Irigaray at the speed of light
In the latest round of post-modernism bashing in the The Australian, it appears we have Irigaray to blame for fundamentalist Intelligent Design movement:
But the IDers aspire to scientific truth. Unfortunately, the only way to claim that something empirically false is scientifically true is to question science's capacity for sorting out truth from falsehood, the same way postmodernists do.
Conservatives were quick to point out the danger of this view in the 1980s and 90s. They argued that a science that rejected the idea of truth was vulnerable to the most inane forms of intellectual hucksterism. And they were right. It's not hard to imagine scams such as cold fusion or the Scientologist critique of psychiatric drugs gaining ground in a world where science's ability to identify knowledge has been undermined. (Among other monuments to postmodern thought was the idea that E=mc2 might be a "sexed equation" that "privileges the speed of light over other speeds", as Belgian-French theorist Luce Irigaray once asserted.)
While my summary of the article's argument may be somewhat reductive, so (I suspect) is their representation of postmodern thought. So does anyone know where they have pulled the Irigaray quote from, and what the original context was? And more broadly - any thoughts on the science-theory nexus? (Beyond the obvious answer of the Flying Spaghetti Monster).
