The École Normale Supérieure 1952–1956 69
Patronnier de Gandillac – sometimes nicknamed ‘Glandouiller de
Patronage’ (‘Layabout Supervisor’) –, merely looked through it.
This was because he could immediately perceive the quality of the
work, he would later say; but mainly it was because he was not at all
a Husserl specialist. Be this as it may, Derrida was very disappointed
at this absence of reaction to his fi rst work of any scope. He had been
hoping for a real philosophical dialogue, a dialogue he had embarked
on with Rudolf Boehm, but not been able to pursue with any of his
friends. ‘My diplôme work would be interesting in other conditions
and for other readers,’ as Jackie confi ded to Michel Monory. Neither
Althusser nor Foucault seems to have off ered to read it. Only Jean
Hyppolite would do so, a year later, when he encouraged Jackie to
get it published. But Jackie was by then in the middle of preparing
for the agrégation, and did not follow up this idea.
The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy is much more than
a simple diplôme piece. Many fundamental elements of Derrida’s
work are already in place in it and, when the work was eventually
published, thirty-seven years later, Derrida would be disturbed at
how he ‘recognized without recognizing [.. .] a way of speaking that
has, perhaps, hardly changed, the old and almost fateful position of
a voice, or rather of tone’. He was even more disturbed to fi nd in it
a sort of law whose stability would strike him as ‘all the more aston-
ishing in that, even in its literal formulation, it will not have ceased
to determine, ever since’, everything he had written. From this early
time onwards, what counted for him was ‘an originary complication
of the origin, [.. .] an initial contamination of the simple’.^22 When
Jean-Luc Nancy discovered this text, he would write to Derrida:
‘The incredible thing about this book is that you can’t fi nd the
young Derrida in it, the one you’d like to catch out committing
some youthful error. The genesis of Derrida, yes, but not the young
Derrida. He’s already completely there, fully armed and helmeted
like Athena. However, it’s evident what he lacks – a certain youth,
with its playfulness.’^23
In spite of his excellent relationship with Lucien Bianco, Derrida
would still miss his friendship with Michel Monory. The ‘frigid
hubbub’ of the École left him feeling numbed, and he longed ‘for
those long silent solitudes of the rue Lagrange during which, and
emerging from which, you are really most yourself’.^24 Michel had
passed the written exam for the CAPES* in lettres the year before,
and was a probationary teacher in two lycées in Nancy. This made
it diffi cult to meet up: when the two managed to do so, their encoun-
ters were generally too short to be other than disappointing. Jackie
- The CAPES (Certifi cat d’Aptitude au Professorat de l’Enseignement du Second
Degré) is a competitive exam used to select schoolteachers. – Tr.