146 Derrida 1963–1983
years, the Salle Dussane would be the privileged meeting place of
a new Freudian France, one more cultured, more philosophical,
and more infl uential than the previous one.’^3 Within the École, the
con sequences were immediate and far-reaching. In the following
session, Jacques-Alain Miller, who had only just turned nineteen,
intervened in the seminar for the fi rst time: ‘Rather good, your
fellow,’ Lacan immediately wrote to Althusser.^4 Impressed by
this attempt to read his work as a whole, Lacan replied at length
to Miller during the session on 29 January. The dialogue between
the old psychoanalyst and the young man would continue uninter-
rupted, and marked a major turning-point in Lacanian discourse.
In comparison with the bold new approach of Althusser, Derrida
initially seemed, in spite of his youth, a more traditional kind of
teacher, ‘a replacement caïman’, in the eyes of Régis Debray. But the
Introduction to The Origin of Geometry made a great impression on
Étienne Balibar and his classmates. That year, Derrida gave them
three demanding courses on authors barely mentioned by Althusser:
the fi rst was on Thought and Movement by Bergson, the second on
Hu sserl’s Cartesian Meditations – a diffi cult work, of which he gave
a memorable analysis –, and the last was called ‘Phenomenology
and transcendental psychology’.
As far as the agrégation was concerned, Derrida at this time
shared Althusser’s view. Whether students were Marxist, Lacanian,
or structuralist, they should ‘go through the motions’ for the pur-
poses of the exam: it was essential to master the specifi c rhetoric of
the essay or the leçon, irrespective of any philosophical or political
question. Derrida himself had suff ered enough from exams to have
a precise idea of what was needed to pass them. But even in this
area, things were starting to move. In 1964, the team of examiners
for the agrégation was changed: the president was no longer Étienne
Souriau, but Georges Canguilhem. The new team would be much
more open to contemporary philosophers, to epistemology, to phe-
nomenology and even to psychoanalysis. In these circumstances,
having been taught by Althusser and Derrida for the exam would
become a real advantage.^5
Derrida’s qualities as a teacher were all the better appreciated as,
just before the written exams, Althusser again fell ill. In April 1964,
he felt at the end of his tether, ‘at a sort of intellectual dead end’,
‘with all the symptoms of a very unpleasant “dry” depression’. He
left the École for several weeks, asking Derrida whether he could
‘keep the boys’ enthusiasm going in the run-up to the exam...
even if just by having a chat with them’.^6 Althusser regretted that he
had been leading a crazy life for the past months and apologized to
Derrida for having had time to talk to him only in snatches in the
corridor.