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# Turns Out Derrida Has Always Been Incomprehensible
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/turns-out-derrida-has-always-been-incomprehensible/
- Published: 2015-04-17T02:46:14.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:43:28.000Z
- Description: Not only did Derrida do poorly on his Shakespeare essay: he also went on flunk his university entrance exams, which he had to take three times.
- Author: Becca Rothfeld
- Tags: In Brief, Shakespeare, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:08 (2014, 2015, part 2)

![Derrida's essay on Shakespeare (image via imgur.com) http://i.imgur.com/A3UWOGY.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/04/derrida-shakespeare.jpg)

Derrida’s essay on Shakespeare (image via imgur.com) (click to enlarge)

For a long time, I’ve struggled to understand the academy’s obsequious reverence for [Jacques Derrida](http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/?ref=hyperallergic.com), famed founder of the [deconstruction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction?ref=hyperallergic.com) movement and an infamously ponderous writer. When I first had the misfortune of wading through Derrida’s near-incomprehensible writing, I was in an advanced French seminar. I wondered if I’d managed to forget a language I’d been studying for 10 years at the time. But I quickly realized that my French wasn’t the problem. The problem, it emerged when I read the rest of the texts in the seminar without much difficulty, was Derrida’s jumbled prose.

Though I’d arrived at college set on pioneering a “semiotics” major, my encounter with Derrida catapulted me towards analytic philosophy, where the prose was crystalline and the argumentation rigorous. For years, I felt about Derrida the way I felt about popular girls in middle school. He was worse than awful: he was overrated.

But it turns out the French weren’t too fond of Derrida’s prose either. A recently opened [exhibition at the UC Irvine Libraries](http://lib.uci.edu/features/news/2015-spring-exhibit-critical-theory.html?ref=hyperallergic.com), which features the papers of several seminal thinkers, showcases a poorly marked essay that Derrida wrote on Shakespeare. The paper bears the grader’s comments, many of which mirror the criticisms levied against Derrida to this day: “In this essay you seem to be constantly on the verge of something interesting, but, somewhat, you always fail to explain it clearly. A few paragraphs are indeed totally incomprehensible,” the notes read. “Quite unintelligible,” the grader goes on to comment alongside one passage. The essay comes from Derrida’s days at Khâgne, a two-year institution designed to prepare French high school graduates to apply to top universities, [Critical Theory reports](http://www.critical-theory.com/quite-unintelligible-derridas-scathing-criticism-from-a-teacher/?ref=hyperallergic.com).

Not only did Derrida do poorly on his Shakespeare essay, he also went on to flunk his university entrance exams, which he had to take three times. When confronted with a passage from Diderot, [*The New York Review of Books* reports](http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/mar/25/derrida-excluded-favorite/?ref=hyperallergic.com), he attempted evasion, arguing that “this text was a trap … that everything about it, in its form, was ambiguous, implied, convoluted, complicated, suggested, murmured.” Unimpressed, the jurors replied, “This text is quite simple. You’ve simply made it more complicated.”

That, I would argue, about sums up Derrida’s role in American intellectual life.

[Through Discerning Eyes: Origins and Impact of Critical Theory at UCI](http://lib.uci.edu/features/news/2015-spring-exhibit-critical-theory.html?ref=hyperallergic.com) *continues at Langson Library, UC Irvine (Irvine, California) through mid-September.*