ABSTRACT
In a recent and quite unique confession, physicist Alan Sokal admitted to having tweaked the noses of theoretical humanists (i.e. various stripes of deconstructionists, ‘deep’ readers, critical analysts, narratologists, and the like). Using the time-honoured tools of both irony and tom-foolery, Sokal concocted a mish-mash of contemporary humanistic jargon and bizarre natural science claims to propose that at long last science had been able to prove that external reality does not exist. The joke, of course, lay primarily in the fact that a leading American journal of cultural studies accepted and printed this artful parody (Sokal 1996).
