Supérieure was. But their teenage son, the brilliantly curious
bookworm, already had his sights set on this immensely pres-
tigious inner sanctum of French intellectual life. In the course
of the twentieth century, the École produced Jean-Paul Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault, along with other
distinguished French intellectuals. Jackie was to become one of
this impressive company.
He prepared for the École Normale entrance exam by
studying philosophy at the Lycée Gauthier in Algiers and then,
for three years, at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Rigorous,
day-and-night study preparation was demanded of all who as-
pired to admission to the École Normale. The school admitted
only a minuscule portion of the teenage students who applied:
several dozen each year, out of many thousands of candidates.
Derrida failed the entrance exam to the École in 1950 .He
redoubled his efforts, and after a new course of demanding
study, he finally passed, entering the École Normale in 1952 .A
few years earlier, in 1947 , Derrida had failed the baccalaureate
exam required for graduation from a French lycée. These were
not to be the last failures in Derrida’s academic career. In 1955
he failed his agrégation,the École Normale’s exit exam. (He
passed the exam the following year, guaranteeing him a state
job for life under the French system.) Throughout his career,
and despite his enormous success, Derrida felt himself to be
something of an outsider, a misfit prone to running afoul of
the ruling powers of academic and intellectual life. Like his fel-
low Algerian Camus, he saw himself permanently in opposi-
tion. In later years, he bridled at any suggestion that he had
founded an institution called deconstruction: even at the high
point of his success, he preferred to cast himself as a rebel
against our usual ways of reading, rather than the founder of a
new, academically favored method.
22 From Algeria to the École Normale