The Walls of Louis-le-Grand 1949–1952 49
about Malebranche. Can come back when he is prepared to
accept the rules and not invent where he needs to be better
informed. If we fail him, we will be doing this candidate a
favour.‘Accept the rules and not invent’: an entire programme for a future
philosopher. While this haughty tone and espousal of conformism
were typical of the mandarins of the 1950s and 1960s, they were a
foretaste of the attitude that the French university system would
long assume towards Derrida. Judgements like these were of a kind
that none of his later successes would ever allow him to forget.
At the beginning of July, Jackie left for Algiers. Most of the time, he
would make the trip by boat, but sometimes he would travel more
cheaply, ‘often semi-clandestinely, in any case not according to
regulations, on board small cargo planes that didn’t look very reas-
suring’. These fl ights were uncomfortable and rather scary, ‘seated
on a bench in the middle of cases full of vegetables’.^24
On his arrival, he wrote to his dear friend Michel, who had also
failed the entrance exam to Normale Sup and was starting to lose
heart. In Jackie’s view, success required an impossible and compli-
cated mixture of intelligence and dumbness: ‘it’s a miracle in the
basest sense of the term’. He knew that his friend was playing with
the idea of leaving Louis-le-Grand and starting at the Sorbonne,
even if his father still opposed the idea. The prospect of no longer
being able to see Michel almost every day worried Jackie as much as
it saddened him.
As in the previous year, Jackie felt that summer in Algiers was a
numbing experience on the intellectual level:
I read very little; I am trying to write, but I abandon the
attempt every time. My ambitions are huge and my means tiny.
Thinking will never be a creative activity for those who lack
genius. Damn!
And then exhaustion overpowers me with this heat; real
exhaustion, the same as that I suff ered when I took the exam.^25He thought he was forever doomed to a nervous exhaustion that
the doctors could not cure, or even understand. So ‘it’s a hideous
sloth, of the kind that doesn’t even have the strength to worry about
itself or barely so, sloth which nothing can aff ect and which mocks
everything. At odd moments, it’s a respite for breathless readings or
exultations.’ These readings were highly eclectic, and extended from
the Bible to Sartre, via Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, Kierkegaard,
Thierry Maulnier, Émile Bréhier, and Jean Wahl. ‘Don’t be alarmed
at this variety: I haven’t read more than seven to eight pages of each