During the week of October 18-21, 1966, an international symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” was held under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore . Initiated by René Girard, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, the symposium celebrated structuralist theory for the first time in the United States as an interdisciplinary program. By inviting well known representatives from several fields of the humanities and social sciences the organizers sought a meeting of philosophy and literature in connection with linguistic, anthropological and mathematical sciences. Jean Hyppolite, representing phenomenology, and George Poulet and Lucien Goldmann, representing approaches to literature, went up against Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Nicholas Ruwet, representing structuralism. Girard also invited Jacques Lacan, in light of his structuralist revision of Freud, and Jacques Derrida, having in mind a recent critical work by Derrida on Lévi-Strauss.

Jacques Derrida, the youngest of the European participants (still ostensibly under Hyppolite's supervision), contributed the enigmatically written “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In the following year Derrida published three volumes: L'écriture et la différence ( Writing and Difference ), De la grammatologie ( Of Grammatology ) and La voix et le phénomène ( Speech and Phenomena ), which arguably established him at the front of the avant garde in high theory and helped to inaugurate a fundamental shift in Anglo-American academic practice.

A genuine interest in structuralist method was evident amongst specialists both on the continent and in the US at the time; but the rumblings of an increasingly influential mass media also began to join in the conversation. In France Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les Choses [ The Order of Things ], published early in 1966, helped establish structuralism as a kind of cultural fashion to both widespread celebration and reactive disapproval. The book drew detailed criticism from traditional corners of academia but also became one of those rare commodities, an academic best seller. In the wake of this burgeoning interest, the Baltimore event signaled several kinds of turning point in intellectual history. The English coinage, “post-structuralism,” appeared for the first time shortly afterwards and indicates some of the perceptions that were developing in America in response to the work of Lacan, Barthes and Derrida in particular. Arguably the most enigmatic and apparently hybrid presentations of the event have had the most profound and lasting influences historically.

Nevertheless, the collection Writing and Difference, in which “Structure, Sign and Play” appears, is remarkable for its time in posing an intricate and closely argued distance between Derrida's modes of writing and what was most current in contemporary thinking, including the works of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas and Georges Bataille, as well as the various re-elaborations by Foucault, Lacan, and Barthes, of the masters of modern critical theory, Nietzsche, Freud and de Saussure. Allying himself instead with what remained most classically “purist” in contemporary thought, Derrida sets out a fundamental radicalization of classical philosophy.

Looking back after more than forty years one can plausibly argue that Derrida's presentation at the Baltimore symposium constitutes the kind of event that he refers to cautiously in his reading of “the history of the concept of structure” in the opening lines of that paper. The article marks a moment in Derrida's writing when it is no longer possible to ignore the procedures of formal adventure. In the peculiar temporal structure of the trace , Derrida does not merely offer an alternative to modes of conception that remain fixated on elements or atomic units of signification (concept, word, phoneme, sign, signifier, etc.); but he begins to write in traces too, with the consequence that careful readers are obliged to abandon their expectations when attempting to follow the diverse threads of an argument.

The contributors we asked to return to the texts of 1966 and 67, with specific reference to “Structure, Sign and Play” as an historical event, the event as it seems today of theory, and to reread it in terms of the ways in which during the last forty years it may have influenced academic responses to historical conditions of all kinds. The conventional limits of what can be regarded as effective in intellectual practice have undoubtedly been redrawn during this time and the event of “theory” plays an integral role in this conception. There have been expansions of possibility but also added complications.

The articles exhibit in their variety different kinds of response to the works of Jacques Derrida, yet they also exhibit a consistency in the discipline and perhaps even the scholasticism that is owed in part to the fecund yet systematic and condensed nature of “Structure, Sign and Play.” It's an article that has for many years been taken for granted—a vintage text in the literary theory canon—but on returning to it after more than forty years one finds a surprisingly early outing for the kind of adventure in form that Derrida will become notorious for in the 1970s (notably after Glas ). At the same time its ability to generate relevant and politicised engagements in the 21 st century seems untainted.

Contributors to the special section of Theory and Event included Graham Allen, Ryan Bishop, Irving Goh, Martin McQuillan, Shaoling Ma, John Phillips, and Sarah Wood.

Publications

Bishop, Ryan and John Phillips, eds. “40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play”, Special Section of Theory and Event. Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009 ( Johns Hopkins University Press)

Wood, Sarah. “Centre-piece” in Bishop & Phillips eds.“40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play”, Special Section of Theory and Event. Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009.

Shaoling, Ma. “Living and Dying by the Event” in Bishop & Phillips eds.“40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play”, Special Section of Theory and Event. Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009.

McQuillan, Martin. “Extraordinary Rendition: Derrida and Vietnam ” in Bishop & Phillips eds.“40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play”, Special Section of Theory and Event. Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009.

Allen, Graham. “365 Holes” in Bishop & Phillips eds.“40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play”, Special Section of Theory and Event. Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009.

Bishop, Ryan. “Method, Techne and Auto-kinesis” in Bishop & Phillips eds.“40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play”, Special Section of Theory and Event. Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009.

Goh, Irving. “Structural Reject” in “40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play”, in Bishop & Phillips eds.“40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play”, Special Section of Theory and Event. Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009.

Phillips, J. W. P. “The Magic Center: Matrix and Conception in Derrida's La structure, le signe et le jeu” in Bishop & Phillips eds.“40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play”, Special Section of Theory and Event. Volume 12, Issue 1, 2009.