Thirty years ago the English-speaking world was discovering the work of some of the key poststructuralist theorists for the first time: Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology had just appeared in translation, as had Roland Barthes' S/Z, Jacques Lacan's Ecrits, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and Pierre Macherey's A Theory of Literary Production. English editions of Julia Kristeva's Desire in Language and Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition were just...