“For treachery is always what occurs when a text, a work of art, or a concept travels to faraway places and becomes something completely different from what it was at its source, within its context of origin. These are felicitous acts of betrayal, productive changes of sense. Misprision, misreading, and misuse are the three virtues of cultural exchange. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Oswald Spengler recognized as much. Behind his pessimism and his debatable partitions, Spengler, the first to diagnose an inexorable “Decline of the West,” also noted the importance of intersections and influences, of this ‘art of deliberate misunderstanding‘ indissociable from each culture’s pure essence: ‘The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it’ – something he already seemed to celebrate, praising the ‘trace’ of Plato in Goethe’s thought to illustrate his point, as well as ‘the history of the “three Aristotles” – Greek, Arabian and Gothic.’ ”

(François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort, pp. 336–337.)