Derrida is hard to follow.

To begin a text with a sentence like that is, of course, to follow Derrida: to follow in his footsteps by finding an incipit that, shorn of context, proffers an undecidable choice of meanings, and which, moreover, stages the very issue the text is to take up. Some examples: ‘Oui, oui, you are receiving me, these are French words’; ‘Pardon for not meaning (to say)’; ‘What am I going to be able to invent this time?’; ‘Genres are not to be mixed’.

To follow in this sense is to redeploy a machine that someone else has invented, as Derrida demonstrates in ‘Psyche’ by varying the opening line of Francis Ponge's little poem ‘Fable’, ‘With the word with commences then this text’, as ‘At the word at commences then this text,’ adding, ‘There would be other regulated variants, at greater or lesser distances from the model, that I do not have the time to note here’ (334). But this possibility of variation does not simply follow an invention (here Ponge's invention), it constitutes the invention as an invention, by means of an achronological logic that we see everywhere at work in Derrida, a logic which does not allow for a simple process of following. If you follow this logic as you read Derrida, it becomes hard not to follow him, hard not to repeat him in your own thinking and writing – testimony, if testimony were needed, to the inventiveness of his texts.