88 Jackie 1930–1962
blows in hurricanes.’ The only class he had any time for was one
on modern logic, in which he was learning ‘a load of things about
Frege, the young Husserl, etc.’. But basically, what Jackie seemed
most discontented with was himself:
Although I’ve decided to work by myself, I still haven’t done
much. I’m already anxious to see how a year of total freedom
is coming to an end – a freedom that I won’t enjoy again for a
long time [.. .] and I was expecting so much from it. [.. .] This
year will have left me with a strong aftertaste of impotence.
Until now I’d been pretending that external [causes] had left me
paralysed, and I wanted to convince myself that once I’d passed
the agrégation, I’d burst forth like a torrent. But in fact it’s
almost worse than before. Of course, I always contrive to con-
sider myself as a martyr of the current crisis in foundations, of
the death-agony of philosophy, of the exhaustion of a culture.
In the vanguard of all these deaths, all one can do is keep
silent so as, at least, not to miss their ‘phenomenon’. Joking
apart, nothing gives one such a sense of this crisis [.. .] than
the total change in philosophical climate from one country
to the next. When you see what happens to philosophy in an
American book or translation, the impossibility of translation,*
the eccentricity of the themes, the shift in areas of interest, the
importance of teaching and local values....^18Derrida said how much he was longing to see Althusser again, in
the apartment that the latter had fi nally been given in the École. He
would like to talk to him about the recent events in Algeria, about
the Budapest uprising, and their repercussions in Paris. He would
also like to talk about the planned ‘short impersonal work’ which
he was trying to settle down to, ‘when he felt able’: a translation,
with introduction, of The Origin of Geometry, a text of about thirty
pages, already mentioned in the penultimate chapter of his diplôme,
and a piece that he considered to be one of Husserl’s best. But he did
not know whether he would have the right to publish his translation,
since he had still received no reply from Louvain.
This project would probably be the launching pad for the thesis
that would usually be the next stage of his career. For a normalien,
this was ‘scarcely a decision’; rather a way of following ‘a more or
less natural’ course.^19 In this thesis, Derrida wanted to set out the
problems that most preoccupied him: those of science, phenomenol-
ogy, and, above all, writing. He had in fact embarked on the work
even before he had left for Harvard:
- Or: the mischief of translation, la traduction impossible. – Tr.