From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Dec 11 2002 - 00:17:18 MST
Lee Corbin:
> Do you have any evidence that Derrida was trying to make
> any kind of scientific statement like this? Does it really
> seem plausible that he had the spacetime interval in mind?
Here's someone who agrees with you:
=====
http://www.soz.uni-hannover.de/isoz/sokal/NYTREV8.HTM
from MICHAEL HOLQUIST
Sokal's Hoax: An Exchange
[..]
When, in reading Sokal's Social Text article, I first encountered this
paragraph, I was bothered not so much by the obscurity of Derrida's terms
"center" and "game." I was willing to suppose that these were terms of art,
defined elsewhere by Derrida. What bothered me was his phrase "the
Einsteinian constant," which I had never met in my work as a physicist.
True, there is something called Newton's constant which appears in
Einstein's theory of gravitation, and I would not object if Derrida wanted
to call it "the Einsteinian constant," but this constant is just a number
(0.00000006673 in conventional units), and I did not see how it could be the
"center" of anything, much less the concept of a game.
So I turned for enlightenment to the talk by Derrida from which Sokal took
this paragraph. In it, Derrida explains the word "center" as follows:
"Nevertheless,... structure--or rather, the structurality of
structure--although it has always been involved,
has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a
center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin."6 This was
not much help.
Lest the reader think that I am quoting out of context, or perhaps just
being obtuse, I will point out that, in the discussion following Derrida's
lecture, the first question was by Jean Hyppolite, professor at the College
de France, who, after having sat through Derrida's talk, had to ask Derrida
to explain what he meant by a "center." The paragraph quoted by Sokal was
Derrida's answer. It was Hyppolite who introduced "the Einsteinian constant"
into the discussion, but while poor Hyppolite was willing to admit that he
did not understand what Derrida meant by a center, Derrida just started
talking about the Einsteinian constant, without letting on that (as seems
evident) he had no idea of what Hyppolite was talking about. It seems to me
that Derrida in context is even worse than Derrida out of context.
6 Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences" in The Structuralist Controversy, edited by R. Macksey and E.
Donato (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 247.
========
Now of course it would be polite to read Derrida's paper first (which is
often seen as marking the end of structuralism, the opening sally of
poststruck thinking), and see if one could decide what Jean Hyppolite meant
in turn. Bear in mind that Hyppolite was not only an expert in Hegel's
phenomenology, but was trained as well in the history and logic of the
sciences.
[Lee harrumphs at this latter phrase]
Damien Broderick
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