Under the Sun of Algiers 1942–1949 33
of anguish, of the experience of nothingness prior to negation,
suited my personal sense of pathos much more than did the frigid
Husserlian discipline to which I came only later. I was in tune with
that pathos, so widely felt at the time, just after the war.’^38 Thanks
to Czarnecki, Derrida also started reading Kierkegaard, one of the
philosophers who would fascinate him most, and one to whom he
would remain faithful throughout his life.
However, the most decisive infl uence that year was Sartre’s.
He was then at the apogee of his fame, and Jackie started to read
him in his fi nal year at the lycée; but it was in hypokhâgne that he
really immersed himself in Sartre’s works. While preparing a long
paper on ‘Sartre, psychology – phenomenology’, he read Being and
Nothingness in the library at Algiers, but also took an interest in
earlier works such as The Imagination, The Imaginary, and Sketch
of a Theory of Emotions. In his essay, Derrida emphasized the infl u-
ence of Husserl on Sartre, even though he still had only an indirect
acquaintance with the great German phenomenologist.
In tandem with Being and Nothingness, Derrida read Nausea ‘in
a certain ecstatic bedazzlement’, ‘sitting on a bench in Laferrière
Square, sometimes raising my eyes toward the roots, the bushes of
fl owers or the luxuriant plants, as if to verify the too-much of exist-
ence, but also with intense moments of “literary” identifi cation’.^39
Many years later, he still admired this ‘literary fi ction based on a
philosophical “emotion” ’. His passion for Sartre extended to No
Exit, a performance of which he saw on stage, the review Les Temps
modernes, and the fi rst two volumes of Situations.
Even though Derrida subsequently deemed his infl uence ‘baleful’
and even ‘catastrophic’, the author of What is Literature? was at
that time, for him as for many others, an essential author.
I recognize my debt, the fi liation, the huge infl uence, the huge
presence of Sartre in my formative years. I have never striven to
evade it. [.. .] when I was in the philosophy class in hypokhâgne
or khâgne, not only the thought of Sartre, but the fi gure of
Sartre, the character Sartre who allied philosophical desire with
literary desire, were for me what is rather vacuously called a
model, a reference point.^40It was also thanks to Sartre that Derrida discovered several writers
who would become essential for him. He made no bones about the
fact: ‘The fi rst time that I saw the name of Blanchot, the name of
Ponge, the name of Bataille [.. .], was in Situations. [.. .] I started
by reading Sartre’s articles on those people, before reading them.’
As far as Being and Nothingness is concerned, the work would strike
him as ‘philosophically weak’ once he had embarked on his reading
of the three big ‘H’s – Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. In Derrida’s