54 Jackie 1930–1962
We still have the detailed account of the exam that Derrida fi nally
passed, as he related it to Roger Pons, his French teacher. The big
surprise is to discover what a remarkable narrator he could be, even
though he would later claim that he was unable to tell a story:
My exams were perfectly normal. The only thing that marked
them out was an oral result so poor it set me back ten places.
I was actually 6th in the written exams, 4.5 points behind the
top pupil – this was in spite of a very disappointing mark in
philosophy. [.. .]
In the orals, I fell back in German and ancient history.
These went disastrously – I thought I’d almost scored a duck.
In French, where I was given a generous 12, I took a dislike
to everything: the jury, whose appearance at least took away
any desire I might have to share with them the joys of explica-
tion. M. Castex put on the airs of an inspired prophet to utter
a few commonplace, summary, and superfi cial judgements.
The other examiner, to whom I spoke more, was more rigor-
ous, more anxious, but there still hung around him and his
thoughts that subtle dust which imbues offi cial papers, the
documents of notaries, and even the school booklets for the
baccalaureate.In this exam, Derrida had been given a page of Diderot taken from
the Encyclopédie, ‘a rather unalluring piece overall, where every-
thing was displayed on the surface, underlined and explicit’. And he
had tackled this text by doing a Derrida avant la lettre, as if the main
lines of his method were already drawn up:
I decided that this text was a trap, that the intention of a certain
Diderot, mistrustful and cautious, was being deployed between
the lines, that everything about it, in its form, was ambigu-
ous, implied, indirect, convoluted, complicated, suggested,
murmured... I deployed all my resources to uncover a range
of meanings fanning out from each sentence, each word. I
invented a Diderot who was a virtuoso of litotes, a maverick of
literature, a resistance fi ghter from the word go.But dialogue with the jury seems to have been diffi cult, with one of
the examiners, M. Schérer, objecting to the candidate:
‘Look, this text is quite simple; you’ve simply made it more
complicated and laden with meaning by adding ideas of your
own. In this sentence, for example, only this bit is explicit.. .’
‘Explicitly, this text doesn’t exist; in my view, it has no
literary interest.. .’