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The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism

The Sokal hoax shares with other controversies of our time the typical feature of erupting suddenly with the threat of dire consequence, only to disappear quickly and nearly completely from public consciousness. No longer perceived as a crisis of the day, the affair is more likely now to elicit weariness with this particular battlefield of the culture wars. I revisit the controversy with the purpose of grasping its continuing claim upon the present even as it recedes into the limbo of the recent past. This claim is nothing other than its significance in the history of criticism. If the Sokal affair belonged to a certain moment in the culture wars, it also has a place in the longer history of conflict between the sciences and the literary humanities or what goes conventionally by the name of the two cultures debate. Yet the relation between the Sokal affair and this longer history is by no means obvious. I will argue in this essay that in the Sokal affair the matters at issue in the two cultures debate were confused with those at stake in the culture wars. A clarification of the actual relation between