If it is difficult, it must be important.
This voice does not arrive gently. It announces itself through density. Sentences coil, subordinate, recurse. Paragraphs refuse to land. Meaning is promised, never delivered — but always deferred just long enough to feel earned.
Difficulty here is not an obstacle. It is the credential.
Complexity as Proof
The Baroque Obscurantist equates resistance with rigour. If a thought cannot be grasped on first reading, that is evidence not of failure but of depth. Clarity becomes suspect; accessibility a sign of compromise.
The reader is invited into a rite of endurance. Understanding is something one proves worthy of by persistence alone.
Confusion is reframed as sophistication.
The Architecture of Excess
Concepts proliferate. Hyphens multiply. Terms are imported from distant traditions and allowed to collide without explanation, as if adjacency itself constituted insight.
Nothing is ever quite defined — not because definition is impossible, but because definition would expose limits. The text remains richly furnished, elaborately decorated, and structurally unstable.
Every sentence gestures beyond itself. None are accountable.
Citation as Aura
Names accumulate like incense. References are invoked less for dialogue than for atmosphere. To read is to move through a hall of mirrors in which authority reflects authority.
Disagreement becomes impossible, not because the argument is compelling, but because it cannot be located. One does not contest the claim; one doubts one’s own readiness.
Opacity here is not a byproduct. It is a strategy.
Against the Plain
Plain speech is treated as naive. To say directly what one means would be to ignore the richness of mediation, the play of difference, the impossibility of presence.
And yet the impossibility of presence somehow always arrives fully present — asserted, reiterated, protected from scrutiny by the very complexity that announces it.
The critique of foundations becomes a new foundation, carefully concealed.
Difficulty Without Risk
For all its surface turbulence, this voice is remarkably safe. It rarely cuts. Distinctions are endlessly deferred. Positions dissolve before they can be tested.
The text performs instability without ever risking commitment. No decision is made long enough to have consequences.
The reader labours, but nothing is lost.
The Moral Alibi of Depth
Baroque obscurity often presents itself as ethically serious. To simplify would be to betray complexity; to clarify would be to dominate.
But difficulty, on its own, is not care. And opacity is not humility.
When nothing can be grasped, nothing can be answered for.
What Remains Unsaid
What slips away beneath the ornamentation is not nuance, but responsibility. Without clear cuts, no exclusions are owned. Without decisions, no consequences follow.
The text becomes an object of admiration rather than a participant in thought.
A Final Flourish
The Baroque Obscurantist does not silence critique by force. It exhausts it. By the time the reader reaches the end, energy has been spent simply surviving the prose.
What remains is reverence — or relief.
In the next post, we will encounter a very different performance: one that speaks clearly, confidently, and endlessly — assembling frameworks where thinking might otherwise have had to pause.
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