Under the Sun of Algiers 1942–1949 31
It was in my fi nal year that I really started reading philosophy;
and since this was when I discovered that, not having studied
Greek at the lycée, I wouldn’t be able to try for the agrégation
de lettres, I thought to myself basically: why not unite the two
and become a philosophy teacher? The great models of the day,
such as Sartre, were people who did both literature and philo-
sophy. And so, gradually, without giving up on literary writing,
I decided that philosophy was, professionally speaking, a better
bet.^35In a fascinating interview from 1989, ‘This strange institution called
literature’, Derrida explained even more clearly the hesitations he
had felt at that period:
No doubt I hesitated between philosophy and literature, giving
up neither, perhaps seeking obscurely a place from which the
history of this frontier could be thought or even displaced – in
writing itself and not only by theoretical or historical refl ec-
tion. And since what interests me today is not strictly called
either literature or philosophy, I’m amused by the idea that my
adolescent desire – let’s call it that – should have directed me
toward something in writing which was neither the one nor the
other.^36This tangle of wishes would fi nd a classic solution. A few days after
the results of the baccalaureate came out, Jackie happened to catch
a broadcast on Radio Algiers off ering careers guidance. A humani-
ties teacher spoke very highly of the hypokhâgne, a broad and varied
training that meant you did not have to specialize too early; in par-
ticular, he related that Albert Camus had been his pupil, in 1932–3.
Derrida, who had never heard of the École Normale Supérieure,
went to see this teacher the very next day and registered for the
hypokhâgne class at the Lycée Bugeaud, a highly regarded class with
pupils from all over Algeria. It was here that he would meet Jean-
Claude Pariente and Jean Domerc, with whom he soon became
friends. They would leave for Paris at the same time as he did.
‘There were quite a few people from the Oran district in Bugeaud’s
hypokhâgne,’ remembers Pariente.
There was also a contingent from Constantine. But one of
the things that partly distinguished it was the fact that it was
a mixed class, at a time when boys and girls went to diff erent
establishments. Generally, pupils went there to study so they
could meet the demands of higher education, and continued in
the arts department at the University of Algiers. There weren’t
many of us who wanted to try for Normale Sup. The presence