I thought of this last weekend and never got around to looking it up, but after a week of journalists and french-a-phobics moaning on and on that Derrida's

prose was famously impenetrable; Derrida didn't shrink from writing sentences that rambled on for two or three pages and his books were abstruse and convoluted in the extreme.

I'd like to know what they make of the other "philosophy" of the 20th century, the Anglo analytical one. The big text there is Russell and Whitehead's Principia Matematica, the book which Wittgenstein showed up in time to help them finish. Other philosophers were baffled by their text, and assumed it was a form of mathematics. Later, after thinking about the matter some more, Wittgenstein denied

that there were any mathematical facts to be discovered and that mathematical statements were "true" in any real sense: they simply expressed the conventional established meanings of certain symbols.

And they certainly expressed themselves with symbols. Here's a taste of their Principia

(((P v Q) -> (P v R)) -> (P v (Q -> R))); ! *2.85 (GB 41->37)
(((P -> Q) -> (R -> S)) -> (R -> (Q -> S))); ! Result of proof

Nothing abstruse there, eh? No doubt today's journalists also find the conclusion of Russell and Whitehead's proof that 1 + 1 = 2, after several hundred pages, penetrable and uncovoluted.  ¶ 9:01 PM