Uncomfortable Positions 1969–1971 219
The summer was overshadowed by this worsening illness, as the
doctors could not come up with any precise diagnosis. Jacques was
irritable and exhausted and unable to work on the text on Condillac
he had brought with him to Nice. ‘My father’s illness has given me,
and is still giving me, so much anxiety that I’ve lost all my strength
and courage,’ he wrote to Nancy.^31
Hospitalized for pleurisy, Aimé Derrida died on 18 October 1970,
‘after two months of anxiety, uncertainty, and even enigma’.^32 In
fact, he had probably been suff ering from pancreatic cancer – the
same illness from which Jacques himself would die, at exactly the
same age.^33 Over the last two weeks, Derrida travelled increasingly
between Paris and Nice; he continued with his visits, to support
his mother, and these trips were all the more exhausting as he still
refused to take the plane. Shaken by this death, which he had not
been expecting, he felt haggard, lost, ‘barely able to keep up a
professional façade’.^34
Things at the École Normale Supérieure had been very restless over
the post-’68 years, but it went through a real crisis at the start of
- In February, a strike continued for several weeks. The Action
Committee known as ‘Damocles’, which had been fomenting the
movement, decided to organize a big party to celebrate the cente-
nary of the Commune. Over fi ve thousand people were welcomed
to the École on the evening of 20 March 1971. But the organizers
of the party could not keep control and the night ended in violence.
The war memorial was vandalized, several rooms were pillaged, as
was the library, and a fi re was started. On the morning of Sunday,
21 March, the École looked like a battlefi eld. President Georges
Pompidou, an alumnus, was deeply shocked. He took the unprec-
edented step of asking Olivier Guichard, the Education Minister,
to close the École for two weeks. When he learned that Robert
Flacelière had been away on the evening in question, the President
was furious, and demanded his resignation. Pierre Aubenque, who
was quite a close colleague of Derrida’s, was initially suggested as a
replacement director for the École. But Pompidou preferred to call
on the top student of his own year, the Hellenist Jean Bousquet, to
restore order.^35
A few weeks after these events, Derrida left for Algeria, with
Marguerite, Pierre, and Jean, for a fortnight. He was due to give
a series of lectures at the University of Algiers, but he was mainly
looking forward to revisiting the places he had known in his youth,
for the fi rst time since summer 1962. Unfortunately, the visit was far
from being a success, as he told Roger Laporte:
This trip was diffi cult in every way. A depressing return to
the ‘archaic’ places of my childhood; a country that you are