The Soldier of Koléa 1957–1959 105
conversations were ‘interdisciplinary’ long before that word became
common: they moved from the analysis of bureaucracy to that of
biology, from mathematics to the myth of races in Hesiod, and from
linguistics to religious ideologies. ‘A head-on, encyclopaedic treat-
ment like this could never have taken place in a university.’
For Derrida, the décade was a real baptism of fi re. Although
he was one of the youngest participants and had still not pub-
lished anything, he intervened in several discussions throughout
the ‘Conversations’. It was he who, rather sharply, launched the
discussion after Jean Piaget’s paper:
I remember the juvenile impudence with which I had the nerve
to object, as a young dog smitten with genetic phenomenology,
to the psychologism of the great Piaget, whose scholastic system
I had studiously learned a few years earlier when working for
my certifi cate in child psychology. This happened on the fi rst
evening, and throughout the décade, Piaget treated the bold,
naïvely insolent young man that I then was with a sort of ironic
deference, both irritated and protective. He nicknamed me ‘the
phenomenologist’.^27On the morning of Friday 31 July, in the chateau’s library,
Derrida delivered his fi rst lecture, reading out some twenty immacu-
lately composed pages. Even though the theme overlapped that
of his diplôme, he had written a new text refl ecting his most recent
research. On this day, one of the concepts that would become fun-
damental in his work, that of diff érance, made an appearance for the
fi rst time. Admittedly, pretty much throughout his paper, he used
the ordinary word diff érence, but the philosopher was clearly giving
it a particular meaning. And in the middle of the text, diff érance –
with an ‘a’ – is there in black and white, albeit furtively: ‘This
irreducible diff erence is due to an interminable delaying [diff érance]
of the theoretical foundation,’ he writes.^28
Another ‘fi rst time’, just as important, was the fact that Derrida
took the opportunity of these Cerisy ‘Conversations’, and the forth-
coming publication of this paper, to swap his fi rst name Jackie for
that of Jacques. And he was annoyed when Maurice de Gandillac
happened to call him ‘Jackie’ in public. From now on, his ‘real’ fi rst
name was kept for the use of family and a few old friends.
After a few days’ holiday at Les Rassats, then El Biar, Jackie and
Marguerite returned to Koléa at the beginning of September for the
last weeks of military service. Time dragged, and they could not wait
to move back to Paris and start a new life. Derrida knew that he
would be very busy writing his Sorbonne lectures and he wanted to
discuss them with Althusser: ‘If you like, when I get back, I’ll submit