A new book examines this issue:

“The Frankfurt School in Exile” by Thomas Wheatland

Reviewed here by Adam Kirsch:

http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/frankfurt-the-hudson

American “critical theory” is mostly a melange of ideas derived from Heidegger and Nitzsche via Derrida, Lacan and Foucault. Your description of their work is apt:

” a mish-mash of badly understood philosophical ideas bandied about for the most part by folk in literature departments…”

This is what I am criticizing. I have no problem with Adorno and Walter Benjamin (though Horkheimer is a little to orthodox Marxist for my taste).

I love it. As much as I’ve had a falling out with all things theory since finishing undergrad, your experience would still have brought me as close to being “starstruck” as I’m ever likely to get!

http://eamonnmcdonagh.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/zizek/

JA: I think you are not using the term “critical theory” in the sense that it is widely understood i.e. the school of thought associated with the Frankfurt school and intellectual progeny; that means Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas and a few more. Honneth would probably be the most important exponent of this line of thought still in harness

Zizek has nothing to do with critical theory, in this sense, and has indeed poured scorn on Habermas. What Zizek does is “theory”, a mish-mash of badly understood philosophical ideas bandied about for the most part by folk in literature departments rather than by philosophers.

Here’s an example of Zizek pontificating on the epistemological consequences of quantum physics:

‘[I]t is perhaps in the insistence on this gap, on this minimal delay between the event itself and its registration, that we find the most far-reaching epistemological revolution of quantum physics: in classical physics, “knowledge in the real” asserts its hold directly, without any delay — that is to say, things simply know what laws they are to obey - whereas quantum physics allows for a minimum of “ontological cheating.” A whole new domain is thus opened up, the domain of the shadowy pseudo-being of pure potentialities, of uncanny events which go on “in the twinkling of uncertainty … while the universe isn’t looking…”

‘Is not this virtual state of an electron which, upon admitting its mistake and acknowledging its unreality, returns to non-existence, equivalent to what Lacan describes as the state “between the two deaths?” an entity exists only so long as it does not “register,” “take note of,” its existence — like the proverbial cartoon cat which, although it has no ground under its feet, is unaware of this, and so calmly continues to walk in the air…’

Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, pp. 226-227 - http://books.google.com/books?id=K77t2XTpSeMC&pg=RA2-PA227&lpg=RA2-PA227&dq=zizek+on+cosmology&source=bl&ots=wACPQJu4Ve&sig=eG5EQJhJKqljjDjYZyvLxMs-pn4&hl=en&ei=SM6aSvexCc-PmAeyn-mYDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#

Not directly no, but Zizek did comment on it where he also tried to link it to the Paul de Man affair as proof that anti-critical theorists like myself were trying to delegitimize critical theory. Is this narcissism, or what?

http://books.google.com/books?id=YRrThKGNTKIC&pg=PA210&lpg=PA210&dq=sokal+affair+and+zizek&source=bl&ots=uxRDJyTG7J&sig=5EWsMu45iF1lV_oPhKqgbKTF9A0&hl=en&ei=sMCaSriaIeaGmQf54byxBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

What is unnerving about critical theory is that one can show again and agains how wrong one is and still get promoted in academia as the example of Bruce Robbins show. He is now some director of a program at NYU and he is still in the name of Edward Said calling for boycotts of Israel.

ganselmi: got any examples??