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 the trouble with reading critics is that Derrida says a lot of complicated things I don't fully follow
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 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.