The École Normale Supérieure 1952–1956 71
Derrida later acknowledged that it was Bianco to whom he owed
everything he had managed ‘to understand, and to think, in an
anxious, critical, ever-changing fashion, about modern China’.^28
Generally speaking, Lucien was at that time more committed and
radical than Jackie, who told him one day: ‘If destiny were to give me
a chance to play the role of Lenin, I’d quite possibly turn it down.’^29
That year, world events loomed very large for them. On 7 May 1954,
with the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the French colonial empire began to
collapse. A few weeks later, Pierre Mendès France became Prime
Minister, arousing many hopes. But on the night of 1 November
1954, Algeria was rocked by a series of attacks: a hitherto unknown
organization, the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale), called for
‘freedom to be won back’. On 5 November 1954, the Minister of
the Interior, a certain François Mitterrand, stated in the National
Assembly that ‘Algeria is France’ and that ‘the Algerian rebellion
can lead to only one conclusion: war’. The confl ict would last eight
years, traumatizing a whole generation and aff ecting Derrida with
particular and lasting intensity.
Another event, this time of much more local importance, marked
the start of the new academic year at the École: Jean Hyppolite
took over the establishment. He was a great fi gure in contemporary
French philosophy, one of those who would be of real signifi cance
for Derrida and one of the fi rst to perceive the latter’s philosophical
talent. Hyppolite had entered the École the same year as Jean-
Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron, and helped to introduce Hegel
into France. In the 1930s he attended Alexandre Kojève’s famous
lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit before translating this
fundamental text, with a detailed commentary. For a long time,
Hyppolite was a khâgne teacher at the Lycée Henri IV, where his
pupils included Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. When he took
over the École, it was his ambition to restore philosophy to its place
of honour on the humanities side. But his temperament prevented
him from implementing his plans as much as he would have liked.
Derrida’s main discussions in the academic year 1954–5 were
defi nitely those he had with Althusser. Jackie, as nervous about the
agrégation as he had feared the entrance exam to the École, wanted
simply to work and to follow the advice he was given. For the fi rst
essay that his caïman asked him to write, he took methodical notes
on Freud. Then, in a long and highly personal piece of writing, he
tried for the fi rst time to bring psychoanalysis and philosophy into
dialogue:
When it ceases to be the remorse of philosophy, the uncon-
scious is merely its repentance. Philosophy as such, in its own
moment, moves between transparencies: intelligible ideas, ‘a
priori’ concepts, the immediate data of consciousness, pure