274 Derrida 1963–1983
The starting point for what was soon being called the Greph was
a protest against the particularly reactionary report published by
the jury of examiners of the philosophy CAPES in 1974: referring
to pedagogical requirements, the jury stigmatized the eff ects of
new philosophical tendencies evident in the answers handed in by
candidates, and advocated a return to the most academic norms.
A few weeks later, some thirty or so teachers and students adopted
the ‘Pilot Study for the Constitution of a Research Group into the
Teaching of Philosophy’. While some of the questions raised were
historical or theoretical in nature, others touched on concrete and
sometimes urgent problems concerning exam syllabuses, the form
that exams – including competitive exams – should take, the way
juries of examiners were set up and norms for evaluation estab-
lished, the recruitment of teachers and their professional hierarchy,
the place reserved for research, and so on.^22
The political context accelerated things: Georges Pompidou died
in offi ce on 2 April 1974, and on 19 May, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
was elected President, narrowly beating François Mitterrand, the
Union of the Left candidate. In March 1975, the new Minister for
Education, René Haby, proposed an overall rethink of secondary
education – including philosophy.
Even before the details of the reform were widely known, Derrida
reacted in a two-page article in Le Monde de l’éducation under the
title ‘Philosophy repressed’. In a style that could hardly have been
more direct, he claimed that the teaching of philosophy would be
aff ected ‘more profoundly than any other discipline’ by the planned
measures:
Since the new Terminales are organized according to a totally
‘optional’ system, there would no longer be any required teach-
ing of philosophy in the only class in which, up to this point,
it has been off ered. Philosophy would be given three hours a
week in the ‘première’: about as much, on average, as in the
sections of the Terminales that receive the least today. Even
before examining the grounds for or aims of such an opera-
tion, let’s move on to what is irrefutable: the number of hours
reserved for philosophy, for all students, is massively reduced.
Philosophy was already the only discipline confi ned to a
single class at the end of the fi nal year of secondary studies; it
would still be contained in a single class, but with fewer hours.
Thus an off ensive that had proceeded, in recent years, more
prudently and deceitfully is openly accelerated: the accentu-
ated dissociation of the scientifi c and the philosophical, the
actively selective orientation of the ‘best’ students toward sec-
tions giving less room to philosophy, the reduction of teaching
hours, coeffi cients, teaching positions, and so forth. This time,