I would like to ask the members here and moderators and others in the governance here with advanced English skills, to tell me what they think of the intelligibility of the two following excerpts. I have to know what you people think so that I can re-assure myself that my English is not very deficient or my mental acuity is not so dull; for I have a terribly hard time trying to make sense of them -- otherwise I will just have to live with my poor mastery of English and my modest mental grasp .
Quote:
(Text 1, focus on the third sentence.) It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after all, be explained in the language of children. Yet the association between difficulty and profundity might less generously be described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity familiar from emotional life, where people who are mysterious and elusive can inspire a respect in modest minds that reliable and clear ones do not.
(Text 2) Such contradictory articulations of reality and desire - seen in racist stereotypes, statements, jokes, myths - are not caught in the doubtful circle of the return of the repressed. They are the effects of a disavowal that denies the differences of the other but produces in its stead forms of authority and multiple belief that alienate the assumptions of ‘civil’ discourse. If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses Of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalize’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality. The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry - a difference that is almost nothing but not quite - to menace - a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other scene of colonial power, where history turns to farce and presence to ‘a part’ can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably.
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Thanks for your educated opinions.
gerry