Between phenomenology and structuralism

In the fall of 1964, Derrida left the Sorbonne, where he had been teaching as an assistant, to take up his new role as agrégé-répétiteur at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. From the bustling anonymity of the Cour d’Honneur, working alongside the phenomenologists Jean Wahl, Paul Ricoeur, and Suzanne Bachelard, Derrida once again entered the intimate, even claustrophobic, institution where Louis Althusser held court and antihumanist Marxism was the order of the day. Though only a few hundred meters’ walk from the lecture halls in which he had been teaching for the past four years, socially and philosophically the ENS was a world apart. In passing through the main gates, Derrida was not only embarking on a new stage of his career, he was entering into a structuralist lions’ den: it was to be a rude introduction to 1960s philosophy.