fortresses, constituting “a kind of monastery for boy geniuses”
(as James Miller describes the École Normale in his biography
of Foucault), make up the chilly, elite pinnacle of French
academic tradition (Passion 45 ). To this day, they are animated
by their students’ ceaseless rounds of intense study, and by
haughty, bristling debates among students and faculty, often
culminating in the rapier-swift demolishing of an opponent’s
position.
Derrida’s studies were nearly all-consuming; he had little
time for leisure activities. But he did take several ski trips in
the French Alps, and he visited Normandy and the Loire. On
one of the ski trips, in 1953 , he met Marguerite Aucouturier, the
sister of a fellow student at the ENS. The handsome Jackie was
tawny-skinned, his hair still black. (In childhood photographs,
he appears much darker than the rest of his family.) Mar-
guerite, from Czechoslovakia, was a blonde beauty of dazzling
intelligence, interested in psychoanalysis (she would later be-
come a psychotherapist). She and Jackie felt an instant rap-
port, both intellectual and emotional. The two began a love
affair, which quickly became an item of gossip in the small,
elite world of the ENS.
In 1956 Derrida made his first trip, by boat, to the United
States. He was to study at Harvard for a year under a rather
thin pretext, as he himself admitted: that he needed to consult
microfilms of Edmund Husserl’s manuscripts in the Harvard
library. A year later, in June 1957 , he returned to France on the
same ship that brought him to America,La Liberté(Counter-
path 25 ). While at Harvard, Derrida worked on his translation
of and introduction to Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry,” which
was to appear as a book six years later.
Derrida was impressed by the openness and seriousness
of American academic life, as he first experienced it in Cam-
24 From Algeria to the École Normale