32 Jackie 1930–1962
of girls changed the atmosphere in class: relationships between
us were more polite than in the classes we’d been in before, and
the pupils in the other classes of the lycée were pretty jealous
of us. But overall, this wasn’t of any great signifi cance. Even
if he was comfortable around girls, I don’t remember Derrida
having a girlfriend in that class.^37Although he was an excellent pupil, Pariente was then starting on
his second hypokhâgne. Bugeaud off ered a complete cycle of classes
préparatoires in the sciences, but there was still no khâgne in Algeria
at that time. Pariente wanted to take the competitive exam for the
École Normale Supérieure in Algiers, rather than in Paris itself, at
the end of that year. The plan did not seem absurd, as you could
get some rather high-quality teaching in that class. Paul Mathieu,
the teacher whom Derrida had heard on the radio, was an old-style
humanist. He was a former normalien, and continued to venerate
the École Normale Supérieure, encouraging his best students to
do their utmost to get a place there. But his lessons were based on
literary history in the style of Lanson, and were too old-fashioned
for Derrida. He also provided a thorough grounding in Latin, a
discipline in which Derrida really did not shine. In history, Lucien
Bessières, who had been deeply aff ected by the war, from which he
returned with a fi ne array of decorations, gave classes that were very
precise, but too slow for the taste of most pupils.
The philosophy teacher, Jan Czarnecki, was a progressive
Protestant who would later be one of the courageous signatories of
the ‘Manifesto of the 121’.* He was a pupil of Le Senne and Nabert,
a follower of the tradition of French idealism and spiritualism, but
he was very open to questions of epistemology as well as to other
philosophical trends. He taught a very rationalist philosophy,
rather dry in tone, but Derrida, whose own ideas were starting to
become clearer, rather liked him. ‘I had a quite remarkable teacher
in hypokhâgne,’ he later told Dominique Janicaud. ‘He gave us
some very cursory and precise lessons on the history of philoso-
phy: he went over everything from the Presocratics to modernity.’
Indeed, among the documents preserved in the Special Collection of
the University of California, Irvine, there are several traces of the
classes that Derrida attended that year.
It was from Czarnecki’s lips that Jackie fi rst heard the name of
Martin Heidegger. As soon as he could, he got hold of the only
work of his that was then available in French, What is Metaphysics?,
a selection of texts translated by Henri Corbin. ‘The question
- This manifesto, published in September 1960, was signed by 121 intellectu-
als denouncing the attitude of the French Government to Algerian demands for
independence. – Tr.