After Yale, he spent six months in Paris, sitting in on classes with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, whose abstruse and fashionable discours would become required reading for a generation of American graduate students. Fukuyama was less than impressed. '“I was turned off by their nihilistic idea of what literature was all about,”' he recalls. '“It had nothing to do with the world. I developed such an aversion to that whole over-intellectual approach that I turned to nuclear weapons instead.”'
“WHAT IS FUKUYAMA SAYING? AND TO WHOM IS HE SAYING IT?” at www.nytimes.com