Once upon a time, a French academic domiciled in the United States thought it would be a good idea to mark the opening of his university's newly instituted Humanities Center by holding a conference on Structuralism, the philosophic system which had penetrated most sections of French intellectual life and, in doing so, marginalized Existentialism, the immediate postwar reigning philosophy even while Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were still alive.
