"Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution"
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Derrida is naming a small but telling kind of outrage: the moment an audience stops seeing itself reflected in the mirror of a text and starts noticing the mirror has been tilted. “Certain readers” is doing quiet work here. It narrows the complaint to a faction while implying a broader pattern: not everyone resents destabilization, but enough people do that the backlash becomes legible as a cultural reflex.
The sting sits in “their territory, their institution.” Derrida frames reading not as neutral comprehension but as border maintenance. These readers approach ideas like property: the right keywords, the familiar canon, the sanctioned methods. When they “could no longer recognize” the landscape, the injury wasn’t confusion so much as dispossession. The subtext is almost comic in its dryness: you thought you were consuming a book; you were actually policing a jurisdiction.
Context matters. Derrida’s work, especially in the decades when “deconstruction” became a campus shibboleth and a conservative bogeyman, repeatedly threatened the fantasy that institutions are held together by stable meanings and tidy hierarchies. He’s describing the institutional immune system kicking in: when language starts showing its seams, gatekeepers reassert the boundary, often by casting the writer as obscurantist, unserious, or dangerous.
The line also doubles as a self-portrait. Derrida isn’t claiming innocence; he’s acknowledging that his writing actively produces this loss of recognition. It’s an intent statement: if your sense of ownership over meaning is what reading is for, then the text will keep slipping out of your hands.
The sting sits in “their territory, their institution.” Derrida frames reading not as neutral comprehension but as border maintenance. These readers approach ideas like property: the right keywords, the familiar canon, the sanctioned methods. When they “could no longer recognize” the landscape, the injury wasn’t confusion so much as dispossession. The subtext is almost comic in its dryness: you thought you were consuming a book; you were actually policing a jurisdiction.
Context matters. Derrida’s work, especially in the decades when “deconstruction” became a campus shibboleth and a conservative bogeyman, repeatedly threatened the fantasy that institutions are held together by stable meanings and tidy hierarchies. He’s describing the institutional immune system kicking in: when language starts showing its seams, gatekeepers reassert the boundary, often by casting the writer as obscurantist, unserious, or dangerous.
The line also doubles as a self-portrait. Derrida isn’t claiming innocence; he’s acknowledging that his writing actively produces this loss of recognition. It’s an intent statement: if your sense of ownership over meaning is what reading is for, then the text will keep slipping out of your hands.
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