"Pretentious Twaddle" that makes you smile.

This award winning Pretentious Twaddle (voted as such), taken from "Further reflections on the conversations of our time", makes my last passage seem half-hearted:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power". 

Beat that, Peeps! 

@ Strapped for cash

If this is the requisite standard, you have little to worry about.

This reads like deliberately opaque academic language, which I find equally objectionable. It helps if you're unfortunate enough to have studied structuralism as an outmoded theory, and Althusser's contribution as a revisionist Marxist to the structuralist debate (that's several months/years of my life I'll never get back). It's still pretty impenetrable, though. What was the source?

I don't like it, but I prefer this to your original example. At least there's evidence of erudition. I've done it now. I'll surely be considered obnoxious after this post (if not already)...

Althusser's wife  might agree if she were still with us

Ignore the question about the source (it's Judith Butler). I know a few feminist critical theorists that would be furious at you daring to bad-mouth Butler... You probably wouldn't want to meet them!

Incidentally, should they trace my comments above I'll be forced to suffer a sustained verbal assault. I therefore retract my earlier remarks about a prominent and highly respected philosopher/theorist/scholar.

Actually, it wasn't me plucking this passage out of the ether, but this sentence had the dubious honour of winning the fourth "Bad Writing Contest", sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature. Details here: http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm

Then who am I to argue.

I still think your original example pips it, as it's largely nonsensical. Butler's purposefully impenetrable prose is constructed on a foundation of decades of research and cogitation. We are mere ants before an intellectual Goliath. You can tell I'm backtracking, can't you...

Well, I'm very scared of the aforementioned feminist critical theorists (so would you be if you met them).