The École Normale Supérieure 1952–1956 67
specialize in the history of modern China and started to learn
Chinese. (‘T’chi t’cheu’ actually means ‘car’ in Chinese, at least in
an approximate French transcription.*) Jackie, working at the next
table, followed his progress with admiration. Later on, he would
marvel at the way his friend could speak the language fl uently, in
a Chinese restaurant near the Gare de Lyon. And he would recall
the discussions he had at this time with Bianco when he referred to
the phono-ideographic model of writing of Chinese writing in Of
Grammatology.
Meanwhile, Jackie was mainly thinking of the subject of his
diplôme d’études supérieures, equivalent, these days, to a dissertation
for a Master’s. At the end of November, he decided to work on The
Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, under the supervision of
Maurice de Gandillac – an old fellow student of Sartre at the École,
and Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne since 1946. Derrida
would often explain that, though Husserl had not been his fi rst love in
philosophy, he had left a lasting infl uence on his work, as a ‘discipline
of incomparable rigour’. At that time, the beginning of the 1950s, he
was not alone in his interest: Husserl’s phenomenology had still made
few inroads into French universities, but it appeared indispensable
to many young philosophers. Before turning to sociology, Pierre
Bourdieu himself had thought of devoting his thesis to Husserl.
Derrida wished to replace ‘French-style’ phenomenology, as
developed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, with ‘a phenomenology
more turned to the sciences’. In his view, this represented almost as
much of a political project as a philosophical necessity. Impressed
by a recent book by the Marxist Tran-Duc-Thao, he too wanted to
link phenomenology to certain aspects of dialectical materialism.
The word ‘dialectical’ cropped up insistently in his diplôme piece; he
would soon abandon it.
Like many others, Derrida was fascinated by Husserl’s unpub-
lished manuscripts – especially on temporality, ‘passive genesis’, and
the ‘alter ego’ – all texts which could be consulted only in the Husserl
Archives in Louvain. In January 1954, Maurice de Gandillac sent a
letter of recommendation and obtained the assurance of Fr Herman
Van Breda that he would grant access to these precious documents.
Derrida set off for Louvain in March and spent several weeks
there. This was the fi rst time he had left French territory. In the attic
of the Institute of Philosophy, where a vast number of the 40,000
pages of unpublished work left by Husserl had been preserved
since 1939, Jackie worked assiduously. In spite of his only average
understanding of German, he deciphered and carefully copied out
several passages, even though he eventually derived a rather small
- In pinyin, qìchē – Tr.