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' "In Praise Of Stark Lucidity" '

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As Althusser rightly commented, ``Lacan finally gives Freud's thinking the scientific concepts that it requires''.59 More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism60 and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS.61 In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group62 of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound; and this homology is linked with the connectedness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or more cuts.63 Furthermore, as Lacan suspected, there is an intimate connection between the external structure of the physical world and its inner psychological representation qua knot theory: this hypothesis has recently been confirmed by Witten's derivation of knot invariants (in particular the Jones polynomial64) from three-dimensional Chern-Simons quantum field theory.65

A. S., Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

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The Sokal Affair was a famous hoax played by physicist Alan Sokal upon the editorial staff and readership of a leading journal in the academic humanities. In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper for publication in a postmodern cultural studies journal, as an experiment to see if a humanities journal would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."The paper, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," [1] was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, without any review from a qualified physicist. On the same day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax.

The expose caused an academic scandal for Duke University, where Social Text is published. Sokal called his paper "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics" made by humanities academics.