High culture can feel obscurantist to me.

Writers like to impress that they and Derrida are in on a shared secret, but if this secret is not interesting then the reader must not be allowed to know it before doing some work. A barricade of allusions and references and filler is necessary to make readers feel like they really earned an insight.

Whereas if we took a step back and stripped off the allegories, we'd realise that Derrida's argument to Lacan about the nature of the phallus is not interesting and does not tell us much.