From a review of a book called The Lacanian Delusion penned (the review, that is) by my current intellectual hero, Cosma Shalizi (a physicist by trade and polymath by choice):
Clearly this [the book's criticism of Lacan's treatment of physics] is better than Lacan's tissue of horrors, but not…without problems of its own, principally stemming from ignorance of mathematics and physical science…This is not, I hasten to say, anything in itself to be ashamed of, or even mildly bothered about — unless you happen to be talking about mathematics or physical science. Lacan, evidently, knew next to nothing about them — on p. 44 Roustang quotes Lacan as saying that "Einstein's little formulae…align inertial mass with a constant and some exponents," which is so far from actual relativity as to be not even wrong. Roustang makes no such howlers, but still I get the impression of a grimly serious duel conducted with whiffle-bats.
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