An Event, Perhaps. Peter Salmon

been built, used, legitimized.’⁴⁰

      When Derrida submitted it, Althusser said, ‘I can’t grade this, it’s too difficult, too obscure …’⁴¹ He decided to pass it on to a friend, an assistant professor at Lille who occasionally lectured at the ENS – Michel Foucault. Derrida had previously attended some of these lectures by this ‘charismatic’ young man, only four years older than himself. These included taking the students to a psychiatric hospital to watch patients being examined. He found it ‘really upsetting’.⁴² After reading the dissertation Foucault said to him, ‘Well, it’s either an F or an A+.’

      For all his brilliance, Derrida continued to struggle at the ENS. In part the problem was his Husserl obsession, and, more crucially, the strain of creating the voice and the concepts that later both exhilarated and frustrated readers within academia and beyond. Althusser, marking one essay, noted that his work would only meet the approval of examiners ‘if you perform a radical overhaul, in the exposition and the expression. Your current difficulties are the price you’re paying for a year devoted to reading and thinking about Husserl, who as I have to tell you again, isn’t a familiar thinker for the jury.’⁴³

      His problems at the ENS also arose from the same anxiety that had plagued him at the lycée. Again he resorted to amphetamines, again he fled part of the written exams, again he finished last in the orals. Failure at the agrégation was not unheard of – Sartre had likewise failed. But Derrida’s failure condemned him to another year of work at the ENS. In the end, he passed, with results that were mediocre compared to his abilities. Althusser wrote to congratulate him, noting that ‘quite simply your friendship has been for me one of the most fine and valuable things about these last two years at the Ecole.’⁴⁴

      If the seeds of deconstruction were present in 1954, it would be another ten years before they bore any sort of fruit. Before they did, Derrida had to look outwards, to move from an analysis of a single subject to the analysis of an intersubjective community. He would have to examine language and writing, and, like Husserl, the problem of the other.