ing of philosophical tradition he seeks. Both Nietzsche and
Lévinas, instead of merely criticizing philosophical conven-
tion, turn toward new continents.
In 1966 , at the age of thirty-six and with his massive
Grammatologyfinished and ready for the press, Derrida under-
took his first trip to America since his Harvard fellowship ten
years earlier. He made the journey in order to speak at a con-
ference at Johns Hopkins, one with a grand subject: the Lan-
guages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. The conference
had been organized by Richard Macksey, a polymath literature
professor who was already cultivating an interest in the inno-
vations stemming from France; and by René Girard and Euge-
nio Donato, two distinguished European scholars teaching at
Hopkins.
Macksey, Girard, and Donato invited a stellar group of
French intellectuals to Baltimore. Roland Barthes stood out as
the most prominent of them: the apostle of the “pleasure of the
text” and the “death of the author,” and the great aesthete
among French theorists. The reclusive Barthes, who lived with
his elderly mother, was an inert conversationalist, but his writ-
ing sparkled. Along with Lévi-Strauss, he was probably the
best stylist among the structuralists. Among the others who
came to Johns Hopkins were Jean Hyppolite, an influential in-
terpreter of Hegel; the baffling psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,
who had already attracted a small group of devoted disciples;
Jean-Pierre Vernant, a scholar who was applying the new the-
oretical methods to the study of ancient Greece; and the
renowned phenomenologist Lucien Goldmann. Also in atten-
dance in Baltimore was a Belgian scholar of literature then
teaching at Cornell named Paul de Man. Derrida and de Man
were to meet for the first time at the Hopkins conference.
Chatting about Rousseau at breakfast, they inaugurated a
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 93