I try to limit myself to just one example of week of academic fraudulence, because it could easily become a full time job. But news just out today can’t wait for the calendar. Retraction Watch carries the news of a Sokal-style hoax in the pages of Baidou Studies, named for some popular obscurantist named Alain Baidou. (Baidou Studies? I don’t know who Baidou is either but why not? There’s an International Journal of Zizek Studies. According to Wikipedia, Baidou “argues for resurrecting the idea of communism.” So he’s a Sanders supporter then.)
Anyway, Baidou Studies published the following article from a non-existent professor “Benedetta Tripodi” at Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza, entitled “Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non-)Being-Queer.” (PDF link.) Here’s part of the 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.
The article, Baidou Studies admits, went through peer review. Heh.
More over at Retraction Watch. This is enough for today.
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