66 Jackie 1930–1962
something inside me. I’d need to tell myself – as well as you –,
I’d need to ‘recite’ the things that have happened over the past
two or three years, up to more recent events, to shed some light
on it all.
And then I don’t want to write any more, I can’t. This is all
the more distressing since I’m sure that I could save myself –
here below, of course – only if I wrote constantly, at least for
myself.^14At the start of the academic year in the autumn of 1953, the
licence exams at the Sorbonne put Jackie in a bad mood. As he
would tell people later, when he received the Légion d’Honneur in
one of the lecture halls in which he suff ered at that time,
khâgne and the École Normale Supérieure conferred on some of
us a puerile sense of hauteur, of being part of an elite, which did
not exempt us, for all our condescension, from coming down to
this very place and registering properly at the Sorbonne for our
exams. And it did not exempt me, as one of their number, from
exams... that I failed quite a few times.^15At the end of October, not having had ‘time to draw and measure
bones’, Derrida fl unked the practicals in ethnology, despite having
passed the written exams. So right at the start of a year which he
would like to have devoted entirely to working on his diplôme, he
found himself faced with what he described as a ‘ridiculous chore’.^16
Luckily, he passed in psychology.
Another piece of good news was that he shared a comfort-
able thurne with his friend Lucien Bianco – ‘Coco’, as he was then
called – in the new buildings of the École. He wrote to his cousin:
‘Working conditions here are ideal and I don’t think we’ve ever
done better. We’re freed of any material worries, and if we were
really selfi sh, really carefree, we’d soon doze off to sleep in this sort
of Artifi cial Paradise, the École.’^17 Together, Jackie and Lucien
bought an old car, a 1930 Citroën C4 that they nicknamed ‘T’chi
t’cheu’. Admittedly, it was pretty clapped out, and they regularly
had to move it from one side of the road to the other to avoid a
series of parking tickets, but it still enabled them to go for a spin
now and again. And above all, this car – the fi rst to be owned by
normaliens – attracted the admiration of their fellow students. It was
in ‘T’chi t’cheu’, driven by Derrida in a, shall we say, rather auda-
cious way, that he would go to the Musée de l’Homme with Alain
Pons to follow the ethnology classes that he still had to attend.^18
Here he learned, in particular, to distinguish the skulls and bones of
human beings from those of anthropoid apes.
Bianco, as ‘well-behaved, studious’ companion, decided to