Thanks for the explanation. I am suspicious, because what I never see in texts "like this" is a close correspondance between any other terminology offered and the literal text. That is, after reading your comment, I might ask:

1) what is the first encounter? 2) what is the devouring doppleganger? (Is 'devouring' merely poetic, or does it have some literal meaning that the doppleganger is devouring?) 3) What is the path of reification? Why is it similar to the path of carnalization of the spiritual?

There are some texts where every sentence leads to some such question, and the questions are never answered. The feeling I am left with is that there's an unlimited number of loose ends where the reader will be forced to guess at what the author means (or not guess, since you can just read by skimming over phrases like "the path of reification").

In this case, I don't think it's possible to answer without access to the original context, and there doesn't seem to be an electronic version of the book. I would also note that the book has been translated from the German, so the exact word choice hasn't been made by the original author.

Here's, maybe, a more comprehensible (but difficult) segment from the beginning of the book (from Amazon's preview): The easiest formula that thematizes the relation of Flaubert's work to the Evangel, Scripture, is perhaps this: in the name of the Cross, the Gospel--the "good tidings"--is crossed out. His oeuvre is thus a kind of "non-Gospel" or dys-angelion-- a body of "bad tidings"; it testifies against the New Testament. History proves the promise of salvation to be a lie; but history is nevertheless absolutely determined by the New Testament, since it is nothing but per-version, its per-versio-- its reversal. Only against the backdrop of this crossed-out promise of the unheard-of love of the New Testament, which is affirmed completely, does history make sense and reveal its horrible truth.

Yeah, the article just drops that paragraph in without explaining what's supposed to be so bad about it. Indeed, the article says almost nothing about what criteria we could use to judge if writing is needlessly complex or opaque.

> Indeed, the article says almost nothing about what criteria we could use to judge if writing is needlessly complex or opaque.

And that's a huge problem for all the "clear writing" mandates; it's hard to give clear guidelines on what is and isn't clear.