Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Derrida

Derrida is warning you off the fantasy of a clean philosophical starting point. The “implicit level of an accumulated reserve” names what his work keeps circling: every concept arrives already stocked with prior uses, assumptions, metaphors, institutional habits, and untranslated residues. Philosophy doesn’t begin; it inherits. That phrase “accumulated reserve” sounds almost economic, like a stored capital of meanings you draw on without noticing you’re borrowing. The cost is that your argument is never fully yours.

The “very great number of relays” is the giveaway. Derrida’s intent isn’t to mystify; it’s to relocate agency. Meaning is transmitted through relays: citations, genres, footnotes, pedagogical lineages, canonical “problems,” even the grammar that forces certain oppositions to seem natural. A relay both carries and alters the signal. So a philosophical claim is less a solitary act of genius than a networked event, routed through libraries, translations, universities, and the sediment of language itself.

“Shared responsibility” is the ethical turn. Derrida is pushing against the comforting alibi that “it’s just how the tradition speaks.” If your ideas are relayed, then responsibility is distributed, but not dissolved. You’re answerable for what you repeat, for the exclusions a concept smuggles in, for the authority you invoke when you say “we.” In late-20th-century debates over structuralism, post-structuralism, and the politics of the canon, this is Derrida’s quiet provocation: critique isn’t optional commentary; it’s what thinking owes to its own borrowed infrastructure.