I've recently picked up a copy of Intellectual Impostures (also Fashionable Nonsense) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. I've been meaning to buy it for quite some time now. It was first mentioned to me after I argued against various absurd feminist analyses that had somehow managed to find print in academic publications, and though I don’t believe this book directly addresses that, it should provide me with a greater understanding of how gibberish occasionally manages to pervade academia.
On a related note, has anyone read anything by Slavoj Žižek and would they recommend doing so? He appears to have some fervent supporters but I simply cannot stand listening to him speak. The little that I have heard seems to be a mixture of slobbering, sniffing, and needlessly redefining words, but I wouldn't really want to write him off without engaging in his work.
Conclusion: This is an excellent book. Sokal and Bricmont quite brilliantly, and often humorously, dismantle the ambiguous texts of some of France's most famous thinkers. As I began reading, I hoped that the book wouldn't leave the reader coming away with the view that all complex or seemingly inaccessible writing should be dismissed as verbose rambling - and indeed it didn't. They explicitly state this much in their epilogue and take great care to highlight exactly what it is that they are attacking: the misuse of scientific terminology and the implementation of deliberately obscure language to mask the vacuity of the writer's analyses (an 'explicitly political' concern is listed by Sokal in discussing his original parody, too).