Like sat down, with a pre-existing understanding of the fields he is interfacing with (particularly phenomenology and structuralism and semiotics a la Saussure) and then begin reading?

Most approaches to continental philosophy I read on these pages are like someone jumping into a halfway point of a complex essay on functional programming, quoting it and declaring it nonsense. To people outside particular discourses, things often seem like nonsense. Within them, with enough background, one can see that these things are meaningful, while one might, of course, disagree.