Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Derrida

Derrida is doing what he always does: turning the accusation into evidence, then smiling while the evidence wriggles. The line is a taunt aimed at a familiar posture in academic life: the critic who insists a body of work is hopelessly obscure, yet somehow knows enough about it to complain that the author is everywhere in it. If the texts are truly “inaccessible,” how can his “name” be echoing inside them with such volume? The complaint collapses under its own certainty.

The phrasing is calculatedly theatrical. “Too visible,” “too alive” makes the philosopher sound less like a quiet technician of concepts and more like a celebrity haunting the footnotes. That’s the point. Derrida is diagnosing a contradiction in how intellectual authority is policed: opponents want the work to be unreadable (so it can be dismissed) and the author to be over-present (so it can be personalized, pathologized, reduced to ego). He treats visibility as a crime because, in certain gatekept circles, to be legible or culturally resonant is already suspect.

The subtext is also autobiographical and historically situated. Derrida spent decades being attacked for “jargon,” for destabilizing meaning, for allegedly making texts say anything. This sentence turns those charges back on the accusers: your insistence that I’m “too much” in the writing admits that you’re reading me closely enough to be haunted. It’s not a defense of clarity so much as an exposure of the politics of reception: “inaccessibility” often names a refusal, not a barrier.