Structure, Sign & Play

Derrida first gave the lecture 'Structure, Sign & Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' to an audience at John Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1966 and it was first published (in French) the following year in the collection L'écriture et la différence, at the heart of what Derrida referred to in an interview given that same year (later published in Positions) as "the grammatological opening" (in reference to the book De la Grammatologie also published in 1967 – Derrida explained in the same interview how his three publications of that year formed a variously interlocking whole). However, in addition to this personal philosophical context, the lecture not only announced Derrida onto the international scene, but launched him into the middle of a heated debate on the question of "structuralism", which the conference at John Hopkins had been convoked in order to address (other contributors included Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov and Jacques Lacan). The lecture was first published in English in 1970 in the conference proceedings, The Structuralist Controversy, and it was in these terms that much of Derrida's work during this period was understood within the English-speaking world, despite his tendency to reject either the structuralist or post-structuralist designations.