86 Jackie 1930–1962
the 10th division of parachutists. In spite of the aggressive surveil-
lance to which the city, including the Kasbah, was subject, attacks
continued, especially in the grandstands of the city stadium and the
stadium in El Biar.
Bianco gave Derrida some news about their old fellow student
Pierre Bourdieu, who was doing his military service in Algiers,
working in the Lacoste cabinet. He had written a brochure on
Algeria, ‘whose tone and form, and even content, are fortunately
completely diff erent from other publications of the general govern-
ment; I was pretty relieved,’ noted Coco. For them too, the prospect
of service was looming. Jackie had suggested that they try to enlist
together, so as to make the two years less awful. But there was
nothing to guarantee that this plan would work. At the same time,
Jackie was fi nding out from other ex-students about the possibility
of joining the navy: several of them had assured him it was ‘the cush-
iest job’. There was an exam to take, with a long essay on a theme
linked to the sea – easy enough for a normalien, but an excellent
knowledge of English was also required, which was a bit trickier.
In February, Derrida received a long letter from Michel Monory,
in which he was glad to fi nd his friend ‘whole and entire’, in spite of
the long separation. He in turn wrote his friend an immensely long
letter in which he wallowed in nostalgia for the years they had been
so close. In the loose-limbed and repetitive style of this letter, we can
already see the style that Derrida would make his own many years
later, in ‘Circumfession’ or The Work of Mourning, for example:
I often feel as if I’d been laid really low, by a nasty unknown
fever, when I yield, helplessly, to ‘Memory’. It’s something ter-
rible, so much bigger and stronger than us, and it plays around
with the little lives we lead every minute. Never do I feel myself
existing as much as when I remember, and never do I feel
myself dying so much. And I love you rather as if we had been
nursed together, nourished by this same memory, and nour-
ished by this same death. We die together, don’t you think – we
die to everything we have loved together, or die together, now,
to everything that is merely the next day?
I don’t want to start saying what I remember, since it would
seem as if I’d forgotten the rest, and I never forget a thing. But
all the same, there are certain images that leap into my heart,
like a refrain that drags others along in its train: one evening
after [the restaurant] ‘Lysimaque’, a light and our school uni-
forms, and a dirty fl oor in the thurne de musique, a walk down
the boulevard Saint-Michel holding the Van Gogh book that I
hadn’t opened yet and that now, after the Mediterranean, has
crossed the ocean, the metro station Europe and me waiting for