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The inhumanities.

Article Excerpt
The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, by Roger Kimball (Encounter, 186 pp., $25.95)

ROGER KIMBALL's Tenured Radicals (1990) is one of the indispensable books of the last quarter-century, for its lucid analysis of the content of higher education. Kimball documented the transgressive insurgency and large-scale victory in the teaching of the humanities of radicalized intellectuals promoting "ever more sophistical layers of intellectualized mendacity," accomplished largely by self-dramatizing "orgies of disillusionment and skepticism" about reason and ethics. He patiently, carefully scrutinized the acts and works of transgressive Francophone literary sophists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man and their American allies and apologists such as Stanley Fish, J. Hillis Miller ("deconstruction's faithful mascot"), and Geoffrey Hartman.

Kimball's indictment could be ignored, but not answered very easily, as he deftly employed the mind's oldest tool of sanity and responsibility, the principle of non-contradiction. Quoting statements from these quicksilver literary sophists, he then employed the ancient "tu quoque" strategy: Apply your own statement to your own work and your own conduct. If, for instance, with Derrida, de Man, and Fish, we deny normal, Aristotelian rational and linguistic procedures and deny the...