How the Impotent Lecture on Power Relations

“From the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson to the poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault, from Jacques Derrida to the legions of lesser-known feminist ‘theorizers,’ devotees of ‘cultural studies,’ and all-purpose academic radicals, you’ll find slightly different arrangements of the same old song: All cultural and intellectual life is ‘really’ a coefficient of power relations. This is part of what many academics now mean when they say — and they never stop saying it — that all art and literature, indeed, that all ‘discourse,’ including science, including even sexuality, is ‘socially constructed'” (Tenured Radicals, p. xiv).