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Derrida was the final speaker on the final day. He remained a silent observer for much of the symposium. He looked on as Lacan rose to his feet with obscure questions at the end of each lecture, and as Barthes gently asked for clarification on various moot points. Eventually, however, Derrida, unused to speaking to large audiences, took to the stage, quietly shuffled his notes, and began, ‘Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event”…’ He spoke for less than half an hour. But by the time he was finished the entire structuralist project was in doubt, if not dead. An event had occurred: the birth of deconstruction.
Salmon, Peter. An Event, Perhaps (pp. 2-3). |
Salmon today at Arts & Letters Daily —
