2 In the Shadow of Althusser 1963–1966
In the very busy year of 1963, Derrida also returned to the rue
d’Ulm. Straight after the publication of The Origin of Geometry,
Althusser invited him to ‘hold forth a bit’ on Husserl to his students.
Derrida was not the only person asked to speak in this context.
While the École did not provide any teaching of its own, it was fre-
quently the site for lectures and seminars. Thus, for several years,
Jean Beaufret ran a small group of Heideggereans, a quite exclusive
coterie. Michel Serres, Pierre Bourdieu, and several others came
from time to time to speak at the École during these years.
But Derrida’s situation soon turned out to be diff erent from that
of those occasional lecturers. On 20 March, Althusser told him of a
conversation he had just had with Jean Hyppolite, who was about
to leave his post as director of the École for a chair at the Collège de
France. The author of Genesis and Structure of the ‘Phenomenology
of Spirit’ gave a warm welcome to the idea of seeing Derrida one day
return to the École as a ‘caïman’, i.e. an agrégé-préparateur. But this
might take some time. Meanwhile, Hyppolite intended to talk to
Georges Canguilhem about the matter, so as to facilitate Derrida’s
move from the Sorbonne to Normale Sup, while not treading on too
many people’s toes.
At the beginning of September 1963, Althusser learned of the
suicide of Jacques Martin, his closest friend. His grief would leave
him in a fragile state for many months, and this no doubt played
a part in his rapprochement with Derrida. Perhaps the new direc-
tor, the Hellenist Robert Flacelière, quickly realized that Althusser
would need help and support. Either way, in 1963–4, Derrida, still
an assistant at the Sorbonne, was appointed maître de conférences at
the ENS, with forty-eight hours of classes to be divided out over the
year.
‘Who will ever write, without giving in to any sort of socio-
academicism, the history of this “house” and its fi liations? This
would be an almost impossible but indispensable task for beginning