The Usual Nonsense From Stanley Fish

Christ this guy is full of shit.

Actually, this time his bullshit is rather different than it used to be. I guess the line now is that French "theory" was never that radical at all! It's kind of like the bait-and-switch. When you're advertising to hapless grad students, it's the most radicalest thing e-var! When it's time to defend it, why, it's really just plain old common sense!

To hear Fish tell it here, it's just worries about skepticism.

Jesus. A bunch of third-rate thinkers being explicated and marketed by their fourth-rate epigones.

[Oh, and...how did these people all manage to miss Hume's skepticism about the self? I mean, seriously. Everything these people were doing was either complete bullshit or it was already done better by someone else. Cripes.]

[I'm too busy to write anything careful about this nonsense, but just let me point to one paragraph:

To this hope, French theory (and much thought that precedes it) says “forget about it”; not because no methodological cautions could be sufficient to the task, but because the distinctions that define the task — the “I,” the world, and the forms of description or signification that will be used to join them — are not independent of one another in a way that would make the task conceivable, never mind doable.

Look: these things are not distinctions. The I is not a distinction. The world is not a distinction. This is sloppy undergraduate stuff. If you're going to try to talk about this stuff at all, you need to be at least minimally precise. This is a relatively minor mistake in a disastrously crap-filled column. But to discuss this stuff intelligently, you can't be making undergraduate mistakes like this.]