94 Jackie 1930–1962
it all, the dogs in the barracks started barking every time Jackie
passed by. ‘They take me for an Arab,’ he used to say, and he
was probably right, as his complexion was very dark, as usual
when he came back to Algeria.After a few weeks, Jackie and Marguerite bought a 2CV, which
meant they could go to Algiers whenever possible. On Friday eve-
nings, they almost always shared the Sabbath meal with Derrida’s
parents. On other evenings they would dine with Pierre Bourdieu,
to whom they were very close throughout this period. Bourdieu
had been appointed to the military cabinet of the general govern-
ment, where he worked as an editor. At the end of 1957, freed from
his military obligations, he became a lecturer at the University
of Algiers and embarked on a real piece of fi eldwork across the
whole country. These years in Algeria constituted a defi nitive
turning-point in Bourdieu’s intellectual development: he had ini-
tially planned to be a philosopher, but now started to turn towards
sociology.^5
Derrida came to the general government once a week; his job
was to translate the main things that were being written in English
about North Africa. This enabled him to be remarkably well
informed and even to gain access to a large amount of information
that was censored in France. During this period, Lucien Bianco
was in Strasbourg, far from his wife, nicknamed Taktak, and their
baby Sylvie. Coco’s mood was anxious and glum: he was doing
his service as a teacher in a school for NCOs, which exposed him
to the bullying behaviour common to old-style military barracks.
In many respects, the situation of the Biancos was like that of the
two Derridas: more than the work, it was the context that was
irksome. If only they could have been together in Koléa, to ‘share
what we’re feeling [.. .], instead of shunning our companions all
the time’.
For several months, evidence of torture in Algeria had stirred
widespread controversy in France. On 11 June 1957, Maurice
Audin, a twenty-fi ve-year-old mathematician, a lecturer at the
science faculty in Algeria and a member of the PCA (the Parti
Communiste Algérien, dissolved in 1955), was arrested by para-
chutists. According to his guards, he escaped on 21 June, but
nobody ever saw him again. He was probably tortured in El Biar,
in the sinister ‘Villa des Roses’, where one of the offi cials was none
other than the young lieutenant Jean-Marie Le Pen, deputy at the
National Assembly. The mathematician Laurent Schwartz and the
historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet had just set up the Audin committee
and were trying to fi nd out the truth behind his disappearance. The
inquest would last until 1962: it concluded that Audin had been
murdered.