The Walls of Louis-le-Grand 1949–1952 37
ishly’, he noted in the margins of several of Derrida’s essays, and
mercilessly crossed out anything that struck him as beside the point.
At the start of this academic year, Jackie talked a lot with Jean-
Claude Pariente, who had arrived from Algiers at the same time as
him. As Pariente recalls,
Our shared enthusiasm for philosophy had brought us
together, while also arousing a certain rivalry between us, one
that remained purely intellectual. My interest for questions of
epistemology surprised him, and his references to existentialists
(Kierkegaard) or phenomenologists (he was already talking
about Husserl and Heidegger) meant nothing to me. I remem-
ber one argument, the subject of which I’ve forgotten now, but
it was defi nitely ambitious, as happens when you’re at the start
of your career, and he concluded it by saying to me, basically:
‘I can’t understand in what way thinking about the sciences
can shed any light on philosophical questions.’ The distance
between us at the time didn’t get in the way of a real friend-
ship. I could sense in him a true profundity of thought, but it
expressed itself in forms that remained foreign to me.^6At the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, in those days, there was a real barrier
between the boarders and the rest. There were very many khâgne
classes, and in them two completely distinct groups formed, united
by one thing alone: disdain for students on the other side of the rue
Saint-Jacques, at the Sorbonne, far removed from the holy of holies
of French higher education comprised by the grandes écoles.
Derrida had little opportunity to meet any of the non-boarding
students: they generally went home for lunch and left the lycée in
the afternoons, as soon as classes were over. Pierre Nora, Michel
Deguy, and Dominique Fernandez were among these Parisians
from good families, well dressed and well fed. The boarders, such
as Michel Serres, Jean Bellemin-Noël, and Pierre Bourdieu, were
provincial boys from often modest backgrounds. The grey smock
which they wore all the time meant you could distinguish them at a
glance: in many respects, they were the proles of the khâgne.
In comparison with this rigid social barrier, the fact that one came
from Algeria appeared a mere detail. Such a more far-fl ung origin
even meant you enjoyed a certain exotic prestige, especially as the
three students who had come over from Algiers in the autumn of
1949 – Pariente, Domerc, and Derrida – were more self-assured
than most of the provincial boys. As Jean-Claude Pariente remem-
bers, they amused their schoolfriends on more than one occasion
by improvising little sketches about Algiers for them: ‘Jackie, who
had a very olive skin and a very stocky physique, could speak fl uent