Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences

Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (French: La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines) was a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966 by philosopher Jacques Derrida. The lecture was then published in 1967 as chapter ten of Writing and Difference (French: L'écriture et la différence).

"Structure, Sign, and Play" identifies a tendency for philosophers to denounce each other for relying on problematic discourse, and argues that this reliance is to some degree inevitable because we can only write in the language we inherit. Discussing the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Derrida argues that we are all bricoleurs, creative tinkerers who must use the tools we find around us.

Although presented at a conference intended to popularize structuralism, the lecture is widely cited as the starting point for post-structuralism in the United States. Along with Derrida's longer text Of Grammatology, it is also programmatic for the process of deconstruction.

Derrida wrote "Structure, Sign, and Play" to present at a conference titled "The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore from 18–21 October 1966. The conference, organized by Richard A. Macksey for the newly founded Humanities Center, and sponsored by the Ford Foundation, brought together a collection of notable French thinkers, including Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Lacan. (Michel Foucault was, in the words of Jean-Michel Rabaté, "notoriously absent".) Derrida reportedly wrote his essay rather quickly in the ten or fifteen days preceding the conference. (According to one report, Derrida was a last-minute replacement for anthropologist Luc de Heusch.)

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