I still don't see how there is any benefit to be gained from speaking in a way that most people cannot even understand what you're saying let alone "understand the truth of it", as you put it. It seems trivially obvious that, if talking about something contentious or for which you are drawing a lot of criticism, doing both is pretty much always superior.
In your mathematician-postmodernist analogy, were the mathematician to face entire populations of otherwise intelligent, interested people claiming that he is saying nothing meaningful, ... (read more)
It was never my intention to defend “postmodernism”, or “postmodern thinking” as a class, only Slavoj Zizek in particular. To whatever extent others are similar to him, my points apply to them also; otherwise, they don’t.
As to the rest of your comment… consider that mathematics rarely has political implications, while the words of Zizek and others like him surely do have such. This provides both an additional incentive for many people to label his ideas as “meaningless” and to refuse or fail to understand them, and for him to decline to make his points too explicitly.
(There is also the point I made in my earlier comment, which I do not think you have really engaged with.)
I still don't see how there is any benefit to be gained from speaking in a way that most people cannot even understand what you're saying let alone "understand the truth of it", as you put it. It seems trivially obvious that, if talking about something contentious or for which you are drawing a lot of criticism, doing both is pretty much always superior.
In your mathematician-postmodernist analogy, were the mathematician to face entire populations of otherwise intelligent, interested people claiming that he is saying nothing meaningful, ... (read more)