Derrida wrote "Structure, Sign, and Play" to present at a conference titled "The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore from 18–21 October 1966. The conference, organized by Richard A. Macksey for the newly founded Humanities Center, and sponsored by the Ford Foundation, brought together a collection of notable French thinkers, including Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Lacan. (Michel Foucault was, in the words of Jean-Michel Rabaté, "notoriously absent".) Derrida reportedly wrote his essay rather quickly in the ten or fifteen days preceding the conference. (According to one report, Derrida was a last-minute replacement for anthropologist Luc de Heusch.)