Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Derrida

Derrida’s slyest move here is to deny, with a straight face, the very caricature that made him famous: the continental trickster who muddles plain speech for sport. “Temptation” frames obscurity as a vice he could indulge in but chooses not to, which already shifts blame away from method and onto motive. He’s not refusing complexity; he’s refusing the petty thrill of performing it. The punchline is “too ridiculous,” a deliberately ordinary phrase that punctures the myth of Derrida-as-oracle. The line works because it’s both confession and trap: to call him “difficult” is to fall into the crude psychologizing he’s parodying.

The subtext is defensive, but not apologetic. Derrida knew that “deconstruction” was routinely sold as nihilism or elitist pranksterism, especially in Anglo-American academia where clarity is treated as an ethical posture. He counters by reclassifying difficulty as a property of the object, not the author’s attitude. Some things resist being made smooth without being falsified; insisting otherwise is its own kind of theatrical simplification. His jab at “being difficult just for the sake of being difficult” also mirrors his larger critique of self-justifying systems: no practice should legitimate itself by its own mystique.

Context matters: Derrida’s reception was shaped less by what he wrote than by how institutions needed him to function - as villain, guru, or shibboleth. This sentence is a compact media strategy: it disarms the heckler while quietly reaffirming the right to complexity. The refusal to “give in” isn’t humility. It’s an insistence that seriousness doesn’t have to advertise itself in baroque fog.