The occasional designation of post-structuralism as a movement can be tied to the fact that mounting criticism of structuralism became evident at approximately the same time that structuralism became a topic of interest in universities in the United States . This interest led to a 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University that invited scholars thought to be prominent structuralists, including Jacques Derrida , Roland Barthes , and Jacques Lacan . Derrida's lecture at that conference "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences" often appears in collections as a manifesto against structuralism. Derrida's essay was one of the earliest to designate some theoretical limitations to structuralism and, while giving it due credit, attempt to theorise on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist. If, however, some consensus thereafter emerged that a departure from structuralism was necessary, it is by no means the case that the direction of departure was agreed upon. Noting these various criticisms of structuralism, much of the scholarship that attempts to take post-structuralism per se as its object results from attempts to adduce common elements to what grew out of such critiques.

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