The École Normale Supérieure 1952–1956 65
for Jackie’s fi rst encounter with Marguerite, Michel’s elder sister –
an encounter that they would allude to, in veiled terms, in the fi lm
Derrida. The young woman, a beautiful blonde of just twenty, was
suff ering from tuberculosis, like many students of her generation.
She had been hospitalized for several months in the sanatorium at
Plateau d’Assy, and her state of health was still uncertain, with good
and bad test results alternating. Right from this fi rst meeting, Jackie
took an interest in Marguerite, but he did not have any opportunity
to see her in private. As far as she was concerned, he was still just
one of the boys in the group. Only a year and a half later, when
Marguerite returned to Paris, did their relations become more
personal.
As the months went by, Derrida allowed himself to be dragged into
a sort of pleasant whirlwind. As he wrote to his cousin Micheline,
‘the life we lead here calls for long, calm, silent, solitary holidays.
You can’t imagine how much we jump around, run everywhere,
spread ourselves thin. At the end of a day, you’re horrifi ed to look
back on how you’ve spent your time.’^11 But, as if to catch up, Jackie
spent much of the summer of 1953 in El Biar immersed in reading a
book that would be of fundamental importance for him, the Ideas
Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy by Edmund Husserl, a work better known under the title
Ideen I. It had been translated into French, with an introduction
and commentary, by Paul Ricoeur. ‘So it was this great reader of
Husserl who, more rigorously than Sartre and even Merleau-Ponty,
fi rst taught me to read “phenomenology” and who, to a certain
extent, acted as my guide thereafter,’ Derrida would acknowledge in
a late homage to Ricoeur.^12
In other respects, August and September went by, yet again,
in a mixture of indolence and melancholy. ‘I bless the end of the
vacation,’ Jackie wrote to Michel Serres. ‘I’ve fi nally yielded to the
cowardly desire to fl ee my family completely. This is what happens
when you love too much.’^13 Apart from Husserl, he hardly did any
work, barely preparing for the certifi cate in ethnology that he had to
take at the Sorbonne, since it was this discipline that he had chosen
as the scientifi c subject for his licence.
Jackie was dismayed by one thing in particular: the distance that
had grown between himself and Michel Monory since his entry into
Normale Sup. He had not found the same degree of intimacy with
any other of the students at the École. And it was in nostalgic tones
that he wrote to his friend:
Why don’t we even have the strength to write to each other any
more? You know that, on my side, I haven’t forgotten you.
It’s not my friendship that has died or lost its ‘salt’, but rather