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“Clear” is always a term used in a context. It always means “clear enough,” but clear enough for what purpose, and how much is enough?
So to hold that there is some kind of absolute clarity, one must be convinced of the unsurpassable moral and political health and virtue of your own momentary social practices and institutions and the forms of speech and of common sense embedded in them, or alternatively
believe that humans have preternaturally strong powers of abstraction, detachment, imagination, and formalization, and that by dint of exercising this capacity we can create a freestanding realm of meaning which is fully functional but not connected at all to human action and human history.
> Is a vague concept really a concept at all?
Is an indistinct photograph really at all a picture of a human being? Can one always replace an indistinct picture with a distinct one? Isn’t the indistinct one often just the one we need?
One of the tasks of dialectical logic is to eliminate the last traces of a deductive system, together with the last advocatory gestures of thought.
To deprive a poem of its congenital, constitutive darkness through clarity is to destroy it. As long as the work remains obscure, it has not yet acted effectively, but when, and if, it stops being obscure, it loses its most important purpose, its real point.
It is easy to be merely obscure, but difficult to be productively obscure.
It is not at all obvious that any given author is in the best position to assess her own obscurity.