ABSTRACT
Assessing The Argument Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” was soon greeted as a hugely significant intervention in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Derrida’s intention had been to draw his audience’s attention to what he saw as a “rupture” already present in structuralist thought, and his paper was soon marked out as a persuasive argument for a change in theoretical approach.1 This much was immediately evident to those in the paper’s original audience. As he made clear in his concluding remarks to the symposium, the organizer, Richard Macksey, viewed it as one of the most “radical” of the papers given in its “reappraisals of our assumptions.”2
