The high wire of rhetoric has its own airy relation to the ground

In much of Barthes’s writing, as in much of Foucault and Derrida, the effect is the idea, and the idea is extreme, exorbitant: it has no prior, sensible, ‘English’ form which could be worked up into an exaggeration. This is not to say that the writing doesn’t mean anything, or that form and content are identical in it, only that the rhetorical high wire has its own airy relation to the ground.