Technology Rig Some days you wish had never started, then along comes one you hope will never end. Anything can happen in a day.

Searle exemplified his view on deconstruction in The New York Review of Books, February 2, 1984; for example:

Anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial.

In 1992, Quine led an unsuccessful petition to stop Cambridge University from granting Derrida an honorary degree. Such criticism was, according to Derrida, directed at Derrida

"no doubt because deconstructions query or put into question a good many divisions and distinctions, for example the distinction between the pretended neutrality of philosophical discourse, on the one hand, and existential passions and drives on the other, between what is public and what is private, and so on".

Quine regarded Derrida's work as pseudophilosophy or sophistry.

Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida's prose style to me as "obscurantisme terroriste." The text is written so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence "obscurantisme") and when one criticizes it, the author says, "Vous m'avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot' (hence "terroriste")