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Und darum: Hoch die Physik! Und höher
noch das, was uns zu ihr zwingt,--unsre
Redlichkeit!
--Nietzsche
The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability--it is, finally, the concept of the game [jeu]. In other words, it is not the concept of something--of a center starting from which an observer could master the field--but the very concept of the game which, after all, I was trying to elaborate.1
1.
This statement by Jacques Derrida has been endlessly circulated in recent discussions around the so-called "Science Wars," in the wake of Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition, and then Alan Sokal's "hoax article," both of which comment on it.2 This circulation, I shall argue here, is a symptom of a broader problem affecting the current cultural landscape and shaping the opinions of a significant portion of the scientific community. Arguments analogous to the one to be offered here concerning Derrida's work can be made for other figures prominent in recent debates, such as Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Serres. My choice of Derrida is due mainly to the extraordinary prominence of the statement cited above and of his work or rather name in general in these discussions. Even given Derrida's status as an icon of intellectual controversy on the Anglo-American cultural scene, it is remarkable that out of thousands of pages of Derrida's published works, a single extemporaneous remark on relativity made in 1966 (before Derrida was "the Derrida" and, in a certain sense, even before "deconstruction") in response to a question by another French philosopher, Jean Hyppolite, is made to stand for nearly all of deconstructive or even postmodernist (not a term easily, if at all, applicable to Derrida) treatments of science. Derrida has commented more extensively and in more grounded ways on mathematics and science, and on the philosophical grounding of both.3 He also makes use of mathematical and scientific theories, concepts, metaphors, and so forth (most famously, Gödel's concept of undecidability) in his work. In addition, his work is fundamentally linked to the question of technology via the question of writing, which defines his work throughout. Both in his actual claims concerning mathematics and science...