36 Jackie 1930–1962
Had he been to the Club Saint-Germain and the Vieux Colombier?
True, all those more or less mythical hotspots in existentialist Paris
were near the rue Saint-Jacques, where Louis-le-Grand was situated,
but the boarders were allowed out only under strict regulations. In
any case, in Algiers, Acharrok continued, everyone’s thoughts were
occupied with other things: the death of the boxer Marcel Cerdan*
has ‘appalled the whole city, including the non-sporty’.^4
That left the classes, from which Jackie was expecting a great
deal. He was, after all, in the most prestigious lycée in France,
where the success rate for passing the exam to the École Normale
Supérieure was far and away the highest. But in this respect too,
Louis-le-Grand would be something of a disappointment to him.
Solid work was preferred to brilliance, and the approach in most
subjects was still quite academic.
If Derrida had been a pupil at the Lycée Henri-IV, the neighbour
and rival of Louis-le-Grand, his philosophy teacher would have been
Jean Beaufret, one of the main writers to introduce Heidegger into
France, and the addressee of the latter’s ‘Letter on humanism’. But
the teacher whose classes he attended for six hours a week, together
with all the pupils in khâgne no. 2, was Étienne Borne – distinc tly
less charismatic. He was an ex-student of Alain, an admirer of
Emmanuel Mounier and Gabriel Marcel, and a pillar of the MRP
- the Mouvement Républicain Populaire.† He was a Catholic, and
published work frequently in La Croix and Esprit, with the result
that he was sometimes called ‘the hack of the bishopric’. In his physi-
cal appearance and movements, there was something farcical about
Borne: he was as thin as a rake, and rocked from leg to leg while fi d-
dling with his watch. Having to speak seemed such torment for him
that his students expected ‘to see him drop dead at the end of each
sentence’. He would wave ‘his arms around like a maniac’ and, as
he gesticulated, belch out ‘the fi rst syllables of certain words to put
them into italics’.^5 None of this stopped him being a good teacher,
who enabled students to master the art of the essay and to knock off a
good bit of ‘blah’, i.e. a twenty-minute piece on any subject whatever.
Borne was soon appreciating the philosophical qualities of
Derrida’s fi rst exercises: ‘careful analysis, good focus on problems,
nice turn of phrase’. Derrida’s marks went from 12.5 to 14/20 –
pretty satisfactory in the context. But Borne’s comments were often
harsh. Derrida referred frequently to Heidegger in his essays, and
this tended to annoy Borne: ‘you use an existentialist language that
needs explaining’, ‘don’t imitate existentialist language too slav-
- Cerdan was a boxing world champion from a pied noir background in French
Algeria: he was killed in a plane crash on 28 October 1949. – Tr.
† This was a centre-right French political party, of Christian Democrat tendencies,
that existed from 1944 until 1967. – Tr.