In laying out this argument, Guillory draws on the famous portrait of the scholar that Friedrich Nietzsche evokes in The Gay Science:

In a scholar's book [Nietzsche writes] there is nearly always something oppressive, oppressed: the "specialist" emerges somehow-his eagerness, his seriousness, his ire, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunchback every specialist has his hump. Every scholarly book also reflects a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.

And

One pays dearly for any kind of mastery on earth, where perhaps one pays too dearly for everything; one is master of one's trade at the price of also being its victim.