An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
into the army and, in June 1940, was captured at Vannes in northwestern France and sent to a POW camp in Schleswig-Holstein. Here he spent the remaining five years of the war, initially carrying out hard labour before an illness saw him confined to the infirmary.
The shattering experience of the war had two decisive effects on Althusser. The first, as alluded to by Derrida, was lifelong bouts of mental instability and depression. From the 1950s onwards he required constant medical supervision, undergoing hospitalisation, narcotherapy, electroconvulsive treatment and analysis. Once they became colleagues, Derrida was often required to take on some of Althusser’s teaching load when he was undergoing what Élisabeth Roudinesco has called ‘the saga of confinement.’2
The second was his introduction to Marxism. As documented in his prison writings, Journal de captivité, Stalag XA 1940–1945, the combination of a sense of solidarity, a sense of community and a sense of the urgency of political action opened this child of the bourgeoisie to the idea of communism. ‘It was in prison camp that I first heard Marxism discussed by a Parisian lawyer in transit and that I actually met a communist,’3 he wrote in his memoir, The Future Lasts a Long Time. Moreover, ‘Communism was in the air in 1945, after the German defeat, the victory at Stalingrad, and the hopes and lessons of the Resistance.’4 The future primary author of the ground-breaking Reading Capital spent the first few years after his internment doing just that.
Returning to the ENS in 1945, Althusser obtained his diploma for the paper ‘On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel’. Graduating in 1948 – first in his year – he was immediately offered the post at the university, a position that he held for thirty-five years. In the same year he joined the PCF, the French Communist Party, and attempted to synthesise his new worldview, Marxism, with his old, Catholicism, in articles with such exemplary titles as ‘Is the good news preached to the men today?’, which discussed the relationship between Catholicism and the labour movement.
If Althusser’s attempts at synthesis were very much the Geist of the times, the eventual choice of one faith over the other was inevitable. A 1949 papal decree excommunicated, en masse, all members of communist parties. In France, the left-wing journal Jeunesse de l’Eglise – ‘faithful to the Church while resisting’ – was censored and forced to close. Meanwhile communism in France, as elsewhere, was itself striving for a greater level of ideological purity. One could not back both horses.
Both of these two great messianic, teleological faiths were competing to explain the calamity of the Second World War and to point to a final transformation into an ideal society. The effects of their battle were felt throughout France, and the ENS found itself at the intellectual cutting edge. The student body divided itself into the Talas (the Catholics) and the Stals (the Stalinists), the latter, as Derrida later noted, dominating ‘in a very tyrannical manner’, which included forcing the entire school to observe a minute’s silence upon the death of Stalin.5
For young Jackie, pressured to join the Stals, the situation was complicated, politically, philosophically and temperamentally. The concerns of the Stals at the time were generally internationalist. The ‘overtheres’ of Hungary, Indochina, the Tito rebellion and such things were considered to represent parochial battles between Soviet and Western forms of not only politics but also philosophical and scientific knowledge. Worldviews were clashing, and they were fundamental to human subjectivity. To join the Party was to take a particular stance.
In addition, Algerian Jackie, without the buffer of wealth that the young Althusser had enjoyed, had seen at close hand the practicalities of a certain kind of class warfare. At seventeen he had ‘belonged to groups that took a stance … Without being for Algerian independence, we were against the harsh policies of France.’6
Notoriously, the PCF’s position on Algeria was for the colonisers and against the colonised. The attacks of 1 November 1954, Toussaint Rouge (Red All-Saints Day), generally regarded as the starting date of the Algerian War, were written off as acts of individual terrorism. And in March 1956 the Party voted with the government of Prime Minister Guy Mollet to impose special powers on the Algerian situation, in order not to ‘divide the republic’, a decision fellow traveller Sartre called ‘spineless’. While Jackie’s position was not pro-independence, to have followed the Party line on this would have been a betrayal of Algeria and his political instincts. ‘I was anti-Stalinist. I already had an image of the French Communist Party, and especially the Soviet Union, that seemed incompatible with, let’s say, the democratic Left to which I have always wished to remain loyal.’7
In part, one can also cite Derrida’s resistance to being affiliated to any sort of faction, his intense disinclination to have – as we saw in his response to his Jewish schooling – an identity imposed, with all of the approximations, lacunas and falsehoods that entails. But it goes deeper than that. Here, as during May 1968, Derrida’s temperamental resistance was of a piece with his, at this point, nascent philosophy. Crucial to his thinking, and indeed later his deconstruction, was a radical questioning of ‘the decision’ and the violence of any gesture that pretends (assumes, supposes, presupposes) to know, whether it be in politics, philosophy or language. Thus his engagement was of a piece with his engagement with Western metaphysics: to contextualise, to seek out hidden assumptions and to reveal the violence of any dichotomy.
At the time Jackie found himself ‘walled in by a sort of tormented silence’ in an institution where ‘there was, let’s say, a sort of theoretical intimidation: to formulate questions in a style that appeared, shall we say, phenomenological, transcendental or ontological was immediately considered suspicious, backward, idealistic, even reactionary.’8 Reflecting on Althusser’s decision to join the Party and his own decision not to, he argued:
each ‘subject’ (individual subject or subject trapped in a collective field) evaluates the best strategy possible from his place, from the ‘interpellation’ that situates him. For a thousand reasons that should be analyzed, my place was other. My personal history, my analytical abilities, etc. made it so that I could not be a Communist Party member… I had been plugged into another type of reading, questioning, and style that seemed to me just as necessary.9
And what was this reading, this questioning and style? As Derrida said in the same interview, it was to examine the work of the philosopher he found most important, Edmund Husserl.
Derrida’s taking up of Husserl was not absolutely philosophy ex nihilo at the ENS in the early 1950s. Sartre’s existentialism was on the wane. Where both Husserl and Heidegger had previously been read through the existentialist lens, they were now, as they were gradually translated into French, being read in the original and Sartre’s reading of Heidegger was more and more being regarded as a misreading. Heidegger’s thinking, however, was problematic. ‘Hitler’s philosopher’, as Althusser called him, was not popular with the Communists, although Derrida would later argue that his thought remained unavoidable and that ‘the avoidance of making any of this explicit annoyed me in a way, especially since Althusser was always fascinated with Husserl and Heidegger without his having ever given any public sign for this fascination.’10 Those who openly read Heidegger did so in what Derrida would refer to as an ‘occult atmosphere.’11
Husserl, on the other hand, had no such associations. Moreover, his grounding in science, and his attempts to found a philosophical one, ran closer to the concerns of the normaliens than did the mysticism of Heidegger. As Derrida put it in 1980, ‘In the fifties … Husserlian phenomenology seemed to some young philosophers to be inescapable. I still see it today as a discipline of incomparable rigour.’ Jackie took to it wholesale, such that as early as 1954, Althusser was warning him not write so obsessively about his ‘master’. It was advice he did not take – his ‘master’ was to dominate his thinking for over a decade. Jackie’s dissertation for his diplôme d’etudes superieures (roughly equivalent to a master’s degree) tackled ‘The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy’, and is a wild, passionate piece of work, overflowing with ideas.
Husserl was born in Prostějov in 1859, the son of non-Orthodox Jews, and studied physics, mathematics and astronomy at the University of Leipzig. It is to the sciences