friendship that would last nearly twenty years, until de Man’s
untimely death in 1983.
Derrida arrived in New York in October 1966 and spent
several days there before going on to Baltimore. He shared a
room at the Hotel Martinique in midtown Manhattan with
Tzvetan Todorov, also invited to lecture at the Hopkins con-
ference. Todorov, a Bulgarian, had fled his country’s repres-
sive regime to live in Paris. Todorov was at the time one of
the structuralists, but his true interest was political thought.
He explained later that, since his parents were still alive and in
Bulgaria, he had to avoid writing about politics, which would
have exposed them to potential punishment by the Bulgarian
Communist government.^4 After his parents’ deaths, Todorov
shifted to books on the European political tradition, the Nazi
death camps, and other subjects—and he became a strong
critic of structuralism and poststructuralism, in the name of a
revived humanism. In a ringing riposte to Derrida’s attempt to
combine deconstruction with ethics, Todorov remarked, “It is
not possible, without inconsistency, to defend human rights
with one hand and deconstruct the idea of humanity with the
other” (Signs 81 ).^5
Derrida was given the honor of being the final speaker at
the Hopkins conference, and he took full advantage of the op-
portunity. His talk, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse
of the Human Sciences” (later published in Writing and Dif-
ference), is one of his most dazzling performances. It is com-
pact (an unusual feat for Derrida) and synoptic, enlisting
Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and other major figures to make
his point. And Derrida’s point in “Structure, Sign and Play” is
nothing less than the demolition of structuralism, represented
by the person of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Derrida’s great precur-
sor. As David Lehman observes, Derrida announced struc-
94 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology