Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jacques Derrida

Derrida frames school not as a neutral site of learning but as a bodily ordeal: “school sickness” lands like a diagnosis, a queasy twin to seasickness. It’s a sly reversal of the usual moralizing script where education is salvation and reluctance is laziness. Here, reluctance is involuntary, physical, almost allergic. The image matters because Derrida’s larger project is to show how institutions present themselves as natural and inevitable while actually producing their own forms of discomfort, coercion, and “normal” behavior.

The second sentence sharpens the knife: he cried “long after” he was old enough to feel “ashamed.” That shame is the real curriculum. School doesn’t just transmit knowledge; it trains you to police your own emotional life, to treat certain responses as childish, deviant, or embarrassing. Derrida’s confession is less self-pity than a small act of counter-discipline, refusing to tidy up the messiness that institutions demand we conceal.

Context matters: a French intellectual formation steeped in exams, ranking, and the prestige economy of elite schooling; a Jewish-Algerian childhood marked by exclusion and the politics of belonging. “School sickness” can be read as an early sensitivity to how authority works through norms that don’t feel like force until they’re inside you. He makes that interiorization audible: the tears aren’t just about school, they’re about being made into the kind of person who shouldn’t cry about school.