From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Dec 11 2002 - 10:22:45 MST
Damien Broderick wrote:
> ...
>
>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.
>
I've encountered "Einsteinian constant" used to refer to the speed of light.
>...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.
>
She seems to be saying that to avoid being bogged down with details, it
has been common to select a point, somehow defined (I believe center of
mass is common), and use that as a stand-in for the object, thereby
avoiding dealing with the structure of the entities involved.
>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
>
It's certainly not the clearest language I've ever encountered!
>lecture, the first question was by Jean Hyppolite, professor at the College
>...
>
>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.
>
>...
>Damien Broderick
>
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