SOURCE: de Vries, Hent. “Deconstruction and America.” In Traveling Theory: France and the United States, edited by Ieme van der Poel and Sophie Bertho, pp. 72-98. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, de Vries presents an overview of issues raised by deconstruction theory as it was introduced and flourished in the United States.

Much has changed since October 1966, when the famous conference on structuralism took place at Johns Hopkins University, introducing the work of a remarkable group of contemporary French thinkers in the United States. The conference, which featured lectures by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, among others, had been organized by the newly founded interdisciplinary Humanities Center. It was intended to inaugurate a two-year-long series of seminars and conferences which “sought to explore the impact of so-called ‘structuralist’ thought on critical methods in humanistic and social studies.”¹ This concise description...