This was in the NY Times online.

PARIS -- In the country that invented Cartesian logic, the philosopher 
is king. So Alan Sokal, professor of physics at New York University, 
and Jean Bricmont, a colleague at the University of Louvain in Belgium, 
may be in big trouble.

In a book published here Friday, "Intellectual Impostures," they argue
that such revered French philosophers as Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray 
and Gilles Deleuze just don't know what they're talking about when they 
try to use scientific and mathematical concepts.  Indeed, they dare to
suggest that some postmodern philosophizing may just be "true 
intoxication by words, combined with complete indifference to what they
mean."

(Ivan's Note:  The book "Intellectual Impostures" is now called 
"Fashionable Nonsense."  I read it and enjoyed it thoroughly.)

Sokal, who has said he considers himself a leftist, insisted in an
interview in the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur that their intention was 
not to attack the American left but to awaken it from cult-like 
fascination with postmodern notions like the idea that modern 
scientific theories can be deconstructed like novels and debunked as 
sexist fallacies.  "Our goal," he and Bricmont say in their book, "is
precisely to say that the emperor has no clothes."

But hell hath no fury like a nation of philosophers with its honor 
at stake, and the book was attacked even before Editions Odile Jacob
officially brought it out Friday.  "What can be the real reason for
such a polemic, so far removed from present-day concerns?" one target,
the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, said in Le Nouvel
Observateur. "It seems to be an anti-French intellectual enterprise."

"Faced with the aura of French thinkers in the United States, 
francophilia has given way to francophobia," she said. Le Monde, in an 
article about the book that took up an entire page, sniffed that only 
in American academia was "postmodernism" recognized as a philosophical-
cultural movement in any event.

"I am very disappointed by the nationalist tone of the reaction to the
book in France," Bricmont said in a telephone interview from Louvain.
"Since I am not American at all, I don't think it's fair to see this as 
an American anti-French attack." He said they hoped to find an American
publisher.

Sokal is no stranger to controversy. Last year he got a respected 
American postmodern journal, Social Text, to publish a philosophical 
treatise that he later revealed was a hoax, a parody filled with 
scientific non sequiturs that had sailed right past infatuated editors.

"I hope this book will not set off a war between France and the United
States, or France and Belgium for that matter," he said in New York 
City before heading to Europe this week. "I hope it will provoke a 
discussion of the underlying issues."

That may not be easy.  Even in France, where Descartes, Diderot and
Voltaire have long been held up as models of the cardinal French virtue 
of clarity, texts like the following, by Deleuze, were cited as 
evidence of his brilliance after his suicide last year:
   "An exhausted man is much more than a weary man. Does he exhaust the
possible because he is himself exhausted, or is he exhausted because he
has exhausted the possible? He exhausts himself by exhausting the
possible, and inversely."

Sokal and his colleague make only passing reference to that kind of
wordplay, insisting that all they are qualified to criticize is the 
misuse of science and mathematics -- notably by Lacan, once, in a 
published lecture that compared the male sex organ to an imaginary 
number, the square root of -1.

Postulating that a signifier, S, divided by what is signified, s, 
equals a statement, s, Lacan said that if the signifier is -1, the 
statement becomes the square root of minus one.

"Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of enjoyment, not 
in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in 
the desired image," he said. "That is why it is equivalent to the square 
root of minus one of the signification produced above, of the enjoyment 
that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of 
the lack of signifier.
   Get it?
Neither did the two physics professors. "Even if his 'algebra' made
sense, obviously the 'signifier,' the 'signified' and the 'statement'
contained in it are not numbers," they wrote. There was also no attempt 
to explain what the male sex organ had to do with the square root of 
minus one.  "We do recognize that it is worrisome to see our erectile 
organ identified with the square root of minus one," they wrote.

Fragments taken out of context, perhaps?  "His analogies between
psychoanalysis and mathematics are more arbitrary than can possibly be
imagined, and he gives absolutely no empirical or conceptual 
justification (neither here, nor elsewhere in his work) for them," 
they wrote.  "Finally, as far as showing off superficial erudition and 
manipulating sentences devoid of sense is concerned, we think the above 
texts speak for themselves."

The Belgian-born psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray comes in 
for an equally hard time with her theories, eagerly adopted in some 
American feminist circles, that much science is sex-biased.  Not that 
the idea should be dismissed out of hand, the authors say, but with 
better logic than she uses when suggesting that male science favors 
solid mechanics over fluid mechanics because men do not menstruate.
"Irigaray, in sum, does not understand the nature of the physical and
mathematical problems posed in fluid mechanics," Sokal and Bricmont
conclude.

In a long attempt to come to grips with Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari's writings, they quote extensively from passages running along
these lines: "It happens that the constant-limit can itself appear as a
link in the whole of the universe in which all the parts are subject to
finite conditions (quantity of movement, force, energy ...)."

The two iconoclasts say: "Obviously, it could be retorted that these 
texts are just profound, and that we do not understand them. But on 
examination, they contain a high density of scientific terms used out 
of context and without apparent logic, at least if these words are 
thought."

But Roger-Pol Droit countered in a review in Le Monde: "By insisting 
that everything that is not mathematically proved or experimentally 
confirmed is 'devoid of sense.' They may be in favor, to fight the 
distortions of the 'politically correct,' of an equally impoverished 
'scientifically correct.' Is recess over?"  Maybe. "The ultimate 
validity of our criticism," Sokal said, "has to be judged author by 
author, case by case."

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