An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon
have directed me toward something in writing which was neither one nor the other.’58
Passing his baccalaureate on the second attempt, Jackie – in a moment straight out of a bad movie – was still undecided as to what to do next when he happened to hear a programme on Radio Algiers offering career advice. The programme mentioned a place that was ‘overthere’ – the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris. Jackie decided immediately that it was what he wanted.
Enrolling in a hypokhâgne – essentially a crammer’s course – at the Lycée Bugeaud, where Camus had also studied, he took philosophy under Jan Czarnecki, who, despite his dry method, as he guided his students from the pre-Socratics to the modern day, Derrida later called ‘remarkable’.59
Derrida immediately joined the Cogito Club, an after-school philosophy group, where students presented papers on subjects they themselves found interesting. It was here that he first became acquainted with three philosophers who shaped his life: Hegel, Heidegger and, crucially, Edmund Husserl, whose Cartesian Meditations had been translated into French by Emmanuel Lévinas in 1931. Despite the philosophical intimacy Derrida later shared with Husserl, he initially found his work ‘frigid’, preferring Heidegger, whose What Is Metaphysics? he devoured, noting that ‘The question of anguish, of the experience of nothingness prior to negation suited my personal sense of pathos.’60
Two of Derrida’s essays from the Club survive. The first is on Sartre’s critique of Husserl’s intentionality and the ‘natural attitude’ – which, as we shall see, are precisely the contested points that later generated Derrida’s own philosophical work. The second is on Heidegger, whom Derrida accuses of using:
Noisy, pretentious and heavy dialect … [a] crowd of neologisms of which a good part are superfluous, this reverse precocity, consists in deadening and complicating his language, as if for fun, and in giving the most everyday, the simplest of faults an air of profundity.61
Derrida’s prejudices against this sort of writing were, one might point out, not ongoing.
Jackie excelled at his hypokhâgne – but life remained elsewhere. For his second year – the khâgne – Derrida knew he had to leave Algeria and cross the Mediterranean to Paris. He applied for, and won a place at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, alma mater of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Verlaine, Diderot, as well as Robespierre and de Sade, Chirac and Pompidou.
Jackie was to be boarder 424, and he would be utterly miserable.
‘From Algiers, the white city, I arrived in Paris, the black city.’62 Black, and grey – Paris in September 1949 was far from the city of the nineteen-year-old Jackie’s dreams. While suffering less bomb damage than many other Allied cities, Paris was run down and exhausted only four years after the occupation, and thirteen years before the then culture minister André Malraux’s introduction of laws to maintain and restore its historical buildings.
The trip from Algiers to Marseilles – the first time Jackie had left Algeria, the first time he had set foot in France – was traumatic. He was seasick, and spent the entire passage vomiting. For all that he was later to theorise the disputed nature of boundaries, the symbolism of moving across this one could not have been more starkly represented.
At Lycée Louis-le-Grand the boys boarded in dormitories, washed in cold water and ate food so bad that some students went on hunger strikes. Unlike the day boys, the boarders wore grey smocks from morning to night, and their movements were subject to strict surveillance. The boys slept in large dormitories without curtains between the beds.63
Despite the privations, Jackie continued to excel in philosophy. His teacher, Etienne Borne, while more traditional in his philosophical interests than Czarnecki, was not untouched by the existentialism of the time. Nonetheless, as a Christian Democrat and one of the founders of the Christian-democratic Mouvement républicain populaire, he attempted to overcome existentialism’s atheism in works such as The Problem of Evil, and the emphatically named God Is Not Dead.
Borne’s religious concerns opened new areas of thinking for Jackie. His essays of the time seek to push back against the nihilism that is arguably implicit in existentialism – the position that life is absurd and therefore meaningless. For Jackie, if philosophy tended to this conclusion, it was a fault in philosophy or, more precisely, it was a ‘characteristic’ of philosophy. Life itself does not tend to this nihilistic conclusion, unless, for instance, the waters are muddied by philosophy. Analysing the most nihilistic of actions, suicide, Jackie argued that, in assuming the divine power to choose between life and death, I assert my own value. What appears most nihilistic therefore is not nihilistic. Man, wrote Jackie, is condemned to be an optimist. Consciously or not, his argument echoes that of Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, with its opening line, ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide’, and its conclusion, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ This was also Derrida’s first foray into regarding philosophy as a narrative, where its very form implies its conclusions.64
Two other thinkers were of particular importance to Jackie at this point. The first was the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, whose two-volume The Mystery of Being attempted to distinguish between a ‘problem’, which exists independently of any individual and can be solved, and a ‘mystery’, which is one’s own, and cannot. Life for Marcel is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
The other was Simone Weil, whose Christian mysticism, in the strongest sense of that term, seemed to move him profoundly – he often gave Gravity and Grace as a present to friends.65 Weil argued, if that is the right term given her numinous, aphoristic style, that human life is marked by ‘gravity’ and it is only by receiving God’s gift – grace – that we can be redeemed and life’s questions, which are beyond our understanding, can be answered.
Weil was one of the first women to attend the ENS, famously finishing first in her entrance exam ahead of second-placed Simone de Beauvoir. After experiencing a revelation while reading George Herbert’s ‘Love III’ (‘Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back’), she converted from Judaism to Catholicism – although she was never baptised, in part because she believed herself unworthy, in part in solidarity with the ‘lost souls in hell’. She was extreme in how she lived her philosophy, which contributed to her early death at the age of thirty-four – despite her physical frailty she worked in an auto factory to understand the debilitating effects of factory work; and while living in the United States she starved herself during the war in solidarity with those left in France.
Jackie took up Weil’s notion that we are powerless to save ourselves, writing that a way was needed beyond philosophy – with its tendency towards nihilism – but which did not, unlike Weil’s position, reject philosophy outright but surpassed it in a way that ‘would also be a return to existence enriched and purified by reflection’. This existence was in Sartrean terms ‘être-pour-soi’, or ‘being-for-itself’. Jackie again equated this with the idea of a ‘secret’ – not one that we choose to keep, but one which we cannot communicate.66 While these are the sophomore essays of a nineteen-year-old, again the consistency of Jackie’s stance is remarkable. Already some of the main themes of his mature work are present – the idea of philosophy as one narrative among others, with its own characteristics and structural requirements unrelated to the object of its enquiry, a fealty to religious ways of thinking, and a fascination with aporias, those irresolvable internal contradictions which, to Derrida, raise questions of their own about the premises of our argument.
The essays also contain a certain optimism that continued to mark his work whatever his personal circumstances, which even he himself was surprised by
the obscure chance, my good fortune, a gift for which thanks should be given to goodness knows what archaic power, is that it was always easier for me to bless this destiny. Much easier, more often than not, and even now, to bless than to curse it. The day I would get to know to whom gratitude must be rendered for it, I would know everything, and I would be able to die in peace.67
At the Lycée Louis-le-Grand this