Pages

Monday 18 April 2016

Spoofing for fun

I love this kind of thing, it sets so many hares running. Via Retraction Watch we have yet another delightful parody of academic pretensions. This one is a spoof philosophy paper which supposedly passed peer review. Almost worthy of the Guardian I thought.

Abstract: 

Since “gender” has been continually the name of a dialectics of the continued institution of gender into an ontological difference and the failure of gendering, it is worth addressing the prospects of any gender-neutral discourse through the tools of Badiousian ontology. As established by Badiou in Being and Event, mathematics – as set theory – is the ultimate ontology. Sets are what gendering processes by reactionary institutions intend to hold, in contradiction to the status of the multiplicities proper to each subject qua subject. This tension between subjectivity and gender comes to the fore through the lens of the ‘count-as-one’, the ontological operator identified by Badiou as the fluid mediator between set-belonging and set-existence. After having specified these ontological preliminaries, this paper will show that the genuine subject of feminism is the “many” that is negatively referred to through the “count-as-one” posited by the gendering of “the” woman. Maintaining the openness of this “many” is an interweaving philosophical endeavour. It is also a political task for any theory receptive to the oppressive load proper to the institutions of sexuation, as deployed through modern capitalism – that is, any queer theory. In its second step, the paper will therefore expose the adequacy of the Badiousian ontology to provide theoretical resources for articulating the field of a genuine queer nomination. It will finally appear that “non-gender” structurally corresponds in the field of a post-capitalist politics of the body to what Francois Laruelle (1984) designated as non-philosophie within the field of metaphysics.

8 comments:

Sam Vega said...

Yes, you would have to be a Guardianista to see the full worth of this. Although not enough in it about transsexuals, which is their latest hobby-horse.

A K Haart said...

Sam - perhaps merely by not mentioning transsexuals it violates is own ontological preliminaries and thereby risks bifurcating its soi–disant gendering processes.

Unknown said...

All I can say is: WHAT?

Demetrius said...

If the fluid mediator is the bloke in the public bar of our local pub, I think I could begin to understand. Mind you, he needs a few to really get going.

Derek said...

Purely coincidental, but I am currently reading a book on Alan Turing's life. It's full of such paragraphs relating to mathematics, and that as copied might have come straight from the pages. Haven't a clue as to what is being said, but a fascinating chap nonetheless.

James Higham said...

Post-Capitalist politics, LOL.

A K Haart said...

Henry - and people make a living by churning out gunk which is only marginally less ridiculous.

Demetrius - I find it slows me down in that respect.

Derek - he was fascinating but if you want my advice, avoid the film The Imitation Game. Not an accurate portrayal.

James - post-rational politics would be worth pursuing though.

Derek said...

AKH, yes. Station X the series tuned me in, then a little in the news following same. Never heard of him prior to. Have watched Imitation Game which in turn made me seek more on Turing as such films are inevitably dressed in 'drama', and can never show the whole story and can deviate wildy. I like Cumberbatch as an actor (Parades End; The Last Enemy), though Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything is even better. But again - it's a film.