Writing difficult prose is a will to power in the face of impotence, futility, death, indifference

Chances are theorists are merely too lazy to find clearer ways to express themselves (or they have cowed all potential editors), especially when opacity also serves a beneficial end casting the aura of difficulty over their works to make it seem more profound, and the scholars that pursue it to comprehension more ascetic. With that in mind, it’s worth remembering what Nietzsche said about asceticism in The Genealogy of Morals:

“For a very long time the ascetic ideal serves the philosopher as the sole phenomenal guise under which he could exist qua philosopher.”

Writing difficult prose is a will to power in the face of impotence, futility, death, indifference. This can prompt a grandiloquent egotism:

“Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell.”

Difficult prose may be just as difficult for the writer as it is for the reader, but necessarily so, because the ideas must seem tortuous to feel true. —Rob Horning 11:55 pm Permalink