Chapter 3 - Normalization

Summary

All of this should be resituated in the strange history of this strange institution and the no less strange “community” that it housed – or, even more precisely, in the genealogy of the Rue d’Ulm philosophers. A work yet to be undertaken: it would clarify a certain number of things about life and about intellectual fashions in this country over several decades.

Jacques Derrida

In 1952, when Derrida entered the ENS, the names of the modern existentialists disappeared almost entirely from his work: le Senne, Weil, and Marcel, who had been mainstays of his thought, dropped out completely, while references to Sartre and Heidegger greatly declined. In their place, Derrida turned to the more technical language of phenomenology and especially to a philosopher who before he had only discussed in passing. Husserl became so central in Derrida's work that already by 1954 Louis Althusser, then his teacher, complained that Derrida was too dominated by his “master.” Over the next decade, the discussion of Husserlian phenomenology would be Derrida's major philosophical preoccupation.

Derrida's adoption of Husserl's phenomenology as an object of study was not simply a philosophical decision. Rather it was encouraged by considerations that only make sense in the context of the ENS, with its peculiar combination of political dogmatism enforced through social pressure. Derrida's discussion of the reduction, intentionality, and the life-world, though seemingly abstract and detached from the messy questions that dominate political life, were invested at the Ecole with political meaning.