Much of what passes for 'theory'-informed writing is actually a form of intellectual hip-hop, a charismatic and incantatory mode of expression that cultivates a street-credibility of assertive protest by way of a standardised lexicon of tropes, artfully exaggerated in an evolutionary ecosystem strongly biased towards the apocalyptic. It is a triumph of a certain kind of musicality or sheer performativity over any desire to make sense, or rather in an explicit rejection of 'sense'. This is quite odd when looked at from a distance but almost impossible to evade from close-up. It seems as though Heidegger was the original philosophical hip-hop artist, but whatever its origins it now seems all-pervading, so that even those schools of thought that appear to value sense-making above all else come to seem as if they are no more than variant forms of the same tendency but valuing different kinds of structured dissonance. Having discovered the inseparable rhetorical reverse side of all thinking the question of how to incorporate this discovery remains open, but surely not by uncritically embracing it?