being broad - in a good way

read this quote, and then my comments, and then the quote again.

The contemporary world is thus doubly hostile to truth procedures. This hostility betrays itself though nominal occlusions*: where the name of a truth procedure should obtain, another, which represses it, holds sway. The name “culture” comes to obliterate that of “art.” The word “technology” obliterates the word “science.” The word “management” obliterates the word “politics.” The word “sexuality” obliterates love. The “culture-technology-management-sexuality” system, which has the immense merit of being homogenous to the market, and all of these terms designate a category of commercial presentation, constitutes the modern nominal occlusion of the “art-science-politics-love” system, which identifies truth procedures typologically.

Alain Badiou (translated by Ray Brassier), 2003, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford University Press, California, p12

* nominal occlusions - the subversion of a true term, a broad, rich, meaningful term; in favour of another, more precise, yet in it's nature less true.

this is what i find a particularly interesting idea - as we define things to aid understanding, we cannot but occlude the true meaning.

i remember N.T. Wright saying 'the gospel is a story', meaning, as soon as you try and pin something down, giving a dictionary definition, you loose the true breadth meant by the term (c/f this on the way this works in Hebrew Poetry). we are too quick to condemn as heretics those who would emphasise one area of a doctrine over another, forgetting the context they speak from and the errors against which they must polemicise.