Alan D. Sokal quotes Noam Chomsky in his sequel to the infamous *Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,* titled *Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword.* Available [here](https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/afterword_v1a/afterword_v1a_singlefile.html#73//)
“George Orwell once remarked that political thought, especially on the left, is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact hardly matters. That’s true, unfortunately, and it’s part of the reason that our society lacks a genuine, responsible, serious left-wing movement.” Perhaps that’s unduly harsh, but there’s unfortunately a significant kernel of truth in it. Nowadays the erotic text tends to be written in (broken) French rather than Chinese, but the real-life consequences remain the same.
Comme ci Comme ça, anyone? Or is it écriture féminine or la petite mort?
Also Sokal, same essay
As an example of “confused thinking’’, I would like to consider a chapter from Harding (1991)[…]
Yes, *that* Harding.
Harding, Sandra. 1991. *Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives.* Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Also, Alan Ryan (1992): “The mood in academic life is sour.”
And
It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was always that power could be undermined by truth: that it was unjustly distributed, that its holders wanted this overlooked and purchased all sorts of intellectual disguises for the purpose, that it would be an uphill struggle getting the truth in front of the public, but that that was what had to be done. Once you read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power, you’ve had it. Those with power have ’truth’ on their side, and the old radical hope that we can undermine power with truth is incoherent. But American departments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess.
Read it [here](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n06/alan-ryan/princeton-diary).