ABSTRACT
The context for this chapter is set by the meeting of an unlikely trio: Nigella Lawson, Judge Dredd and Jacques Derrida. The trio met in Lawson‡s 1995 article in The Times, ‘Is This Trivia Really Worth Studying?’, in which she penned belittling critiques against both the academic study of popular culture in the mid-1990s and the association of French intellectuals with such a practice. 1 Regarding the former, referring specifically to a grant funding a study of the audiences of the 1995 film Judge Dredd 2 she quipped, ‘[t]hese days it simply isn’t intellectually respectable to have an interest in any form of culture that isn’t popular’. 3 Lawson then deduced that ‘most people who turn their critical faculties towards mass entertainment just wouldn’t be up to anything else. They lack the references, they lack the reading, they lack the information’. 4 She then insulted such studies for their ‘excessive claims of self-styled culture analysts – those who have … read some Barthes but not many books, and think that by regurgitating what some French intellectual wrote a couple of decades back counts for originality’. 5 Her article then concluded with an ad hominem attack against the French theorist Jacques Derrida, premised on a guest lecture he had given at the University of Oxford 6 and her step-father‡s, that is AJ Ayer‡s, comment afterwards, ‘Mais monsieur, vous vous foutez de nous!’. 7
