62 Jackie 1930–1962
miss it. If you’re breaking it off today, it was probably bound to
happen. There were many things drawing us together, and few
that separated us. But that little was still too much: friendship,
too, tends to become totalitarian.^6The article ‘The Communists and peace’, in which Sartre stated
his support for the USSR and posed as a fellow traveller of the
French Communist Party (PCF), led, a few months later, to a more
painful break with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The two men had met
at the École Normale in 1927; they were allies in various quarrels
before founding Les Temps modernes together. In politics, Merleau-
Ponty was often ahead of Sartre, even acting as a ‘guide’, but the
author of Dirty Hands now accused him of neglecting the political
questions of the moment and turning to an overly detached philo-
sophy of the world. Above all, he could not forgive him for having
criticized the USSR at the height of the Cold War. In his eyes, there
was no salvation outside the ‘Party’. ‘An anti-Communist is a dog,
I can’t see any way out of that one and I never will,’ he was even to
write a few years later.
These two confl icts, which split the intellectual world of the
time from top to bottom, were particularly important for Derrida
since, each time, he felt, ‘like Sartre himself, no doubt, [.. .] in
contradiction and on both sides at once’.^7
In any case, at the rue d’Ulm, it was impossible to ignore the
Communist question: the Party had dominated the École ever since
the Liberation. There were a lot of peculiar rituals to many aspects
of this. Every morning, straight after breakfast, the members of the
École’s ‘cell’ would gather in the ‘aquarium’ to read L’Humanité
and wave the best pages around. During this period, a few rebels
who felt closer to the Italian Communist Party would ostentatiously
immerse themselves in L’Unità. On the day of Stalin’s death, 5
March 1953, the Communists – many of whom could not dry their
tears – forced the École to observe a minute’s silence, while trying
to fi nd out to whom in the USSR they could address a telegram of
condolence. But the militants – the most active at this time being
Emmanuel Le Roy-Ladurie, Jean-Claude Passeron, Pierre Juquin,
Paul Veyne, and Gérard Genette – put pressure on other people in
an often intensely annoying way. They would keep turning up in
your thurne to summon you to meetings, noisily fl og L’Humanité,
and endlessly present you with petitions to sign.
Like his friends Lucien Bianco and Pierre Bourdieu, Derrida tried
to keep to a diffi cult line, refusing to oppose the Communist Party
head-on, but even less inclined to be dragooned into it. The militants
soon came to classify him as one of those whom they could not hope
to bring into the Party, even though such people were admittedly on
the Left, and might in some circumstances be useful allies. On good