stories

David Hoy, 8 January 1987

Nietzsche: Life as Literature 
by Alexander Nehamas.
Harvard, 261 pp., £14.95, January 1986, 0 674 62435 1
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... undecidable. This ‘critical pluralism’ can be supplemented with an attack (as by Foucault and Derrida) on the claim that the author has any authority over the polysemy of the text. In contrast, Nehamas defends both the postulated author and the regulative ideal of critical monism: the theory that practical interpretations aim at an ideal but always only ...

It isn’t your home

Toril Moi: Sarraute gets her due, 10 September 2020

Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between 
by Ann Jefferson.
Princeton, 425 pp., £34, August 2020, 978 0 691 19787 6
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... it shared significant preoccupations with a new generation of theorists, including Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Both the new novelists and the new theorists detested Balzacian realism and psychological character studies, and embraced a formalist view of language, embedded in an ...

Selflessness

Jonathan Rée, 8 May 1997

Proper Names 
by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Michael Smith.
Athlone, 191 pp., £45, January 1997, 0 485 11466 6
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Levinas: An Introduction 
by Colin Davis.
Polity, 168 pp., £39.50, November 1996, 0 7456 1262 8
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Basic Philosophical Writings 
by Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi.
Indiana, 201 pp., £29.50, November 1996, 0 253 21079 8
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... to sound a bit glum. A couple of years later, though, Foucault suffered a mauling from the young Jacques Derrida (in a lecture to Jean Wahl’s Collége Philosophique), and shortly afterwards Derrida published a vast essay in praise of Levinas, ingeniously framed by two quotations: Matthew Arnold on Hebraism and ...

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