The École Normale Supérieure 1952–1956 79
nature of this absurd exam, and the relentlessness of the jury. I
can see from where you came in the results that you were spared
nothing. Chase this unpleasant reminiscence, and the faces of
your judges, from your life and memory as fast as you can!
Allow me to say quite simply that your friendship has been
for me one of the most fi ne and valuable things about these last
two years at the École.^44And so, in spite of these encouragements (which would not go
unheeded), it was on a somewhat bitter note that Derrida left the
École Normale Supérieure. Passing the agrégation, at the second
attempt and with far from fl ying colours, had forced him to travesty
his thinking and his style of writing, to bend to the demands of a dis-
cipline that was never his and would never suit him. As he wrote to
Michel Monory, this really rather mediocre success ‘does not in the
least seem like a reconciliation’; it was if he had been allowed to pass
‘somewhat reluctantly’.^45 He would remember it all as a real time of
suff ering, and continued to bear something of a grudge towards the
French university system, in which, throughout his life, he would
feel ‘an outcast’.
Among the various messages his exam success brought him,
Derrida must have given particular importance to the letter from
his cousin Micheline Lévy. After congratulating her dear Jackie,
she confi ded to him, with a curious mixture of naïvety and insight:
‘Instead of being a teacher, I’d like you to have been a writer. [.. .]
I’d really like to have read your books (novels, of course), to try to
translate you between the lines.’^46 It was to be several years before
Derrida would satisfy her wishes.