next two decades, Derrida continues on his basic course as a
skeptical unraveler of logocentrism, relatively unconcerned
with Lévinas’s emphasis on ethics.
Less than a year after the appearance ofWriting and Difference,
Of Grammatology,andSpeech and Phenomena,an epochal
event occurred, one that Derrida, like every other French citi-
zen, and especially every intellectual, was forced to reckon
with. This event was the student revolt of May 1968. The stu-
dents hurled a vivid protest against the sterile, stagnant uni-
versity system; the cramped and repressive living conditions in
their dormitories; the seeming uselessness of their education.
They succeeded in blockading the streets of the Latin Quarter
and in shutting down the Sorbonne. Classes were replaced by
a communal free-for-all consisting of endless insomniac de-
bates over politics and revolution.
Led by “Red Danny,” the young firebrand Daniel Cohn-
Bendit, the students of May ’ 68 seemed to be winning. French
workers, suffering under a low minimum wage, joined them in
a general strike. For a few days in May, it looked as if the French
government might be brought down by the combined action
of the workers and the students. By the end of the month, how-
ever, the strike had dissolved: the majority of the French
people stood by their leader de Gaulle who, in a decisive
speech, forcefully invoked the need for public order.
In October 1968 , just a few months after the upheaval on
the streets of Paris, Derrida traveled to America to present a
talk at an international colloquium on philosophy and an-
thropology in New York. The lecture, later included in Der-
rida’s Margins of Philosophy( 1972 ), is entitled “The Ends of
Man.” It is one of Derrida’s most eloquent and influential
statements of his place in philosophical tradition. In the course
130 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology