the trouble with reading critics is that they spend their time writing criticism of particular texts and then i read that and then i feel like to get the most out of the criticism i need to go read the thing they're criticizing.
perhaps this is arguably the case with pretty much all writing and its sources and influences, but it's a lot more apparent in the criticism case
also also the trouble with reading critics is that it's too easy to just interpret them as saying things i already agree with when they are maybe saying something subtly different.
Lady, EVOLVED 
@alyssa if it helps i’m pretty sure derrida only criticizes people he actually at least halfway agrees with
@Lady in this case that's very apparent, since i think he's explicitly relying on certain claims within the Rousseau text he's analyzing in his own argument about the text (and about broader points). (this textbook suggested i read for myself the part of Of Grammatology where he said (in Spivak's translation anyway) "There is nothing outside the text")
@Lady fortunately, in this case, even if i definitely didn't manage to understand everything, i did manage to get out of it what i was looking for (an understanding of what he was saying by that one line)
@alyssa honestly probably the greatest lesson i took from reading derrida in college was the importance of the concept of “worthy of critique”
derrida and the people around him (de man, etc) believed that studying critiques of a text was essential to exposing its meaning (because only in the critique of a critique are you analysing the interpretive process itself, i.e. how meaning is formed or not formed from text)
so critiques, through a kind of double negative, become a really positive force, and something you only really direct at things you really like and want to form meaning around
also the trouble with reading critics is that Derrida says a lot of complicated things I don't fully follow