judt out your chin...

[agrenner at artsci.wustl.edu]

from: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i08/08a02001.htm

Along with a dose of cultural history, Mr. Judt also dispenses judgments that 
will raise eyebrows, especially in the United States. Poststructuralist theory, 
for instance, takes a few sharp knocks. (In one footnote, Mr. Judt writes of 
the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that "even by the lax standards of Sixties-era 
Paris he remained quite remarkably ignorant of contemporary developments in 
medicine, biology, and neurology, with no discernible harm to his practice or 
reputation.")

Quizzed about those barbs, Mr. Judt observes that "one of the distorting 
effects" of theory's influence in American academe is that theory's totemic 
figures — Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva — are "seen 
as much more prominently at the center of European thought than they actually 
are. Whereas I deliberately 'decentered' them, to use a cliché, and put them 
where I think they belong, which is within the intellectual and cultural world 
of Europe, but much more at the periphery."