Is this something to be proud of?

For Lindsay Waters, "The very idea of criticism was to drag all the oppressive ideas that had dominated intellectual life before the court of reason by treating none of them piously." In The Lure of the List, Waters expresses dislike for the idea of a once revolutionary journal compiling a list of the greatest literary theorists:

What did the editors hope to gain, and was it worth giving up so much credibility to put pseudoscience where words should have been, to substitute accounting methods for critical judgment? [ed: Pseudoscience? Take a look at what some of these clowns write.] Humanists should know better...

Critical Inquiry published an essay last winter that purported to rank the greatest literary theorists in its pages (and, by implication, the world).... How? By counting citations to theorists. Behind the rhetoric about discovering "the identity of our journal" lies an implicit assumption: If you're cited in Critical Inquiry, you're the best of the best.

According to the article, the eight most frequently cited theorists are Jacques Derrida (177), Sigmund Freud (174), Michel Foucault (160), Walter Benjamin (147), Roland Barthes (92), Jacques Lacan (80), Fredric Jameson (79), Edward Said (77). Consider these people in order:

Wikipedia's Criticism of Derrida mentions that

Noam Chomsky has expressed the view that Derrida's work is essentially pointless, because his writings are deliberately obscured with pretentious rhetoric to hide the simplicity of the ideas within. Chomsky has frequently grouped Derrida within a broader category of the Parisian intellectual community which he has criticized for acting as an elite power structure for the well-educated through difficult writing.... Chomsky has indicated that he may simply be incapable of understanding Derrida, but is suspicious of the possibility, maintaining that in the majority of cases he is able to ask a colleague to explain the work in clearer terminology, such as a new theorem in physics.

The Economist similarly characterized Derrida as obscurantist, and given to bombastic rhetoric and illogical ramblings, and point out that

Derrida's style of deconstruction flowered especially in American departments of comparative literature, where it became interwoven with Marxism, feminism and anti-colonialism. Although by the early 1980s French academics had largely tired of trying to make sense of him, America's teachers of literature increasingly embraced Mr Derrida. Armed with an impenetrable new vocabulary, and without having to master any rigorous thought, they could masquerade as social, political and philosophical critics.

As for Freud, Cecil Adams argues

Freudian practice is pseudoscience (quackery, if you will) because it fails an essential test of a true science--that is, it does not produce propositions that, in principle, can be shown to be false. Here it seems to me that Crews and his allies are on unassailable ground. One finds in Freud's work only a charade of the scientific method. Having cooked up some arcane notion through introspection, he would proceed to "confirm" it in sessions with patients. A key procedure in analysis was (and remains) free association, in which the analysand says whatever pops into his head in response to a stimulus. On hearing about a patient's dream, for example, Freud would ignore the dream's manifest content and instead ask the patient to free-associate in order to recover its latent (i.e., real) import. From the blather that followed Freud would pluck a few key words or images that in his opinion revealed the dream's true meaning, which in turn would shed light on the roots of the patient's neurosis. The analysand might resist or deny the interpretation, but this merely showed the strength of his mechanisms of repression. Freud would bear down and eventually the analysand would cave. Bingo: confirmation of Freud's hunch (and by extension his theory). There's a bit more to the process than that, but on the whole Freud's critics have persuaded me that it's not much more. How can anyone prove such a conclusion wrong when the only proofs that it's right are a function of the therapist's insistence?

Wikipedia's Criticisms of Foucault:

Many thinkers have criticized Foucault.... While each of these thinkers takes issue with different aspects of Foucault's work, all of these approaches share the same basic orientation: Foucault clearly seems to reject the values and philosophy associated with the Enlightenment while simultaneously secretly relying on them.

and also list Marx as an influence, but try to excuse it:

Marx's influence in French intellectual life was dominant from 1945 through to the late 1970s. Foucault often found himself opposing Marxists, but claimed that he still quoted Marx without acknowledging him during this time as a kind of game.

"A kind of game"--that's what a lot of these theorists were engaged in. Maybe Foucault was not a Marxist, but both Wikipedia and The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia characterize Walter Benjamin as one.

Wikipedia on Barthes; He:

accuse[d] the old, bourgeois criticism of being unconcerned with the finer points of language and capable of selective ignorance towards challenging concepts of theories like Marxism.

and he

consider[ed] the limitations of not just signs and symbols, but also Western culture’s dependency on beliefs of constancy and ultimate standards.

Indeed, Wikipedia's Marxist view of the bourgeoisie:

Arguably one of the most influential of...criticisms came from Karl Marx, who attacked bourgeois political theory and its view of civil society and culture for what he believed to be its falsely universal concepts and institutions; in Marx's view, these concepts were only the ideology of the bourgeoisie as a new ruling class, which sought to reshape society after its own image.

As for Lacan, according to Wikipedia, he considered his work to be an authentic "return to Freud". In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Lacan of abusing scientific concepts. Chomsky called him a "perfectly self-conscious charlatan".

Wikipedia characterizes Fredric Jameson as "a Marxist political and literary critic and theorist.... [He has] described postmodernism as the claudication of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism...." "Late capitalism"! I guess it's not surprising that a Marxist can claim to know that capitalism is on its last legs.

Finally, Edward Said's overpraised Orientalism tended towards overdrawn assertions, hyperbole and oversimplification, was pretentiously written and drenched in jargon. Like the postmodernists who inspired him, he insists that objectivity is impossible.

So let's see: the top eight are obscurantist, pseudoscientific, reject the Enlightenment, Marxists, charlatans, and disbelieve in objectivity. I hope the time has come for all the oppressive ideas that have dominated intellectual life to be hauled before the court of reason.

I can't believe I'm citing Chomsky as an authority. It's not the first time. Still it's significant that even though he is a hard leftist, he criticizes postmodernist writing in general: "extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish."