52 Jackie 1930–1962
Louis-le-Grand: the food was better, healthier, and the atmo-
sphere was pleasanter. Generally speaking, we weren’t a very
happy lot of young people – a question of generation, prob-
ably. We’d only just emerged from the war with its privations,
we hadn’t any career planned out and we didn’t imagine our
future was going to be very rosy. Still, our lives were notice-
ably less hard now that we weren’t subject to the discipline
imposed on boarders. We often went to the cinema. Sometimes
we played bridge, a game he liked almost as much as poker...
I also remember that on 1 May 1952, Jackie turned up at my
place with a bunch of lily of the valley.* This was really unusual
between two boys and I was touched.^33The main thing was still getting ready for the entrance exam. In
spite of the temptations available to Jackie now that he lived outside
the school – including, according to some people, an aff air with
a married woman –, he spent this year working assiduously and
methodically, without skipping a single subject. ‘We spent most of
our evenings together,’ Pierre Foucher remembers.
It’s largely thanks to him that I really started to work. I helped
him with his Latin, as I was better than him; he helped me in
English, where he was very good. I was also poor at philoso-
phy, since I’d had a lousy teacher in my last year at high school.
One Sunday evening, as I was unable to fi nish my essay, I asked
Jackie to help me out, and he dictated the whole fi nal section to
me. When Borne handed our work back to us, his verdict was
trenchant: the work was second-rate, apart from the last two
pages, which were remarkable!As the years went by, however, Derrida was getting less and
less out of the philosophy classes given at Louis-le-Grand. For
instance, neither Borne nor Savin felt any affi nity with Heidegger,
whom he had started to read assiduously. Generally speaking,
pupils in khâgne were not really encouraged to confront the great
texts; instead, they were taught to use summaries and to master the
rhetoric of the essay. So it was on his own initiative that Derrida
approached Heidegger’s oeuvre. But few of his works were available
in French at the beginning of the 1950s. Only ‘What is metaphysics?’,
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and a few chapters of Being
and Time had been translated, but in versions already acknowledged
to be quite inadequate. Derrida would later describe as ‘monstrous
[.. .] in many respects’ the translation of the concept of ‘Dasein’
- A typical gift on 1 May in France. – Tr.