The École Normale Supérieure 1952–1956 63
days, they were considered as ‘decent guys’, in other words consider-
ably less than ‘fellow travellers’; on bad days, they were denounced
as ‘social traitors’. In a late homage to the great Sinologist Lucien
Bianco, Derrida would remember this period:
All around us, in the school in the rue d’Ulm, among our closest
friends, the most dogmatic form of ‘Stalinism’ was then living
through its last days. But it did so as if it had the whole of the
future still ahead of it. Both of us were then politically active,
in a more or less predictable and conventional way, in groups
on the Left or non-Communist extreme Left. We attended
every meeting, at La Mutualité and elsewhere, we sealed enve-
lopes for I forget which committee of anti-Fascist intellectuals
(against colonial repression, torture, French actions in Tunisia
or Madagascar, etc.).^8To the great fury of the Communists, the little group soon founded
a section of the ‘Intellectuals’ Action Committee in Defence of
Liberties’, which brought together the Left and the non-Communist
extreme Left, and managed to attract many students. They would
spend hours discussing the political questions of the moment, after
reading Le Monde, L’Observateur, or L’Express.
Jackie almost became a full collaborator on the weekly L’Express,
as we fi nd from a letter sent by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber to
Derrida dated 15 May 1953, the day before the fi rst issue came
out. The two men had met a few weeks beforehand, and discussed
the possibility of Derrida contributing to the magazine’s editorial
team. Right now, Servan-Schreiber wrote, he could not see exactly
what he might ask of the young philosopher, and confessed he was
still groping around to fi nd the right formula for his weekly. But if
an opportunity arose, he promised that he would not forget to call
on Derrida. A collaboration of this kind would not have been in
the least demeaning: shortly afterwards, it was in L’Express that
Roland Barthes published his Mythologies and Alain Robbe-Grillet
several of his manifestoes for the New Novel.
At the École Normale Supérieure, out of an intake of some thirty
students, only four chose philosophy that year. Two came from
Louis-le-Grand (Michel Serres and Derrida); two from Henri-IV
(Pierre Hassner and Alain Pons). But they were far from compris-
ing a real group: neither Serres nor Hassner lived in the rue d’Ulm
and they were not often seen there. So it was often in the company
of Alain Pons that Derrida would go to the Sorbonne, sporadically
attending lectures given by Henri Gouhier, Maurice de Gandillac,
Ferdinand Alquié, and Vladimir Jankélévitch. But from the teach-
ers at the École itself, he met two who would turn out to be decisive.