An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
end of my tether, Michel, pray for me.’ His reading remained resolutely melancholy, including Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes and Gide’s Strait Is the Gate.68
He again sought solace in the cinema, which acted as ‘a drug, entertainment par excellence, uneducated escape, the right to wildness’. For Jackie, as for the man he would become, ‘the movies are a hidden, secret, avid, gluttonous joy – in other words, an infantile pleasure’. While cinema never became ‘a form of knowledge, or even a real memory’, he saw parallels between filmic style and deconstructive writing – both adopting ‘all the possibilities of montage, that is, of plays with the rhythms, of grafts of quotations, insertions, changes in tone, changes in language, crossings between “disciplines” and the rules of art, the arts.’69
The cinema was also a place of spectrality, phantoms, and, as he later punned on ontology, ‘hauntology’. Film lets one see ‘new specters appear while remembering (and then projecting them in turn onto the screen) the ghosts haunting films already seen … Let’s say that cinema needed to be invented to fulfil a certain desire for relation to ghosts.’70 And film shares what we might call a certain consanguinity with psychoanalysis.
If his struggles in France were not enough, Jackie found his trips back to Algeria in the holidays ‘gloomy and impossible.’ For all its terrors, the stimulation of Paris left Algeria ‘a real drag, terribly monotonous’ and the people he knew to be ‘of no interest’. The political situation remained tense – while the 1947 Statute of Algeria had granted French citizenship to all Algerian men, the creation of the Algerian Assembly, split into a house for the minority Europeans and ‘meritorious’ Arabs, and a house for the remaining eight million Muslims, did nothing to appease those who rose up in 1954.
While Jackie’s brilliance at philosophy already provoked the sort of reactions his later work garnered – ‘I confess I find this really difficult to follow,’ wrote one teacher, ‘remember the reader’ – in other subjects he showed little talent.71 He was okay at French and History-Geography but appalling at languages – English, German and Latin – scoring just 2.5/20 in the latter. His difficulties with languages were to last his whole life, a perpetual embarrassment, particularly once he had achieved worldwide fame with a philosophy that put language and its translation at centre stage.
Jackie failed his written examinations at the end of his first year. This was not unusual at the khâgne, but his marks were so low that he was not even eligible for the oral exams that followed (where one of the examiners would have been Merleau-Ponty). He was not only undone by weakness in certain subjects. He was also resorting to that great staple of students over the years, amphetamines bought over the counter, which disturbed his sleep to the extent that he kept nodding off during the exams. In his second year he repeated the same mistakes, this time being forced to abandon the first paper, handing in a blank sheet.
Jackie then had a new philosophy teacher, Maurice Savin, whose lectures were peppered with allusions to Proust, Freud and Bachelard. While recognising Jackie’s natural ability, Savin was open about his frustration with Jackie’s increasingly dense style. ‘There is undeniably a philosopher lurking in there somewhere,’ he wrote, ‘despite your over-specialised, hermetic language.’72 One examiner was even more blunt: ‘The answers are brilliant in the very same way that they are obscure … [he] can come back when he’s prepared to accept the rules and not invent.’73 Again the child would be father to the man.
In his third year, Jackie moved off site. While still anxious, and still taking amphetamines (albeit fewer), he worked harder, bringing his other subjects up to an acceptable level, and reaching new levels in philosophy. ‘Reliably brilliant results; a definite philosophical personality; you must succeed,’ Borne wrote.74 He passed his written exams, and finally undertook the dreaded oral, where he was asked to speak on a page of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia. ‘I deployed all my resources to uncover a range of meanings fanning out from each sentence, each word,’ he wrote. ‘I invented a Diderot who was a virtuoso of litotes, a maverick of literature, a resistance fighter from the word go.’75 He scraped through, but he fell back ten places from his position after the written exams. In the exasperated words of one of the examiners, ‘Look, this text is quite simple, you’ve simply made it more complicated and laden with meaning, by adding ideas of your own.’76
Jackie passed. At twenty-two he was to enter the École normale supérieure. It was to be his home, off and on, for the next thirty years.
It was Husserl who taught me a technique, a method, a discipline, and who has never left me. Even in moments where I had to question certain presuppositions of Husserl, I tried to do so while keeping to phenomenological discipline.
– Sur parole
In everything I’ve published there are always touchstones announcing what I would like to write about later on – even ten or twenty years later on.
– I Have a Taste for the Secret
There will be established in Paris an École normale, where, from all the parts of the Republic, citizens already educated in the useful sciences shall be called upon to learn, from the best professors in all the disciplines, the art of teaching.
So read the 1794 decree that founded the École normale supérieure. Exclusive, often cultish, the ENS remains a breeding ground for France’s cultural elite, boasting thirteen Nobel Prizes (eight in physics), twelve Fields Medals for mathematics, and two Nobel Prizes in Literature – the awardees, Henri Bergson and the ubiquitous Sartre, taking their place at the ENS in a philosophical roll-call that includes Simone Weil, Raymond Aron, Jean Hyppolite, Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. The latter two, like Derrida, ended up on the teaching staff. Sociologists Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu, the novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar and the economist Thomas Piketty are among the ENS alumni, while Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan taught there, as did Jacques Lacan.
Despite its influence, or perhaps contributing to it, the student body was small. In the 1950s, when Jackie attended, he was one of only around 200 students, all men. He was one of only six philosophy students accepted that year, along with Michel Serres, later an ‘immortal’ at the Académie française.
Then as now, for the students, known as normaliens, there are no set classes, no programme of study, no reading list. Students study for four years, the third year being taken up with the agrégation for the civil service (normaliens are trainee civil servants) and the final year being spent on a dissertation. Classes are sought outside of the university, the results brought back. Adding to the sense of a cloistered existence was the fact that many members of the teaching staff were themselves ex-normaliens.
It was to one such student-turned-teacher that Jackie Derrida had to report on his first day: Louis Althusser, caïman of the university – the professor responsible for preparing students for the agrégation. Derrida later remembered
his face, Louis’s so very handsome face, that high forehead, his smile, everything that, in him, during the moments of peace – and there were moments of peace, as many of you here know – radiated kindness, the need for love and the giving of love in return, displaying an incomparable attentiveness to the youth of what is coming, curiously on the lookout from daybreak on for the signs of things still waiting to be understood, everything that upsets order, programs, facile connections, and predictability.1
Twelve years older than Derrida, unknown and unpublished, the thirty-four-year-old Althusser was also born in Algeria, but to a prosperous Catholic family. His father had been a lieutenant in the French army and later the director of a bank, his mother a schoolteacher, and his childhood had been by his own admission a happy one. He