ON FOUCAULT’S OBSCURITY: informational prosaicity vs transformational poeticity
Posted on July 19, 2013 by terenceblake
From the Agent Swarm blog
Possible sources of the appearance of obscurity:
1) Vocabulary: French being Latin based looks more complicated than it is when viewed by an English speaker. I remember my surprise when I first arrived in France and a fairly unintellectual friend said “I just want to deculpabilise him”. In English that would sound highbrow, in French not so much. Another lexical factor giving the appearance of abstraction is the tendency, contrary to English, to prefer nominal expressions to verbal ones. “Natation” means “swimming”, and is an ordinary word in French, but it has an abstract feel to an English speaker. Further, at the level of meaning the suffix “-ation” seems more reified and static compared to the processual “-ing”.
With thanks to Dirk Felleman for this link
Foucault News 