44 Jackie 1930–1962
In spite of these somewhat modernist tendencies, Maurice seems
to have appreciated Derrida’s style less than Borne had. His fi rst
essay earned him just 12.5 out of 20, an okay mark but nothing
more in the context of Louis-le-Grand. His teacher’s remarks were
severe but astute:
There is undeniably a philosopher lurking somewhere in this
writer. If I think of the whole historical part, I have to say that
there is much too much philosophy in these pages. Because
potted summaries of philosophy don’t add up to much. So
the whole beginning of your essay left me uncertain and even
unhappy. But when you start to analyse things, despite your
over-‘specialized’, hermetic language, your text becomes really
interesting and has several good qualities.In the margins of one paragraph that is indeed rather contorted,
Savin noted: ‘I confess I fi nd this really diffi cult to follow. Remember
the reader.. .’ In a thoroughly non-academic way, Derrida had
ended his work with two and a half pages of ‘Marginalia’. These
were a series of short paragraphs, composed almost like aphorisms
and completely detached from the overall movement of the essay.
The fi nal remark occupies just one line and bears but a distant rela-
tionship to the subject supposedly under discussion: ‘Love: to yield
to the incommensurable; to madness.’ ‘Interesting, but irrelevant’,
Savin soberly noted.*
As for madness, Jackie sometimes felt he was on the verge of
succumbing to it as he started his second year in khâgne. Discipline
in the boarding school weighed on him even more heavily than it
had the previous year. The cold, the lack of hygiene, the horrible
food, and the absence of any privacy had become intolerable.
Some evenings he fell into a crying jag and was unable to work or
even talk to his friends. Only his ever-more intense friendship with
Michel Monory enabled him to keep going. Working together in
the thurne de musique – Michel had special permission to keep the
key to it –, they wrote sketches for short stories and poems that
they nervously submitted to each other. But as the weeks went
by, Jackie complained more and more of a ‘malady’ as serious
as it was ill defi ned. He was constantly on the edge of a nervous
- This essay, like many others, was preserved by Derrida to the day he died and
can now be found in the Special Collection at the University of California, Irvine.
The habit of adding a long postscript to certain texts would stay with him: such is
the case with the contribution he wrote for the fi ftieth anniversary of Les Temps
modernes: ‘ “Dead man running”: Salut, salut’, published in English in Negotiations:
Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. and tr. by Elizabeth Rottenberg
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 257–92.