The Soldier of Koléa 1957–1959 101
Zhivago by Pasternak, which Michel Aucouturier had just trans-
lated; Zazie in the Metro by Queneau; and novels by Henry Miller
and Faulkner brought back from the United States. Marguerite
was translating The Life of Klim Samgin, a rather dull novel by
Gorky. As for Jackie, he sometimes tried to resume work on his
introduction to The Origin of Geometry, but, with his nineteen
hours of classes per week in Koléa, the three hours in Algiers for the
mana gerial secretaries, a few private lessons, and the translation of
English newspapers for the general government, he had hardly any
time left over for himself.^16 As he explained to Michel Monory:
All this, as you can imagine, reduces considerably any chance
I have of solitude, in other words of breathing. Outside certain
‘periods’ where a devilish craving springs up in me, when I feel
that I’m seeing the world upside down and walking on my head,
I can accept it all [.. .], with little sighs that are soon forgotten,
and the somewhat anaesthetized and dully resigned serenity of
those who continue to live because they have forgotten that the
air has become rarefi ed.^17In spite of the distance, the academic world could not be com-
pletely forgotten. In February 1959, Maurice de Gandillac suggested
that his former student participate in the ‘Cerisy Talks’ that were to
take place during the summer, on the theme ‘Genesis and structure’.
Derrida could talk about Husserl, using his dissertation as a basis.
But essential, in de Gandillac’s view, was the ‘free and easy discus-
sion’ of the talks that would take place ‘in the middle of the lush
Normandy countryside’. There would be ‘phenomenologists, dia-
lecticians (idealist and materialist), logicians and epistemologists,
historians of the economy, art and language, ethnologists, biologists,
etc.’. And the conversations would be led ‘in the most accommodat-
ing way possible’ by Lucien Goldmann and de Gandillac himself.^18
Although he was apprehensive about this fi rst public conference,
Derrida could not fail to agree to this fl attering suggestion.
It was also in this year – and not in 1957, as he would say when he
belatedly defended it – that he offi cially registered the subject of his
thesis, with the title ‘The ideality of the literary object’. Even though
the work was explicitly infl uenced by Husserl, it was to lead Derrida
towards a completely personal set of problems – in the direction
that, ever since his teens, had been of most importance to him:
It was then for me a matter of bending, more or less violently,
the techniques of transcendental phenomenology to the needs
of elaborating a new theory of literature, of that very peculiar
type of ideal object that is the literary object [.. .]. For I have
to remind you, somewhat bluntly and simply, that my most