Writing Itself 1965–1966 167
you want to say.’ Once again the thematic of ‘stolen ideas,’
the fantasy of owning concepts, the narcissism of priority. It
proved too much. Derrida refused to go along, and retorted
sharply, ‘That is not my problem.’ Lacan was being made to
pay for his remark. Later in the evening, he approached the
philosopher and laid his hand gently on his shoulder. ‘Ah!
Derrida, we must speak together, we must speak.’ They would
not speak.. ..^36Lacan had become something of a star in France, and was eager
to impose his presence at the Baltimore conference. He probably
wanted this trip, his fi rst to America, to become as mythical as
Freud’s in 1909. Giving a paper on the second day, he fi rst insisted
that he speak before the other psychoanalyst present, Guy Rosolato,
and the latter’s wife took umbrage. But in particular, he started to
give his paper in English, a language that he was far from speaking
fl uently, before shifting into an almost incomprehensible mixture of
English and French. The title itself was enough to leave anyone non-
plussed: ‘Of structure as an inmixing of an otherness prerequisite to
any subject whatever’. The translator soon threw in the towel. The
public was fl ummoxed. The organizers were taken aback by what
was perceived as a ‘huge bad joke’.^37
Derrida spoke on the afternoon of the third day, just before the
conclusions. This did not stop his paper – ‘Structure, sign and play
in the human sciences’ – appearing as the most important given at
the conference. Georges Poulet, whose work was the polar opposite
of Derrida’s, nonetheless sang the praises of this ‘admirable paper’
to all those who had not been lucky enough to be there, especially
J. Hillis Miller, who was to become one of Derrida’s staunchest
supporters in the United States.^38 David Carroll, a student who
had only just started at Johns Hopkins, was also dazzled by this
young and unknown philosopher: ‘We were just discovering what
structuralism was, and he came and started to call into question
what we were starting to learn. I immediately realized that it was
an event.’^39
It is true that, way beyond the texts of Lévi-Strauss under ana-
lysis, Derrida’s paper did not draw back from setting out a number
of signifi cant markers. Some formulations would become canonical
in the United States, once ‘French theory’ made its impact there.
Derrida, yet again positing the need to break away from the ‘ethic
of presence’ and the ‘nostalgia for origins’, focused on the way signs
could be substituted for one another, freed from any tyranny from
the centre. He sought to replace the old hermeneutics that dreamed
of ‘deciphering a truth’ with a mode of interpretation that ‘affi rms
play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism’.^40 It was a
matter, however, not of moving on from philosophy, but of reading