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Over on Twitter, Jordan Peterson (guest on Tom Woods Show episodes #773 and #800) recently asked the folks who run the New Real Peer Review account, which posts excerpts from absurd academic articles, whether they thought this was the worst sentence ever written:
The curricular inclusion of Indigenous perspectives is differentially problematic if we cannot also attend to the taken-for-granted and naturalized epistemological/ontological and axiological commitments/enactments of what we are including perspectives into. (Marc Higgins, Maria F.G. Wallace, and Jesse Bazzul, in Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education)
The great Christina Hoff Sommers (Tom Woods Show guest, episode #625) jumped in and proposed this sentence, written by gender theorist Judith Butler in 1997, in the journal Diacritics:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
In looking up these passages, though, I came across what may be the most atrocious passage ever written in all of academic literature.
It’s from D.G. Leahy’s Foundation: Matter the Body Itself (1996).
Force yourself to plow through the whole thing. Seriously. Make yourself do it.
Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self).
Thank goodness we’re subsidizing that!
People who write crazy nonsense like that are generally the same folks who look down their noses at folks in the business world.
The only thing they’ve ever created in their lives are sentences like the ones above, for which there is no market without government subsidies. But they’re sure they’re superior to people who actually make the world go round.
Speaking of which, tonight is the live session with Tom Woods Show guest Steve Clayton, who’s helped a ton of my listeners create nice side (or even full-time) businesses. He’s the former LabCorp VP who ventured out on his own and had spectacular success, and now teaches others.
You should be there. Plus: for every single person who attends (costs nothing, btw), we’re donating ten smackers to the Scott Horton Show.
So now you have to be there — for Scott and yourself.
Sign up, and I’ll see you tonight: