Warner: "[C]ommon sense is an unreliable standard for intellectual writing. The apparent clarity of common sense is corrupt with ideology and can only be countered by defamiliarization in thought and language. The task of the intellectual is to disclose all the forms of distortion, error, and domination that have been embedded in the current version of common sense"
"to the degree that our commonsense perceptions contain distortion, just so far will the effort of reimagining seem difficult, even (to many) unclear"
Warner here is citing Judith Butler's interpretation of Adorno's Minima Moralia
"As she [Butler] points out, views that now strike us as grotesque have often been graced with such immediate comprehension that they hardly needed to be stated at all. The rightness of slavery and the subordination of women are only the most politically salient among many other gruesome examples" (132)
see also Thoreau's suspicion of the legitimacy of slavery, separate note