Around Derrida's Intervention in Baltimore: "Decentering" as a Marker of Poststructural Displacement?

This intervention focuses on some of the circumstances, issues, and consequences of the article "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," published by Derrida following the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins. As for the context, we know that 1966 was a "great" structuralist year. It is sometimes even said that it was the "structuralist year" because of the quantity of important works that have been published on structuralism at that time (Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme 328; History of Structuralism 316). It is therefore also a year in which the problem of structuralism appeared, even in the eyes of a wide public, as a novelty.

Thus, an issue of the journal L'Arc was devoted to this subject, presenting the "scene" of the structuralist irruption as an anti-existentialist scene.¹ Jean-Paul Sartre was called upon to defend himself. This was obviously a somewhat questionable presentation of the situation, but it seems to be symptomatic of the terms in which a fairly broad public considered the advent of structuralism as a rupture with Sartre—to the point that the vocabulary used by the journalists was that of "conspiracy (conjuration)." So, it was certainly not entirely by chance that some of these putative "conspirators" were invited in Baltimore, to discuss this structuralist "controversy" that the organizers of the conference intended to echo.

Yet, this dimension of "rupture with Sartre" can be attenuated by the fact that it did not concern some of the main issues in which Sartre was engaged, whether they were about social class, race, or gender relations. From this point of view, what appeared to journalists as a general "conspiracy," could be limited to a criticism of the more strictly philosophical position of the "subject first," taken in the "absoluteness" of his founding freedom—which was, indeed, radically challenged.

It is nevertheless significant that, in this issue of L'Arc, among the counterarguments put forward by Sartre against his alleged structuralist opponents, the topic of "decentering" was already highlighted: Sartre reproached the "structuralists" of proposing a "decentering" that would make any "praxis" of the subject in history impossible (Sartre, "Jean-Paul Sartre répond" 91–92). This may already suggest that around the interpretation of this term, a large part of the meaning of what changed in this moment of intellectual life could be played out. However, it can be noted that "decentering" seems also to be the key term in order to understand what is at stake in Derrida's intervention.

And yet, in Baltimore, the debate on existentialism was no longer central. This is particularly apparent in retrospect: fifty years later, it is not the presentation of the novelty of structuralist theses, but already the topic of another discussion, that makes us consider this moment as one of those in which a new approach would have been born, by which, if criticism was addressed to structuralism, it was less in the name of excessive "objectivity," than of an internal limit needing to be overcome. It could still be a criticism of "totalization," but from a significantly different point of view, that has sometimes been called "poststructuralist," and of which Derrida's intervention would be an essential witness, perhaps the most significant.

The term "decentering" was not, of course, created by Derrida. We saw that it was already used by Sartre. It is not a neologism, like "differance," "archi-trace," or others. But Derrida gave it an unprecedented critical potential: he managed to make it a disclosure of the difficulties inherent in any structuralism. From this point, one may wonder whether any "poststructuralism" is not dependent, in one way or another, on this kind of thought of decentering.

As the problems are those of a whole period, the analysis of these developments will be clarified by the reference to authors with whom Derrida was constantly discussing. This is all the more true if we take into account the fact that "decentering" does not present itself as a simple or unitary operation. It is not self-evident that one can speak of the decentering and understand...