Richard L. Conville

Scholarship is supposed to proceed like an antiphonal chorus, with one section
of investigators proposing, from one section of the choir, and another disposing,
from across the way; or like a conversation, with one participant conjecturing
and another refuting or supporting or even changing the subject. While the
process is more often marked by cacophony than by euphony, once in a while it
works right and is melodious. One such time was in 1970, when the proceedings
of a symposium held at Johns Hopkins University, October 18-21, 1966, were
first published. The prestigious gathering was entitled "The Languages of
Criticism and the Sciences of Man," and it inaugurated a series of 40 seminars
given by 26 visiting scholars over the next two years. Their purpose was "to
explore the impact of contemporary 'structuralist' thought on critical methods
in humanistic and social studies" ( Macksey & Donato, 1972, p. xv).

The seminar presentations, along with transcriptions of their subsequent dis-
cussions, were published by the Johns Hopkins University Press as The
Structuralist Controversy, with the symposium title as subtitle. In his paper
"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Jacques
Derrida ( 1972) proposed the structurality of structure. The presentation must
have been particularly perplexing to Jean Hyppolite, then professor of the histo-
ry of philosophy at the Collège de France. During the discussion, after a lengthy
and oblique response from Derrida to a question of his, Hyppolite shouted
(based on the transcript, at least, I would guess that he shouted; or perhaps he
spoke ve-ry de-lib-er-ate-ly from between clenched teeth), "What is a structure
then?" After a somewhat shorter, but no less oblique reply from Derrida, the
discussion was rescued by Hyppolite's colleagues and turned to other topics.
Hyppolite's question remains, however, and serves to initiate the antiphony I
want to highlight in this chapter. As well, it captures the theme of this volume.

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