The Seventh Function of Language

48

Althusser is in a panic. He’s searched through all his papers, but he cannot find the precious document that was entrusted to him and which he hid in a junk-mail envelope, left in plain sight on his desk. Although he never read the document, he’s a nervous wreck because he knows it is of the utmost importance that he return it to the people who gave it to him for safekeeping, and that this is his responsibility. He rummages around in his wastepaper basket, empties his drawers, takes his books one by one from the shelves and hurls them onto the floor in a rage. He feels filled with a dark anger at himself, mixed with an embryonic suspicion, when he decides to shout: “Hélène! Hélène!” She runs up to him, worried. Does she, by any chance, know where … an envelope … opened … junk mail … a bank or a pizzeria … he can’t remember … Hélène, in a natural voice, says: “Oh yes, I remember, that old envelope … I threw it away.”

Time stops for Althusser. He doesn’t ask her to repeat it. What’s the point? He heard her perfectly well. But still, there’s hope: “The trash…?” I emptied it last night, and the garbagemen took it away this morning. A long groan howls deep inside the philosopher while he tenses his muscles. He looks at his wife, dear old Hélène, who has put up with him for so many years, and he knows that he loves her, he admires her, he feels sorry for her, he blames himself, he knows what he put her through with his caprices, his infidelities, his immature behavior, his childlike need for his wife to support him in his choice of mistresses, and his manic-depressive fits (“hypomania,” they call it), but this, this is too much, this is much, much more than he can tolerate—yes, him, the immature impostor—and he throws himself at his wife, screaming like a wild beast, and grabs her throat with his hands, which tighten around it like a vise, and Hélène, taken by surprise, stares at him wide-eyed but does not try to defend herself, putting her hands on his but not really struggling. Maybe she knew all along that it would have to end like this, or maybe she just wanted to put an end to it one way or another, and this way was as good as any, or maybe Althusser is just too fast, too violent. Maybe she wanted to live and recalled, at that instant, one or two phrases written by Althusser, this man she loved—“one does not abandon a concept like a dog,” perhaps—but Althusser strangles his wife like a dog, except that he is the dog, ferocious, selfish, irresponsible, maniacal. When he loosens his grip, she is dead. A bit of tongue—a “poor little bit of tongue,” he will say—sticks out of her mouth and her bulging eyes stare at her murderer or the ceiling or the void of her existence.

Althusser has killed his wife, but there will be no trial because he will be judged to have been temporarily insane at the time. Yes, he was angry. But why didn’t he say anything to his wife? If Althusser is a “victim of himself,” it’s because he didn’t disobey the person who asked him to remain silent. You should have said something, you jerk, at least to your wife. A lie is far too precious a thing to be misused. He should at least have told her: “Don’t touch this envelope, it’s extremely valuable, it contains a highly important document that X or Y [he could have lied here] gave me to look after.” Instead of which, Hélène is dead. Judged insane, Althusser will have his case dismissed. He will be committed for a few years, then will leave his apartment on Rue d’Ulm and move to the Twentieth Arrondissement, where he will write that very strange autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, which contains this crazy phrase, placed inside parentheses: “Mao even granted me an interview, but for reasons of ‘French politics,’ I made the stupid mistake, the biggest of my life, of not turning up for it…” (The italics are mine.)

49

“Italy! That place is unbelievable!” D’Ornano paces the presidential office, lifting his hands above his head. “What the hell is going on in Bologna? Is that connected to our case? Were our men targeted?”

Poniatowski rummages around in the drinks cabinet. “Hard to say. It could be just coincidence. It could be the far left or the far right. It could also have been ordered by the government. You never know with the Italians.” He opens a can of tomato juice.

Sitting behind his desk, Giscard closes the copy of L’Express that he was leafing through and puts his hands together in silence.

D’Ornano (tapping his foot): “Coincidence, my ass! If—and I mean if—a group, of whatever kind, or a government, or an agency, or a service, or an organization possesses the means and the determination to set off a bomb that kills eighty-five people just to hamper our investigation, then I think we have a problem. The Americans have a problem. The English have a problem. The Russians have a problem. Unless it’s them, obviously.”

Giscard asks: “It seems like the kind of thing they’d do, Michel, don’t you think?”

Poniatowski unearths some celery salt. “Random killing with as many civilian victims as possible? I have to say that’s more the far right’s style. And anyway, according to Bayard’s report, there was that Russian agent who saved the kid’s life.”

D’Ornano (startled): “The nurse? She might just as easily have planted the bomb.”

Poniatowski (opening a bottle of vodka): “Why would she show herself in the station, then?”

D’Ornano (pointing at Poniatowski as though he were personally responsible): “We checked. She never worked at Salpêtrière.”

Poniatowski (stirring his Bloody Mary): “It’s more or less proven that Barthes no longer had the document by the time he got to the hospital. In all probability, things went like this: he comes out of the lunch with Mitterrand, gets knocked over by a laundry van—driven by the first Bulgarian. A man posing as a doctor pretends to examine him and steals his papers and his keys. Everything suggests that the document was with his papers.”

D’Ornano: “In that case, what happened at the hospital?”

Poniatowski: “Witnesses saw two intruders whose description matches the two Bulgarians who killed the gigolo.”

D’Ornano (trying to keep count of the number of Bulgarians involved): “But since he didn’t have the document anymore?”

Poniatowski: “They probably came back to finish the job.”

D’Ornano, who is soon out of breath, stops pacing and, as if his attention has been suddenly drawn to something, starts examining a corner of Delacroix’s painting.

Giscard (picking up the biography of JFK and stroking the cover): “Let’s assume that it was our men who were targeted in Bologna.”

Poniatowski (adding Tabasco): “That would prove they’re on the right track.”

D’Ornano: “Meaning?”

Poniatowski: “If it was really our men they were trying to eliminate, it must have been to prevent them from discovering something.”

Giscard: “This … club?”

Poniatowski: “Or something else.”

D’Ornano: “So we should send them to the USA?”

Giscard (sighing): “Doesn’t he have a phone, this American?”

Poniatowski: “The kid says it’ll be a chance to ‘get down to brass tacks.’”

D’Ornano: “You don’t say! So that little twat wants to go on a trip paid for by the Republic?”

Giscard (perplexed, as if chewing on something): “Given the available evidence, wouldn’t it be just as useful to send them to Sofia?”

Poniatowski: “Bayard’s a good cop, but he’s no James Bond. Maybe we could send a Service Action team?”

D’Ornano: “To do what? Bump off some Bulgarians?”

Giscard: “I’d rather keep the Ministry of Defense out of all this.”

Poniatowski (grinding his teeth): “Besides, we don’t want to risk a diplomatic crisis with the USSR.”

D’Ornano (trying to change the subject): “Talking of crisis, what’s happening in Tehran?”

Giscard (starting to leaf through L’Express again): “The shah is dead, the mullahs are dancing.”

Poniatowski (pouring himself a neat vodka): “Carter is screwed. Khomeini will never free the hostages.”

Silence.

In L’Express, Raymond Aron writes: “It is better to let laws become dormant when, rightly or wrongly, they are refused by the morals of the day.” Giscard thinks: “How wise.”

Poniatowski kneels in front of the refrigerator.

D’Ornano: “Uh, and the philosopher who killed his wife?”

Poniatowski: “Who cares? He’s a Commie. We shut him up in an asylum.”

Silence. Poniatowski gets some ice cubes from the icebox.

Giscard (in a belligerent voice): “This case must not have any influence on the campaign.”

Poniatowski (who understands that Giscard has returned to the subject at hand): “We can’t find the Bulgarian driver or the fake doctor anywhere.”

Giscard (tapping his index finger against his leather desk blotter): “I don’t care about the driver. I don’t care about the doctor. I don’t care about this … Logos Club. I want the document. On my desk.”

50

When Baudrillard learned that under the weight of more than 30,000 visitors the metallic structure of the Centre Georges-Pompidou, opened by Giscard in 1977 on Rue Beaubourg and immediately nicknamed “The Refinery” or “Our Lady of the Pipes,” risked “folding,” he grew as excited as a child, like the rascal of French Theory that he is, and wrote a little book entitled The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence.

“That the mass (of visitors) magnetized by the structure should become a destructive variable for the structure itself—this, if the designers intended it (though how could we hope for that?), if they planned, in this way, the possibility of putting an end, in a single blow, to the architecture and culture … then Beaubourg constitutes the most audacious object and the most successful happening of the century.”

Slimane knows the Marais quarter well, and in particular Rue Beaubourg, where students line up as soon as the library opens. He knows it because he’s seen all this when coming out of clubs, exhausted by the night’s excesses and wondering how two worlds could coexist in parallel like this without ever touching.

But today, he is in the line. He smokes, his Walkman’s earphones stuck in his ears, trapped between two students with their noses in books. Discreetly, he tries to read the titles. The student in front is reading a book by Michel de Certeau entitled The Practice of Everyday Life. The other, behind him, Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born.

Slimane listens to “Walking on the Moon” by the Police.

The line advances very slowly. Someone says it’ll be another hour before they get in.

“MAKE BEAUBOURG FOLD! The new watchword of the revolution. No need to burn it. No need to protest it. Come on! It’s the best way of destroying it. Beaubourg’s success is no longer a mystery: people go there for that very reason; they rush to enter this building, whose fragility already exudes catastrophe, with the single aim of making it fold.”

Slimane has not read Baudrillard but when his turn comes he goes through the turnstile, unaware that he is participating in this post-Situationist undertaking.

He crosses a sort of press room where people are looking at microfiche on viewers, and takes an escalator up to the reading room, which resembles a huge textile workshop, except that the workers are not cutting out and assembling shirts using sewing machines but reading books and making notes in little notebooks.

Slimane also spots youngsters who’ve come to cruise and tramps who’ve come to sleep.

What impresses Slimane is the silence, but also the height of the ceiling: half factory, half cathedral.

Behind a large glass wall, an immense TV screen shows images from Soviet television. Soon, the images switch to an American channel. Spectators of various ages are sprawled in red chairs. It smells a bit. Slimane does not hang around here, but begins striding through the aisles of shelves.

Baudrillard writes: “The people want to accept everything, swipe everything, eat everything, touch everything. Looking, deciphering, studying doesn’t move them. The one mass affect is that of touching, or manipulating. The organizers (and the artists, and the intellectuals) are alarmed by this uncontrollable impulse, for they reckoned only with the apprenticeship of the masses to the spectacle of culture.”

Inside, outside, on the square, on the ceiling, there are windsocks everywhere. If he survives this adventure, Slimane, like everyone else, will associate the identity of Beaubourg—this big, futuristic ocean liner—with the image of the windsock.

“They never anticipated this active, destructive fascination—this original and brutal response to the gift of an incomprehensible culture, this attraction which has all the semblance of housebreaking or the sacking of a shrine.”

Slimane glances randomly at titles. Have You Read René Char? by Georges Mounin. Racine and Shakespeare by Stendhal. Promise at Dawn by Gary. The Historical Novel by Georg Lukács. Under the Volcano. Paradise Lost. Pantagruel (that one rings a bell).

He passes Jakobson without seeing it.

He bumps into a guy with a mustache.

“Oh, sorry.”

Perhaps it’s time to give some substance to this Bulgarian so he doesn’t end up like his partner, an anonymous soldier fallen in a secret war where the whys are clear but the wherefores remain hazy.

Let’s suppose his name is Nikolai. In any case, his real name will remain unknown. Along with his partner, he followed the investigators’ leads, which brought them to the gigolos. They killed two of them. He still doesn’t know if he ought to kill this one, too. Today, he is unarmed. He has come without his umbrella. The specter of Baudrillard whispers in his ear: “Panic in slow motion, without external movement.” He asks: “What arrre you looking for?” Slimane, who has been suspicious of strangers since the deaths of his two friends, rears back and replies: “Nothing.” Nikolai smiles at him: “That’s like everrrything: difficult to find.”

51

We are in a Parisian hospital again, but this time no one can enter the room—because this is Sainte-Anne, the psychiatric hospital, and Althusser is sedated. Régis Debray, Etienne Balibar, and Jacques Derrida stand guard outside the door and discuss how best to protect their old mentor. Peyrefitte, the minister of justice, is also a former student of the École Normale Supérieure, but that doesn’t seem to incline him to magnanimity, because he is already demanding in the press that the case go to trial. On the other hand, the three men must listen patiently to the denials of good Dr. Diatkine, who has been Althusser’s psychiatrist for years, and who regards it as absolutely unthinkable—more than that—physically, “technically” impossible (I quote) that Althusser could have strangled his wife.

Foucault turns up. If you were a professor at the ENS between 1948 and 1980, then among your students and/or colleagues, you’d have had Derrida, Foucault, Debray, Balibar, Lacan. And BHL, too. That’s how it is in France.

Foucault asks for the latest news, and they tell him what Althusser has been repeating endlessly: “I killed Hélène. What happens next?”

Foucault leads Derrida aside and asks him if he’s done what was asked of him. Derrida nods. Debray watches them on the sly.

Foucault says he shouldn’t have done such a thing, and that he refused when he was asked. (Professional rivalry obliges him to rub in the fact that he was asked before Derrida. Asked what? It’s still too early to say. But he refused because one shouldn’t deceive a friend, even what is known as “an old friend,” with all those implications of weariness and only partly repressed bitterness.)

Derrida says they must move forward. That there are interests at play. Political.

Foucault rolls his eyes.

BHL arrives. He is politely shown the door. Naturally, he will find a way back in.

Meanwhile, Althusser sleeps. His former students hope for his sake that he is not dreaming.

52

“Tennis clay-court vision satellite broadcast on grass you see that’s how it is you have to hit back each phrase hard straight away second ball net cord topspin volley backhand forehand winner borg connors vilas mcenroe…”

Sollers and Kristeva are sitting at a table in a refreshment area in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and Kristeva is nibbling tentatively at a crêpe au sucre, while Sollers monologues tirelessly and drinks his café crème.

He says:

“In Christ’s case, there’s one pretty special thing—that he said he’s coming back.”

Or:

“As Baudelaire said: I took a long time to become infallible.”

Kristeva stares at the skin of milk floating on the surface of the coffee.

“Apocalypse in Hebrew is gala, which means ‘to discover.’”

Kristeva arches her back to hold back the nausea rising in her chest.

“If the God of the Bible had said I am everywhere, we’d know about it…”

Kristeva tries to reason with herself. She reminds herself silently: “The sign is not the thing, but still…”

An editor they know, Gitane in his mouth, limping slightly as he takes a small child for a walk, comes over to say hello. He asks Sollers what he’s working on “at the moment,” and naturally Sollers is only too happy to tell him: “A novel full of portraits and characters … hundreds of notes taken in real-life situations … about the war of the sexes … I can’t imagine any novel being more informed, more multilayered, more corrosive and lighthearted than this…”

Still mesmerized by the film of milk, Kristeva suppresses a retch. As a psychoanalyst, she makes her own diagnosis: she wants to spit herself out.

“A philosophical novel, even metaphysical, with a cold, lyrical realism.”

Infantile regression linked to a traumatic shock. But she is Kristeva: mistress of herself. She controls herself.

Sollers spews his torrent of words over the editor, who frowns to make clear his intense attentiveness, while the small child tugs at his sleeve: “The highly symptomatic turning point of the second half of the twentieth century will be described in its secret and concrete ramifications. One could draw a chemical table of it: the negative feminine bodies (and why), the positive bodies (and how).”

Kristeva reaches slowly toward the cup. Slips a finger into the handle. Brings the beige liquid to her lips.

“The philosophers will be shown in their private limitations, the women in their hysteria and their calculations, but also as being free (in both senses).”

Kristeva closes her eyes as she swallows. She hears her husband quote Casanova: “If pleasure exists, and if it can be experienced only in life, then life is a joy.”

The editor hops about: “Excellent! Very good! Good!”

The child looks up, surprised.

Sollers is just warming up, and moves on to the plot: “Here, the bigots look miserable, the sociopaths and sociomanes denounce superficiality, the spectacular industry becomes trapped or desperately wants to distort the fact, the Devil is annoyed because pleasure should be destructive and life a calamity.”

The coffee streams into Kristeva like a river of lukewarm lava. She feels the skin in her mouth, in her throat.

The editor wants to commission a book from Sollers when he has finished this one.

For the thousandth time Sollers recounts an anecdote about himself and Francis Ponge. The editor listens politely. Ah, these great writers! Always banging on about their obsessions, always shaping their material …

Kristeva thinks that phobia does not disappear but slides under the tongue, under language itself, that the object of the phobia is a proto-writing and, conversely, all use of words, inasmuch as it is writing, is a language of fear. “The writer: a phobic who succeeds in making life a metaphor in order not to die of fear but to come back to life in the signs,” she thinks.

The editor asks: “What’s the latest on Althusser?” Suddenly, Sollers falls silent. “After Barthes, it’s so awful. What a year!” Sollers looks away when he replies: “Yes, the world is mad. What can you do? But that is the fate of sad souls.” He doesn’t see Kristeva’s eyes open like two black holes. The editor takes his leave and walks off with the child, who makes little yapping noises.

Sollers stands silently. Kristeva visualizes the mouthful of coffee forming a sort of stagnant pool in her stomach. The danger has passed, but the skin is still there. The nausea remains at the bottom of the cup. Sollers says: “I have a talent for differences.” Kristeva drains the cup in a single gulp.

They walk toward the large pond where children play with wooden boats that their parents rent by the hour for a few francs.

Kristeva asks for the latest on Louis. Sollers replies that the dogs are standing guard but that Bernard was able to see him. “In a total daze. Apparently, when they found him, he kept repeating: ‘I killed Hélène. What happens next?’ Can you imagine? What … happens … next? Extraordinary, isn’t it?” Sollers savors the anecdote greedily. Kristeva brings him back to more practical concerns. Sollers tries to reassure her: the chaos of the apartment means that if the copy wasn’t destroyed, it has at least been lost forever. At worst, it will end up in a cardboard box and some Chinese people will find it, two hundred years from now, with no idea what it is, and they’ll use it to light their opium pipe.

“Your father was wrong. No copy, next time.”

“There were no consequences, and there won’t be a next time.”

“There is always a next time, my squirrel.”

Kristeva thinks about Barthes. Sollers says: “I knew him better than anyone.”

Kristeva replies coldly: “But I killed him.”

Sollers quotes Empedocles: “The blood around the heart is men’s thought.” But as he is unable to last more than a few seconds without bringing the conversation back to himself, he grits his teeth and whispers: “His death will not be in vain. I will be what I will be.”

Then he takes up his monologue again, as if nothing happened: “Of course the message has no importance anymore … ah, ah, this little affair is far from clear, oh, oh … the public, by definition, has no memory it is blank it is virgin forest … You and I, we are like fish in air … What does it matter if Debord is wrong about me, even going so far as to compare me with Cocteau?… Who are we, to begin with, and in the end?”

Kristeva sighs. She leads him toward the chess players.

Sollers is like a child—his short-term memory lasts only three minutes—so he becomes absorbed in a game between an old man and a young man, both wearing baseball caps with logos featuring a team from New York. While the young guy launches an attack clearly designed to neuter his opponent’s ability to castle, the writer whispers into his wife’s ear: “Look at that old guy, he’s as cunning as a fox, ha ha. But if they look for me, they will find me, ha ha.”

They hear the poc-poc of tennis balls on nearby courts.

It is Kristeva’s turn to drag her husband by the sleeve because it is nearly time.

They walk through a forest of swings and arrive at a little puppet theater. They sit on wooden benches, surrounded by children.

The man who sits just behind them is badly dressed and has a mustache.

He pulls at his crumpled jacket.

He traps his umbrella between his legs.

He lights a cigarette.

He leans toward Kristeva and whispers something in her ear.

Sollers turns and exclaims joyfully: “Hello there, Sergei!” Kristeva corrects him curtly: “His name is Nikolai.” Sollers takes a cigarette from a blue tortoiseshell case and asks the Bulgarian for a light. The child sitting next to him watches curiously. Sollers sticks out his tongue. The curtain opens, and the puppet Guignol appears. “Hello, children!” “Hello, Guignol!” Nikolai explains to Kristeva, in Bulgarian, that he has been tailing Hamed’s friend. He searched his house (without making a mess, this time) and he is absolutely certain: there is no copy. But there is something odd: for some time now, he’s been spending his days at the library.

As Sollers does not speak Bulgarian, he watches the play while he waits for them. The conflict is between Guignol and two others: an unshaven burglar, and a gendarme who rolls his r’s like Sergei. The story revolves around a simple dispute that is the pretext for multiple action scenes involving violence perpetrated with a stick. Essentially, Guignol must recover the Marquise’s necklace, stolen by the thief. Sollers immediately suspects the Marquise of having given it to the thief of her own free will in exchange for sexual favors.

Kristeva asks what kind of books Slimane has been reading.

Guignol asks the children if the thief went thataway.

Nikolai replies that most of the books he saw Slimane consulting were about linguistics and philosophy, but that, in his opinion, the gigolo is not really sure what he is looking for.

The children cry out: “Yeeeeeesssss!”

Kristeva thinks the main point is that he is looking for something. When she tries to repeat this to Sollers, he cries out: “Yeeeesss!”

Nikolai specifies: mostly Anglophone authors. Chomsky, Austin, Searle, and also a Russian, Jakobson, two Germans, Bühler and Popper, and one Frenchman, Benveniste.

The list speaks for itself as far as Kristeva is concerned.

The thief asks the children to betray Guignol.

The children shout: “Nooooooo!” Sollers, facetiously, says “Yeeesss!” but his answer is drowned out by the children’s cries.

Nikolai becomes even more specific: Slimane only leafed through some of the books, but he read Austin with particular care.

Kristeva deduces from this that he is seeking to contact Searle.

The thief sneaks up behind Guignol, armed with a stick. The children try to warn Guignol: “Watch out! Watch out!” But each time Guignol turns around, the thief hides. Guignol asks the children if the thief is nearby. The children try to tell him, but he acts like he’s deaf, pretending not to understand, which makes them hysterical. They scream, and Sollers screams with them: “Behind you! Behind you!”

Guignol is hit by the stick. Anxious silence in the theater. He looks as if he’s been knocked out, but in fact he’s just pretending. Phew.

Kristeva thinks.

A cunning trick allows Guignol to knock out the thief. For good measure, he rains blows on him with the stick. (In the real world, thinks Nikolai, no one would survive head trauma like that.)

The gendarme arrests the thief and congratulates Guignol.

The children clap until their hands are sore. In the end, we don’t know if Guignol has handed over the necklace or kept it for himself.

Kristeva puts a hand on her husband’s shoulder and shouts into his ear: “I have to go to the USA.”

Guignol waves: “Goodbye, children!”

The children and Sollers: “Goodbye, Guignol!”

The gendarme: “Goodbye, childrrren!”

Sollers, turning around: “Bye, Sergei.”

Nikolai: “Goodbye, Monsieur Krrristeva.”

Kristeva to Sollers: “I’m going to Ithaca.”

53

Slimane also wakes up in a bed that is not his own, but other than him the bed is empty, containing only the outline of a body, as if drawn in chalk on the still-warm sheets. Rather than a bed, he is lying on a mattress placed on the floor in a dark, windowless, almost completely bare room. From the other side of the door, he can hear men’s voices mixed with the sound of classical music. He remembers exactly where he is and he knows that music. (It’s Mahler.) He opens the door and, without bothering to get dressed, goes into the living room.

It is a very long and narrow room, with a long bay window overlooking Paris (toward Boulogne and Saint-Cloud). We are on the ninth floor. Around a low table, Michel Foucault, wrapped in a black kimono, is explaining the mysteries of elephant sexuality to two young men in underpants, one of whom has his portrait reproduced in three photographs hung on a pillar next to the sofa.

Or more exactly, Slimane thinks he understands, how elephant sexuality was perceived and described in seventeenth-century France.

The two young men smoke cigarettes that Slimane knows are stuffed with opium, because this is their technique to cushion the comedown. Curiously, Foucault has never had to resort to this, such is his tolerance for all drugs: he can be at his typewriter at nine in the morning after spending the whole of the previous night on LSD. The young men look less on form. All the same, they greet Slimane, hollow-voiced. Foucault offers him coffee, but just then there is a loud noise in the kitchen and a third young man appears, looking distressed, holding a bit of plastic. This is Mathieu Lindon, who has just broken the coffeepot. The two others cannot suppress a tubercular giggle. Foucault, in a debonair way, suggests tea. Slimane sits down and begins buttering a biscotte while the tall bald man in his black kimono returns to his lecture on elephants.

For François de Sales, bishop of Geneva in the seventeenth century and author of Introduction to the Devout Life, the elephant is a model of chastity: faithful and temperate, he has only one partner, with whom he mates once every three years for a period of five days, away from prying eyes, before they wash each other at length in order to purify themselves. Handsome Hervé, in his underpants, grumbles from behind his cigarette about the truth behind this elephant fable: the horror of Catholic morality, on which he spits—at least symbolically, as he is short on saliva, so he just coughs on it instead. Foucault, in his kimono, becomes animated: “Exactly! What is very interesting here is that even in Pliny we find the same analysis of the elephant’s morals. So if we trace the genealogy of this moral, as Nietzsche would say, we realize that its roots reach deep into an epoch prior to Christianity, or at least into an epoch where its development was still largely embryonic.” Foucault looks jubilant. “You see, we talk about Christianity as if it were a single thing … But Christianity and paganism do not constitute clearly defined and distinct entities. One mustn’t think of impenetrable blocks that appear out of nowhere and disappear just as suddenly, without influencing each other, interpenetrating, metamorphosing.”

Mathieu Lindon, who is still standing holding the handle of the broken coffeepot, asks: “But, uh, Michel, what’s your point exactly?”

Foucault gives Lindon one of his dazzling smiles: “In fact, paganism can’t be regarded as a single entity, but the same is even more true of Christianity! We need to reevaluate our methods, you understand?”

Slimane bites into his biscotte and says: “Hey, Michel, you know that conference at Cornell, are you still going? Where is that place, exactly?”

Foucault, always happy to answer questions, no matter what they might be, and unsurprised that Slimane should be interested in his conference, replies that Cornell is a large American university situated in a small city in the northern United States named Ithaca, like Ulysses’s island. He doesn’t know why he accepted the invitation, because it’s a conference on language, the “linguistic turn” as they say over there, and he hasn’t worked in that field for a long time (The Order of Things came out in 1966) but anyway he said yes and he doesn’t like to go back on his word, so he’ll be there. (In fact, he knows perfectly well why he accepted: he adores the United States.)

When Slimane has finished chewing his biscotte, he drinks a mouthful of the scorchingly hot tea, lights a cigarette, clears his throat, and asks: “Do you think I could come with you?”

54

“No, darling, you can’t come with me. It’s a conference for academics only and you hate it when people call you Monsieur Kristeva.”

Sollers’s smile cannot conceal the wound to his ego that, alas, may never heal.

Can you imagine Montaigne or Pascal or Voltaire doing a postgraduate degree?

Why do those pathetic Americans obstinately refuse to take any notice of him, this giant among giants, who will be read and reread in 2043?

Can you imagine Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo? Will I one day have to ask permission to think?

The funniest thing is that they’re inviting Derrida, obviously. But aren’t you aware, my dear Yankee friends, that your idol, this man you revere because he writes différance with an a (the world decomposes, the world dissolves), wrote his masterpiece, Dissemination (the world disseminates), as an homage to his own Nombres, which no one in New York or California has ever bothered to translate! Seriously, it’s just priceless!

Sollers laughs and pats his stomach. Ho ho ho! Without him, no Derrida! Ah, if only the world knew … Ah, if only the Americans knew …

Kristeva listens patiently to this speech, which she knows by heart.

“Can you imagine Flaubert, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Claudel, Proust, Breton, Artaud, taking a postgraduate degree?” Sollers abruptly stops talking and pretends to think, but Kristeva knows what he is going to say next: “It’s true that Céline wrote a doctoral thesis, but it was for a medical degree, although in literary terms it was superb.” (Subtext: He has read Céline’s medical thesis. How many academics can say as much?)

Then he rubs against his wife, sliding his head under her arm, and says in a dopey voice:

“But why do you want to go, my beloved squirrel?”

“You know why. Because Searle will be there.”

“And all the others!” Sollers explodes.

Kristeva lights a cigarette. She examines the embroidered motif on the cushion she is leaning against, a reproduction of the unicorn from Cluny’s tapestry, which she and Sollers bought together back in the old days, at the Singapore airport. Her legs are folded under her, her hair is in a ponytail, and she caresses the potted plant next to the sofa as she says in an undertone, articulating exaggeratedly with her very faint accent: “Yes … the otherrrs.”

To contain his nervousness, Sollers recites his little personal rosary:

“Foucault: too irritable, jealous, vehement. Deleuze? Too dark. Althusser? Too sick (ha ha!). Derrida? Too hidden in his successive envelopments (ha ha). Hate Lacan. Don’t see any harm in the Communists looking after security at Vincennes. (Vincennes: a place for monitoring the fanatics.)”

The truth, Kristeva knows, is that Sollers is afraid of not ending up published in the Pléiade collection, that one sure sign of having made it.

For now, the misunderstood genius strives to vilify the Americans, with their “gay and lesbian studies,” their totalitarian feminism, their fascination for “deconstruction” or for Lacanian psychoanalysis, when it’s obvious that they’ve never even heard of Molière!

And their women!

“American women? Mostly unbearable: money, complaints, family sagas, pseudo-psychological infection. Thankfully, in New York, there are Latino and Chinese girls, and quite a few Europeans, too.” But at Cornell! Pfft.

Kristeva drinks a jasmine tea while she leafs through an English-language psychoanalysis journal.

Sollers paces around the large living-room table, livid, shoulders hunched forward like a bull: “Foucault, Foucault, that’s all they think about.”

Then he suddenly lifts his head and thrusts out his chest, like a sprinter on the finishing line: “Oh, screw it, what do I care? I know how it works: you have to travel, give speeches, speak Anglo-American like a good slave, participate in tedious conferences, ‘work together,’ water down your thoughts, seem human.”

Putting her cup down, Kristeva speaks to him gently: “You’ll have your revenge, my love.”

Sollers, feverish now, starts talking about himself in the second person while touching his wrist: “You have a facility for elocution; it is flagrant, annoying (they’d prefer it if you stuttered, but never mind)…”

Kristeva takes his hand.

Sollers smiles at her and says: “Sometimes you need a little encouragement.”

Kristeva smiles back at him and says: “Come on, let’s read some Joseph de Maistre.”

55

Quai des Orfèvres. Bayard types up his report while Simon reads a Chomsky book on generative grammar, which he has to admit he doesn’t really understand.

Each time he comes to the edge of the page, Bayard uses his right hand to move the lever that sends the typewriter cylinder flying back across to the other side while, with his left, he grabs his cup of coffee, drinks a mouthful, takes a drag on his cigarette and puts it back on the edge of a yellow ashtray bearing the Pastis 51 logo. Crac tac tac tac, tac tac tac, crac tac tac tac, and so on.

But the tac-tac sound stops abruptly. Bayard sits up on his padded imitation leather chair, turns toward Simon, and asks:

“Actually, where’s it from, that name? Kristeva?”

56

Serge Moati is stuffing his face with slices of Savane marble cake when Mitterrand arrives. Fabius, in slippers, opens the door of his mansion in the Panthéon to let him in. Lang, Badinter, Attali, Debray, all wait patiently, drinking coffee. Mitterrand tosses his scarf to Fabius, moaning: “Your friend Mauroy? I’m going to give him a good beating!” He’s in a bad mood, no doubt about it. The young conspirators realize that this meeting is not going to be much fun. Mitterrand bares his teeth: “Rocard! Rocard!” No one says a word. “They messed up Metz and now suddenly they’re desperate to sign me up for the presidential election so they can be rid of me!” His young lieutenants sigh. Moati chews his Savane in slow motion. The young adviser with the birdlike face risks saying, “President…” but Mitterrand turns on him, cold-eyed, furious, poking his finger into his chest as he moves toward him: “Shut your mouth, Attali…” And Attali retreats all the way to the wall as the would-be candidate goes on: “They all want me to fail but I can thwart their strategy easily: all I have to do is not accept it! Let that idiot Rocard get a good hiding from that imbecile Giscard. Rocard, Giscard … it’ll be the war of the morons! Magnificent! Sublime! The Deuxième Gauche? Fiddlesticks, Debray! French fiddlesticks! Robert, get a pen, I’m going to dictate a press release. I abdicate! I fold. Ha! How do you like that?” He moans: “Fail! What does that mean, to fail?”

No one dares respond, not even Fabius, who does occasionally stand up to his boss but who wouldn’t dare get involved in a subject as sticky as this. Anyway, the question was purely rhetorical.

Mitterrand must record his statement of principle. He has prepared his little speech: it is dreary, formulaic … it’s just crap. It talks about stasis and the dangers of not changing. No passion, no message, no inspiration, just hollow, bombastic phrases. The cold anger of the eternal loser, palpable on the screen. The recording takes place in gloomy silence. Fabius’s toes writhe nervously inside his slippers. Moati chews his Savane like it’s cement. Debray and Badinter look blankly at each other. Attali watches through the window as a traffic cop puts a parking ticket on Moati’s R5. Even Jack Lang looks perplexed.

Mitterrand grits his teeth. He wears the mask he has worn all his life, walled up inside that morgue where he always goes to conceal the anger gnawing at him. He gets to his feet, picks up his scarf, and leaves without saying goodbye to anyone.

The silence drags on for a few minutes longer.

Moati, pale: “Well, that’s it, then … We’d better call a spin doctor. It’s our only hope.”

Lang, behind him, mutters: “No, there is another one.”

57

“I don’t understand how he could have missed it the first time. He knew he was looking for a document about that Russian linguist, Jakobson. He sees a book about Jakobson on the desk and he doesn’t even glance at it?”

Yes, it has to be said, that does seem implausible.

“And just by chance, he’s there exactly when we arrive at Barthes’s place, when he’d had weeks to go back to the apartment, ’cause he had the key.”

Simon listens to Bayard while the Boeing 747 crawls over to the runway. Giscard, that horrible bourgeois fascist, finally agreed to pay for their airfare, but was still too mean to book them on Concorde.

The investigation into the Bulgarians led them to Kristeva.

Now Kristeva has gone to the United States.

So … it’s hot dogs and cable TV for our heroes.

Naturally, there is a kid crying in their row.

A stewardess comes over and asks Bayard to extinguish his cigarette because smoking is prohibited during takeoff and landing.

Simon has brought Umberto Eco’s Lector in Fabula to read on the journey. Bayard asks him if he’s learning anything interesting from his book, and by interesting he means useful for the investigation, though maybe that’s not all he means, actually. Simon reads out loud: “I live (I mean: I who write, I have the intention of being alive in the only world I know), but at the moment when I create a theory of possible narrative worlds, I decide (based on the world of which I have direct physical experience) to reduce this world to a semiotic experience in order to compare it to narrative worlds.”

Simon gets a hot flush while the stewardess moves her arms to mime the safety instructions. (The kid stops crying; he is fascinated by this traffic-cop choreography.)

Officially, Kristeva has gone to Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, for a conference whose title and subject Bayard has not even attempted to understand. All he needs to know is that John Searle, the American philosopher mentioned by Eco, is also among the guests. The aim is not to kidnap the Bulgarian woman in an Eichmann-style raid. If Giscard had wanted to arrest Barthes’s murderer (because everything suggests she is involved), he would have prevented her from leaving the country. The aim is to understand what’s going on. Isn’t that always the way?

For Little Red Riding Hood, the real world is the one where wolves speak.

And to recover that bloody document.

Bayard tries to understand: Is the seventh function a set of instructions? A magic spell? A chimera provoking hysteria in all those little political and intellectual cabals who see in it the ultimate jackpot for whoever can get their hands on it?

In the seat next to his, separated by the aisle, the kid takes out a cube with multicolored sides that he starts twisting in different directions.

When it comes down to it, Simon wonders, what is the fundamental difference between himself and Little Red Riding Hood or Sherlock Holmes?

He hears Bayard thinking aloud, or maybe he’s talking to him: “Let’s assume that the seventh function of language really is this performative function. It enables whoever masters it to convince anyone to do anything in any circumstances … okay. Apparently, the document fits into a single page. Let’s say it’s written on both sides, in small letters. How can the instructions for something so powerful fit into such a tiny space? All user manuals, for a dishwasher or a TV or my 504, are pages and pages long.”

Simon grinds his teeth. Yes, it’s hard to understand. No, there is no explanation. If he had even the tiniest intuition of what that document contains, he would already have been elected president and have slept with every woman he wanted.

While he is speaking, Bayard keeps his eyes fixed on the kid’s toy. From what he can observe, the cube is subdivided into smaller cubes that must be arranged by color using vertical and horizontal rotations. The kid is going at it frenetically.

In Lector in Fabula, Eco writes about the status of fictional characters that he calls “supernumeraries” because they add to the people in the real world. Ronald Reagan and Napoleon are part of the real world, but Sherlock Holmes is not. But then what meaning can there be in an assertion such as “Sherlock Holmes is not married” or “Hamlet is mad”? Is it possible to regard a supernumerary as a real person?

Eco quotes Volli, an Italian semiologist who said: “I exist; Madame Bovary doesn’t.” Simon feels increasingly anxious.

Bayard gets up to go to the toilets. Not that he really needs to piss, but he can see that Simon is absorbed by his book, so he may as well stretch his legs, particularly as he’s already knocked back all those little bottles of booze.

Walking to the back of the plane, he bumps into Foucault, who is mid-conversation with a young Arab man with headphones around his neck.

He saw the conference schedule and Foucault’s presence here should not surprise him because he knew the philosopher was invited, but all the same he cannot suppress a slight start. Foucault flashes him his predatory smile.

“Don’t you know Slimane, Superintendent? He was a good friend of Hamed’s. You haven’t cleared up the circumstances of his death, I suppose? Just another queer, eh? Or is it because he was an Arab? Does that count double?”

When Bayard returns to his seat, he finds Simon asleep, head hanging forward, in that uncomfortable position typical of people who try to sleep while sitting. It was another phrase of Eco’s, quoting his mother-in-law, that finished him off: “What would have happened if my son-in-law had not married my daughter?”

Simon dreams. Bayard daydreams. Foucault takes Slimane to the bar upstairs, to talk to him about his lecture on sexual dreams in Ancient Greece.

They order two whiskeys from the stewardess, who smiles almost as much as the philosopher.

According to Artemidorus, our sexual dreams are like prophecies. You have to establish parallels between the sexual relations experienced in dreams and the social relations experienced in reality. For example, dreaming that you sleep with a slave is a good sign: insofar as the slave is your property, that means your estate is going to increase. With a married woman? Bad sign: you mustn’t touch another man’s property. With your mother, it depends. According to Foucault, we have greatly exaggerated the importance the Greeks attributed to Oedipus. In any case, the point of view is that of the free, active male. Penetrating (man, woman, slave, family member) is good. Being penetrated is bad. The worst, the most unnatural (just after sexual relations with gods, animals, and corpses), is lesbians practicing penetration.

“Each to his own criteria, all is normative!” Foucault laughs, orders two more whiskeys, and leads Slimane to the toilets, where the gigolo graciously lets him do what he wants (though he refuses to take off his Walkman).

We have no way of knowing what Simon dreams about, because we are not inside his head, are we?

Bayard notes Foucault and Slimane climbing the stairs to go to the bar on the plane’s upper deck. Driven by intuition rather than reason, he goes back to examine their empty seats. There are some books in the pocket in front of Foucault’s seat and some magazines on Slimane’s seat. Bayard opens the overhead compartment and grabs the luggage that he supposes must belong to the two men. He sits in Foucault’s seat and goes through the philosopher’s bag and the gigolo’s backpack. Papers, books, a spare T-shirt, cassettes. No obvious sign of a document, but Bayard realizes it probably won’t have “The Seventh Function of Language” written on it in bold, so he takes the two bags and walks over to his own seat to wake Simon.

By the time Simon has emerged from his dream, grasped the situation, expressed his surprise at Foucault’s presence on the plane, become indignant at what Bayard is asking him to do, and in spite of this agreed to rummage through things that do not belong to him, a good twenty minutes have passed, so that when Simon is finally in a position to guarantee to Bayard that there is not, in Foucault’s or in Slimane’s belongings, anything that might bear any resemblance at all to the seventh function of language, the two men see Foucault coming down the stairs.

He is going to return to his seat and is bound to realize, sooner or later, that his things have disappeared.

Without any need to confer, the two men react like old teammates. Simon steps over Bayard and goes to meet Foucault in the aisle, while Bayard slips into the parallel aisle to walk back to the tail of the airplane and come around in the other direction to Foucault’s row.

Simon stands in front of Foucault, who waits for him to move out of the way. But as Simon doesn’t budge an inch, Foucault looks at him and, from behind his thick-lensed glasses, recognizes the young man.

“Well … if it isn’t Alcibiades!”

“Monsieur Foucault, what a surprise!… It’s an honor! I adore your work … What are you working on at the moment?… Still sex?”

Foucault narrows his eyes.

Bayard walks down the far aisle but is blocked by a stewardess pushing a drinks cart. She calmly serves cups of tea and glasses of red wine to the passengers while trying to sell them duty-free, and Bayard hops up and down behind her.

Simon doesn’t listen to Foucault’s reply because he is concentrating on his next question. Behind Foucault, Slimane grows impatient. “Can we move forward?” Simon grabs his opportunity: “Oh, you’re with someone? Enchanté, enchanté! So does he call you Alcibiades too? Ha ha … uh … So have you been to the United States before?”

At a pinch, Bayard could push past the stewardess, but there is no way he could get around the cart, and he still has another three rows to go.

Simon asks: “Have you read Peyrefitte? What a load of crap, huh? We miss you at Vincennes, you know.”

Gently but firmly, Foucault takes Simon by the shoulders and makes a sort of tango move, pivoting with him, so that Simon finds himself between Foucault and Slimane, which effectively means that Foucault has got past him and that nothing but a few paces now separates him from his seat.

Finally, Bayard comes level with the toilets at the back of the plane, where he is able to cross to the opposite aisle. He reaches Foucault’s seat, but the philosopher is moving toward him and he is going to see him putting the bags back in the overhead compartment.

Simon, who does not need glasses and is well aware of the situation, has seen Bayard before Foucault has, so he cries out: “Herculine Barbin!”

The passengers jump. Foucault turns around. Bayard opens the compartment, shoves the two bags in, and closes it again. Foucault stares at Simon. Simon smiles stupidly and says: “We’re all Herculine Barbins, don’t you think, Monsieur Foucault?”

Bayard moves past Foucault, apologizing, as if he is just returning from the toilets. Foucault watches Bayard pass, then shrugs, and at last everyone returns to his own seat.

“Who’s that, Herculine Whatsisname?”

“A nineteenth-century hermaphrodite who had a very unfortunate life. Foucault edited his memoirs. He turned it into a slightly personal thing, used it to denounce the normative assignments of biopower, which force us to choose our sex and our sexuality by recognizing only two possibilities, man or woman, in both cases heterosexual, unlike the Greeks, for example, who were much more relaxed about the question, even if they had their own norms, which were…”

“Okay, got it.”

“Who’s the young guy with Foucault?”

The rest of the journey passes without any problems. Bayard lights a cigarette. The stewardess comes over to remind him that smoking is prohibited during landing, so the superintendent falls back on his emergency miniatures.

We know that the young guy with Foucault is called Slimane; we don’t know his surname. But when they reach American soil, Simon and Bayard see him deep in discussion with several policemen at passport control because his visa is not valid, or rather, because he does not have a visa at all. Bayard wonders how he was allowed to take off from Roissy. Foucault tries to intervene on his behalf, but it’s no good: American policemen are not in the habit of joking around with foreigners. Slimane tells Foucault not to wait for him, and not to worry—he’ll be fine. Then Simon and Bayard lose sight of them and get on a suburban train.

They do not arrive by ship like Céline in Journey to the End of the Night, but emerge from underground at Madison Square Garden, and their sudden entrance into central Manhattan is no less of a shock: the two stunned men stare at the skyscrapers lining the sidewalks to vanishing point and the smear of light on Eighth Avenue, filled at once with a feeling of unreality and a no less powerful feeling of familiarity. Simon, who used to read Strange, expects to see Spider-Man leaping over the yellow taxis and red lights. (But Spider-Man is a “supernumerary,” so this is impossible.) A busy-looking native stops spontaneously to ask if they need help and this completes the two Parisians’ disorientation, so unused are they to such solicitude. In the New York night, they walk up Eighth Avenue until they reach the Port Authority Bus Terminal, opposite the gigantic building that houses The New York Times, as the massive gothic letters on the façade unequivocally indicate. Then they get on a bus to Ithaca. Goodbye to the skyscraper wonderland.

As the journey lasts five hours and everyone is tired, Bayard takes a small, multicolored cube out of his bag and starts to play with it. Simon cannot believe it: “You nicked that kid’s Rubik’s Cube?” Bayard finishes his first row as the bus emerges from the Lincoln Tunnel.

58

“Shift into overdrive in the linguistic turn”

Cornell University, Ithaca, fall 1980

(CONFERENCE ORGANIZER: Jonathan D. Culler)

LIST OF TALKS:

Noam Chomsky

Degenerative grammar

Hélène Cixous

Les larmes de l’hibiscus

Jacques Derrida

A Sec Solo

Michel Foucault

Jeux de polysémie dans l’onirocritique d’Artémidore

Félix Guattari

Le régime signifiant despotique

Luce Irigaray

Phallogocentrisme et métaphysique de la substance

Roman Jakobson

Stayin’ Alive, structurally speaking

Fredric Jameson

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act

Julia Kristeva

Le langage, cette inconnue

Sylvère Lotringer

Italy: Autonomia—Post-political politics

Jean-François Lyotard

PoMo de bouche: la parole post-moderne

Paul de Man

Cerisy sur le gâteau: la déconstruction en France

Jeffrey Mehlman

Blanchot, the laundry man

Avital Ronell

“Because a man speaks, he thinks he’s able to speak about language.”—Goethe & the metaspeakers

Richard Rorty

Wittgenstein vs Heidegger: Clash of the continents?

Edward Said

Exile on Main Street

John Searle

Fake or feint: performing the F words in fictional works

Gayatri Spivak

Should the subaltern shut up sometimes?

Morris J. Zapp

Fishing for supplement in a deconstructive world

59

“Deleuze isn’t coming, right?”

“No, but Anti-Oedipus is playing tonight. I’m so excited!”

“Have you heard the new single?”

“Yeah, it’s awesome. So L.A.!”

Kristeva is sitting on the grass between two boys. Stroking their hair, she says: “I love America. You are so ingenuous, boys.”

One of them tries to kiss her neck. She pushes him away, laughing. The other whispers in her ear: “You mean ‘genuine,’ right?” Kristeva giggles. She feels a shiver of electricity run down her squirrelish body. Facing them, another student finishes rolling and lights a joint. The pleasant smell of the grass spreads through the air. Kristeva takes a few hits. Her head spins a little bit. She pontificates soberly: “As Spinoza said, each negation is a definition.” The three young pre–New Wave post-hippies laugh and exclaim rapturously: “Wow, say that again! What did Spinoza say?”

On campus, students come and go, some looking busy, others less so, crossing the wide lawn between Gothic, Victorian, and Neoclassical buildings. A sort of bell tower overlooks the scene, itself perched on top of a hill that rises above a lake and some gorges. We may be in the middle of nowhere, but at least we’re in the middle. Kristeva bites into a club sandwich because the baguette, which she loves so much, has not yet reached the remote Tompkins County, in deepest New York State, halfway between New York City and Toronto, former territory of the Cayuga tribe, which was part of the Iroquois Confederation, and home to the small city of Ithaca, home in turn to the prestigious Cornell University. She frowns and says: “Unless it’s the other way around…”

They are joined by a fourth young man, who comes out of the hotel-management school carrying an aluminum packet in one hand and Of Grammatology in the other (but he doesn’t dare ask Kristeva if she knows Derrida). He’s brought muffins, oven fresh, that he made himself. Kristeva is happy to take part in this improvised picnic, getting tipsy on tequila. (Unsurprisingly, the bottle is hidden inside a paper bag.)

She watches the students walk past, carrying books or hockey sticks or guitar cases under their arms.

An old man with a receding hairline, his abundant hair brushed back as if he once had a thick bush on his head, mumbles to himself under a tree. His hands, which shake in front of him, look like branches.

A young, short-haired woman, who looks a bit like a cross between Cruella in 101 Dalmatians and Vanessa Redgrave, appears to be the only member of an invisible protest march. She shouts slogans that Kristeva does not understand. She seems very angry.

A group of young guys is playing with an American football. One recites Shakespeare while the others drink red wine from the bottle. (Not wrapped in paper, the rebels.) They throw the ball to one another, taking care to get a good spiral. The one with the bottle fails to catch the ball in his other hand (which is holding a cigarette), so the others make fun of him. They already seem pretty drunk.

Kristeva looks at the bush-man with the receding hairline; he looks back at her and they hold each other’s gaze, just for an instant, but a touch too long for it to be insignificant.

The angry young woman stands in front of Kristeva and says: “I know who you are. Go home, bitch.” Kristeva’s friends stare wide-eyed at each other, burst out laughing, then reply excitedly: “Are you stoned? Who the fuck do you think you are?” The woman walks away and Kristeva watches as she recommences her solitary protest. She is fairly certain she has never seen her before in her life.

Another group of young people bear down on the football players, and the atmosphere changes immediately; from where she is sitting, Kristeva can tell that the two groups are openly hostile to each other.

A church bell rings.

The new group noisily calls out to the first group. From what Kristeva can hear, they are calling them “French suckers.” Kristeva does not understand at first if this is a prepositional apposition (suckers who also happen to be French) or a genitive construction (they practice fellatio on French people), but given that the group in question seems Anglo-Saxon (because she thinks she spotted that they knew some of the rules of American football), she thinks the second hypothesis is the more likely.

Whatever, the first group responds with insults of the same kind (“you analytic pricks!”) and the situation would no doubt have degenerated had not a man in his sixties intervened to separate them, shouting (in French, surprisingly): “Calm down, you lunatics!” As if to impress her with his grasp of the situation, one of Kristeva’s young admirers then whispers to her: “That’s Paul de Man. He’s French, isn’t he?” Kristeva replies: “No, he’s Belgian.”

Under his tree, the bush-man mutters: “The sound shape of language…”

The one-woman protest march screams at the top of her lungs, as if she were supporting one of the two teams: “We don’t need Derrida, we have Jimi Hendrix!”

Distracted by Cruella Redgrave’s disconcerting slogan, Paul de Man does not hear the man approach him from behind until a voice says: “Turn around, man. And face your enemy.” A guy in a tweed suit is standing there, his jacket too big for his skinny body, the sleeves too short for his long arms, his hair side-parted with a lock of hair hanging over his forehead; he looks like a supporting actor in a Sydney Pollack film, except for his eyes, which are so piercing you feel as if they are x-raying you.

This is John Searle.

The bush-man observes Kristeva as she observes the scene. Attentive, concentrated, Kristeva lets her cigarette burn down to her fingertips. The bush-man’s eyes move from Searle to Kristeva, and from Kristeva to Searle.

Paul de Man tries to appear simultaneously ironic and conciliatory, and he is only half-convincing in this role of a man at ease. “Peace, my friend!” he says. “Put your sword down and help me separate those kids.” Which, for reasons unknown, serves to annoy Searle, who advances toward Paul de Man. Everyone thinks that he is about to hit him. Kristeva squeezes one young man’s arm, and he takes advantage of the situation to hold her hand. Paul de Man remains immobile, paralyzed, fascinated by the menacing body coming toward him and the idea of a fist’s impact, but when he moves to protect himself or—who knows?—maybe even attack, a third voice rings out, its falsely jovial intonation barely concealing a faintly hysterical anxiety: “Dear Paul! Dear John! Welcome to Cornell! I’m so glad you could come!”

This is Jonathan Culler, the young researcher who has organized the conference. He rushes over to hold out his hand to Searle, who shakes it with bad grace; his hand is limp and his expression malicious as he stares at Paul de Man. In French, he says to the Belgian: “Take your Derrida boys and piss off. Now.” Paul de Man leads the little group away, and the incident is over. The young man hugs Kristeva as if they’d escaped from great danger, or at least as if they’d lived through a moment of great intensity together, and perhaps Kristeva feels something similar—in any case, she doesn’t push him away.

The sound of a car engine roars through the dusk. A Lotus Esprit comes to a sudden halt with a screech of tires. A spry man in his forties gets out, cigar between his lips, bucket hat on his head, silk pocket handkerchief, and heads straight for Kristeva. “Hey, chica!” He kisses her hand. She turns to her young admirers and points at the newcomer: “Boys, allow me to introduce Morris Zapp, a specialist in structuralism, poststructuralism, New Criticism, and lots of other things.”

Morris Zapp smiles and adds, in a tone sufficiently detached that one does not immediately suspect him of vanity (but in French, all the same): “The first professor in the world with a six-figure salary!”

The young men say “Wow” as they smoke their joint.

Kristeva laughs her clear laugh and asks: “Have you prepared your presentation on Volvos?”

Morris Zapp puts on an apologetic tone: “You know … I don’t think the world is ready.” He glances over at Searle and Culler, who are talking together on the lawn. He doesn’t hear Searle explain to Culler that all the speakers at the conference are crap except for him and Chomsky, but he decides not to go over and say hello to them anyway, and tells Kristeva: “Well, I’ll see you later. I have to check in at the Hilton.”

“You’re not sleeping on campus?”

“What? My God, certainly not!”

Kristeva laughs. And yet Telluride House, which is where all Cornell’s visiting speakers are put up, has an impeccable reputation. In some people’s eyes, Morris Zapp has elevated the academic career to the ranks of the fine arts. Watching him get back in his Lotus, rev the engine, almost crash into the bus from New York, and tear off up the hill at top speed, she thinks that those people are not wrong.

Then she spots Simon Herzog and Superintendent Bayard getting off the bus, and her face falls.

She pays no further attention to the bush-man, still watching her from under his tree, but he in turn does not notice that he is being watched by a skinny young North African man. The old man with the receding hairline wears a pinstriped suit in thick cloth that looks like it belongs in a Kafka novel, and a woolen tie. He mumbles something under his tree. No one hears it, but even if they had, very few would understand it because it’s in Russian. The young Arab puts his Walkman headphones back over his ears. Kristeva walks along the grass, looking up at the stars. After five hours on the bus, Bayard has succeeded in doing only one side of the Rubik’s Cube. Simon stands there, amazed by the beauty of the campus, and can’t help thinking about Vincennes, which in comparison is a total dump.

60

“In the beginning, there was philosophy and science and until the eighteenth century they walked hand in hand, basically so they could fight against the Church’s obscurantism, and then, gradually, from the nineteenth century on, with Romanticism and all that stuff, they started to get into the spirit of the Enlightenment, and philosophers in Germany and France (but not in England) started saying: science cannot penetrate the secret of life; science cannot penetrate the secret of the human soul; only philosophy can do that. And suddenly, continental philosophy was not only hostile to science but also to its principles: clarity, intellectual rigor, the culture of proof. It became increasingly esoteric, increasingly freestyle, increasingly spiritualist (except for the Marxists), increasingly vitalist (with Bergson, for example).

“And all this culminated in Heidegger: a reactionary philosopher, in the full meaning of the term, who decided that philosophy had been heading the wrong way for centuries and that it had to return to the primordial question, which is the question of Being, so he wrote Being and Time, where he says he’s going to search for Being. Except he never found it, ha ha, but anyway. So it was he who really inspired this fashion for nebulous philosophers full of complicated neologisms, convoluted reasoning, dubious analogies, and risky metaphors, leading to Derrida, who’s the heir to all that stuff now.

“Meanwhile the English and the Americans stayed faithful to a more scientific idea of philosophy. This is called analytic philosophy, and Searle is the leader of that movement.”

[Anonymous student, interviewed on campus.]

61

Let’s be honest: the food is excellent in the United States, and especially so at the cafeteria in Cornell reserved for the professors, which even if it’s self-service is more like a restaurant in terms of culinary quality.

It is lunchtime, and most of the conference’s speakers are scattered through the refectory in a geopolitical pattern that Bayard and Simon have not yet figured out. The room consists of tables that can seat six to eight, none of them fully occupied. But—Simon and Bayard can scent this in the air—there are clearly various camps.

“I wish I could get a rundown on the different forces here,” says Bayard to Simon, choosing a double rib steak with mashed potato, plantains, and boudin blanc. The black chef, who overheard him, responds in French: “You see the table near the door? That’s where the analytics sit. They’re in enemy territory, and they’re outnumbered, so they’re sticking together.” There is Searle, Chomsky, and Cruella Redgrave, whose real name is Camille Paglia, a specialist in the history of sexuality and a direct rival of Foucault, whom she detests with all her being. “On the other side, near the window, there’s a belle brochette, as you say in France: Lyotard, Guattari, Cixous, and Foucault in the middle—you know him, of course, the tall bald guy who’s talking, right? Kristeva is over there, with Morris Zapp and Sylvère Lotringer, the boss of the magazine Sémiotext(e). In the corner, on his own, the old guy with the wool tie and the weird hair, I don’t know who that is. [Strange-looking man, thinks Bayard.] And the young lady with the violet hair behind him? I don’t know her, either.” His Puerto Rican sous-chef glances over and remarks tonelessly: “Probably Heideggerians.”

A professional reflex rather than any genuine interest prompts Bayard to ask how serious the rivalries between the professors are. In reply, the black chef just points at Chomsky’s table, where a young, mousy man is passing. Searle calls out to him:

“Hey, Jeffrey, you need to translate that asshole’s latest piece of crap for me.”

“Hey, John, I’m not your bitch. Do it yourself, okay?”

“Fine, dickhead. My French is good enough for that shit.”

The black chef and his Puerto Rican assistant burst out laughing and high-five each other. Bayard didn’t understand the dialogue, but he gets the idea. Behind him in the line, an impatient voice grumbles: “Can you move along, please?” Simon and Bayard recognize the young Arab who was on the plane with Foucault. He is holding a tray of chicken curry, purple potatoes, hardboiled eggs, and celery purée, but he does not have official accreditation so is held back at the checkout. Foucault, seeing this, starts to intervene, but Slimane signals that everything is fine, and after brief negotiations he is allowed through with his tray.

Bayard sits down next to Simon at the solitary old man’s table.

Then he sees Derrida arrive, recognizing him in spite of never having seen him before: head pulled into his shoulders, square-jawed, thin-lipped, eagle-nosed, wearing a corduroy suit, the top buttons of his shirt undone, silver hair springing up from his head like flames. He helps himself to couscous and red wine. He is accompanied by Paul de Man. The people at Searle’s table stop speaking, and so does Foucault. Cixous gestures to him but he doesn’t see her: his eyes have immediately sought and found Searle. A moment’s indecision, his meal tray in hand, then he goes over to join his friends. Cixous kisses him on both cheeks, Guattari pats him on the back, Foucault shakes his hand while looking surly (the consequence of an old article by Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in which, roughly speaking, he suggested that Foucault had completely misunderstood Descartes). The young woman with violet hair also goes over to say hello: her name is Avital Ronell, she is a Goethe specialist and a great admirer of deconstruction.

Bayard observes the body language and facial expressions. He eats his boudin in silence while Simon talks about the program of events that lies on the table between them: “Have you seen? There’s a symposium on Jakobson. Shall we go?”

Bayard lights a cigarette. He almost feels like saying yes.

62

“The analytic philosophers are real drudges. They’re Guillermo Vilas, you know? They’re so boring. They spend hours defining their terms. For each argument, they never fail to write the premise, and then the premise of the premise, and so on. They’re fucking logicians. Essentially, they take twenty pages to explain stuff that could easily be summarized in ten lines. Weirdly, they often make exactly that criticism of the continentals, while also having a go at them for their unbridled whimsy, for not being rigorous, for not defining their terms, for writing literature rather than philosophy, for lacking the crucial mathematical spirit, for being poets, basically, guys who aren’t serious, who are like crazy mystics (even though they’re all atheists, ha!). But anyway, the continentals are more like McEnroe. At least they’re never boring.”

[Anonymous student, interviewed on campus.]

63

Simon is generally considered to have a reasonably good grasp of English, but oddly, what is considered reasonable in France, in terms of mastery of a foreign language, always seems to prove woefully inadequate in reality.

So Simon understands only about one word in three of Morris Zapp’s speech. In his defense, it has to be said that the subject—deconstruction—is not one he’s very familiar with, and involves some difficult, or at least obscure, concepts. But still, he was hoping to find it enlightening.

Bayard did not go with him, and Simon is pleased: he would have been unbearable.

Given that the content of the speech largely escapes him, he seeks meaning elsewhere: in Morris Zapp’s ironic inflections, in the audience’s knowing laughter (each member wishing to seal his rightful sense of belonging to the here-and-now of this amphitheater—“another amphitheater,” thinks Simon, succumbing to an unhealthy structuralist-paranoiac reflex to search for recurrent motifs), in the questions of the listeners, which are never really about the matter at hand but rather attempts if not to challenge the master, at least to position the questioner, in relation to the other listeners, as a serious thinker blessed with acute critical faculties and superior intellectual capacities (in a word, to distinguish the questioner, as Bourdieu would say). From the tone of each question, Simon can guess the asker’s situation: undergrad, postgrad, professor, specialist, rival … He can easily detect the bores, the wallflowers, the asslickers, the snobs, and—most numerous of all—those who forget to ask their question, so busy are they reeling off their interminable monologues, intoxicated by the sound of their own voices, driven by that imperious need to offer their opinion. Clearly, something existential is going on in this puppet theater.

But finally he does seize upon a passage that holds his attention: “The root of critical error is a naïve confusion of literature with life.” This intrigues him, so he asks his neighbor, an Englishman in his forties, if he might be able to provide a sort of simultaneous translation, or at least summarize what’s being said, and as the Englishman, like half the campus and three-quarters of those at the conference, has very good French, he explains to Simon that according to Morris Zapp’s theory there is, at the source of literary criticism, an original methodological error of confusing life with literature (Simon redoubles his attention) whereas it is not the same thing, it does not function in the same way. “Life is transparent, literature opaque,” the Englishman tells him. (That’s arguable, thinks Simon.) “Life is an open system, literature a closed system. Life is made of things, literature of words. Life is what it seems to be: when you are afraid of flying, it is a question of fear. When you try to date a girl, it is a question of sex. But in Hamlet, even the most stupid critic realizes that it is not about a man who wants to kill his uncle—it is about something else.”

This reassures Simon slightly, as he doesn’t have the faintest idea what his adventures could be about.

Apart from language, obviously. Ahem.

Morris Zapp continues his speech in an increasingly Derridean mode; now he affirms that understanding a message involves decoding it, because language is a code. And “all decoding is a new encoding.” So, broadly speaking, we can never be sure of anything, because no one can be sure that he is using words in exactly the same sense as the person he is talking to (even when they are speaking the same language).

Sounds about right, thinks Simon.

And Morris Zapp employs this startling metaphor, translated by the Englishman: “Conversation is essentially a game of tennis played with a ball of modeling clay that changes shape each time it crosses the net.”

Simon feels the earth deconstruct beneath his feet. He leaves the lecture smoking a cigarette, and bumps into Slimane.

The young Arab is waiting for the lecture to end so he can talk to Morris Zapp. Simon asks him what he wants to ask. Slimane replies that he is not in the habit of asking anyone anything.

64

“Yeah, well, obviously, the paradox is that so-called continental philosophy is now much more successful in the U.S. than it is in Europe. Here, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault are absolute stars on campus, while in France they’re not studied by literature students and they’re snubbed by philosophy students. Here, we study them in English. For English departments, French Theory was a revolutionary weapon that enabled them to go from being the fifth wheel of the social sciences to being the one discipline that subsumes all the others, because since French Theory is founded on the assumption that language is at the base of everything, then the study of language involves studying philosophy, sociology, psychology … That’s the famous linguistic turn. Suddenly, the philosophers got upset, and they started working on language too—your Searles, your Chomskys, they spend a good part of their time denigrating the French, with demands for clarity (‘what is clear in conception is clear in articulation’) and demystifications, objections along the lines of ‘nothing new under the sun, Condillac said it all already, Anaxagoras used to repeat the same thing, they all cribbed Nietzsche, et cetera.’ They feel as if their thunder’s being stolen by clowns, buffoons, and charlatans. It’s to be expected that they’re angry about it. But you have to admit, Foucault is a lot sexier than Chomsky.”

[Anonymous student, interviewed on campus.]

65

It’s late. The day has been punctuated with seminars. The public has come out in force and listened attentively. Now, briefly, the excitement on campus dies down again. Here and there the laughter of drunken students can be heard in the night.

Slimane is alone, lying in the room he shares with Foucault, listening to his Walkman, when there is a knock at the door. “Sir? There’s a phone call for you.”

Slimane ventures out carefully into the corridor. He has already received some initial offers; maybe a potential buyer wants to raise his bid? He picks up the receiver from the telephone on the wall.

It’s Foucault on the line, in a panic. He struggles to say: “Come and get me. It’s starting again. I’ve lost my English.”

How Foucault has managed to find a gay club—S&M into the bargain—in this godforsaken hole, Slimane has no idea. He gets in a taxi and is driven to an establishment named the White Sink, located in the suburbs near the lower part of town. The clientele wear leather trousers and Village People baseball caps. To Slimane, the atmosphere seems fairly pleasant at first. A bodybuilder with a riding crop offers to buy him a drink, but he declines politely and goes off to inspect the back rooms. He finds Foucault on LSD (Slimane recognizes the symptoms immediately), crouching on the floor—half-naked, with wide red welts on his body, in a total daze—in the middle of three or four Americans who seem to be questioning him anxiously. All he can do is repeat, in French: “I’ve lost my English! No one understands me! Get me out of here!”

The taxi driver refuses to take Foucault, either because he’s afraid he will throw up on his seats or because he hates queers, so Slimane holds him up, supporting him under the shoulders, and they walk back to the campus hotel.

Ithaca is a small city of 30,000 inhabitants (a figure doubled by the students on campus), but it is very spread out. They have to trek a long way through the deserted streets, past endless rows of more or less identical wooden houses, each with its sofa or rocking chair on the porch, a few empty beer bottles on low tables, overflowing ashtrays. (Americans still smoke in 1980.) Every hundred yards there is a wooden church. The two men cross several streams. Foucault sees squirrels everywhere.

A police car slows down next to them. Slimane can make out the cops’ suspicious faces behind the torchlight that shines in his eyes. He says something in French, sounding cheerful. Foucault makes a gurgling noise. Slimane knows that to a trained eye the man leaning on him does not look merely drunk but completely high. He just hopes that Foucault has no LSD on him. The policemen hesitate. Then drive away without taking any further action.

Finally they arrive downtown. Slimane buys Foucault a waffle in a diner run by Mormons. Foucault yells out: “Fuck Reagan!”

It takes them an hour or more to climb up the hill. Thankfully Slimane has the idea of cutting through the cemetery. During the walk, Foucault repeats: “A nice club sandwich with a Coke…”

In the hotel corridors Foucault has a panic attack because he saw The Shining just before he left France. Slimane tucks him in. Foucault demands a good-night kiss, and falls asleep dreaming of Greco-Roman wrestlers.

66

“I’m not saying this because I’m Iranian, but Foucault talks a load of crap. Chomsky is right.”

[Anonymous student, interviewed on campus.]

67

Simon makes friends with a young Jewish feminist lesbian, coming out of Cixous’s conference on women’s writing. Her name is Judith, her family is from Hungary, she is doing a PhD in philosophy, and it so happens that she is interested in the performative function of language and suspects the patriarchal powers that be of resorting to some sneaky form of the performative in order to naturalize the cultural construction that is the model of the heteronormative monogamous couple: in plain English, according to Judith, all it takes is for the white heterosexual male to declare that something is in order for it to be.

Performative utterances are not restricted to knighting people; they also encompass the rhetorical ruse of transforming the result of an age-old balance of power.

And above all: “natural.” Yes, nature—that’s the enemy. The reactionaries’ argumentative coup de grâce “against nature,” the vaguely modernized variation on what used to be known as “against God’s will.” (Even in the USA, God is a little tired by 1980, but the forces of reaction are stronger than ever.)

Judith: “Nature is pain, sickness, cruelty, barbarism, and death. Nature is murder.” She laughs, parodying the pro-lifers’ slogan.

Simon agrees in his own way: “Baudelaire hated nature.”

She has a squarish face, a neat student haircut, and the look of a teacher’s pet from Sciences Po, except that she is a radical feminist who is not far from thinking, like Monique Wittig, that a lesbian is not a woman, since a woman is defined as the supplement of a man, to whom she is, by definition, subject. In a sense, the myth of Adam and Eve is the original performative function: from the moment it was decreed that the woman came after the man, that she was created from the man’s rib, and that she committed the sin of biting into the apple, that it was all her fault, the slut, and that she fully deserved to give birth in terrible pain, she was, basically, screwed. What next? Would she refuse to look after the kids?

Bayard arrives: he missed the Cixous seminar, preferring to go to see the ice hockey team train so he could, he says, drink in the campus atmosphere. He is holding a half-empty beer and a packet of chips. Judith looks at Bayard with curiosity but, contrary to what Simon might have expected, without any apparent animosity.

“Lesbians aren’t women, and they screw you and your phallogocentrism.” Judith laughs. Simon laughs with her. Bayard asks: “What’s all this about?”

68

“Take off those black glasses. You can see perfectly well that it’s not sunny. The weather is foul.”

In spite of his reputation, Foucault is pretty groggy after his exploits last night. He dips a huge pecan cookie in a remarkably drinkable double espresso. Slimane sits with him, eating a bacon cheeseburger with blue cheese.

The restaurant is at the top of the hill, at the campus entrance, on the other side of the gorge spanned by a bridge where depressed students commit suicide from time to time. They are not really sure if they’re in a bar or a tearoom. To find out, the ever-curious Foucault orders a beer despite his throbbing head, but Slimane cancels it. The waitress, probably used to the caprices of visiting professors and other campus stars, shrugs and turns on her heel, reciting mechanically: “No problem, guys. Let me know if you need anything, okay? I’m Candy, by the way.” Foucault mutters: “Hello, Candy. You’re so sweet.” The waitress does not catch this, which is probably for the best, thinks Foucault, noting in passing that his English has returned.

He feels something touch his shoulder. He looks up and, from behind his glasses, recognizes Kristeva. She is holding a steaming paper cup the size of a thermos flask. “How are you, Michel? It’s been a long time.” Foucault composes himself instantly. After rearranging his features, he takes off his glasses and offers Kristeva his famous toothy smile. “Julia, you look radiant.” As if they saw each other just the night before, he asks her: “What are you drinking?”

Kristeva laughs: “Some godawful tea. The Americans have no idea how to make tea. Once you’ve been in China, you know…”

In order to conceal even a hint of the state he’s in, Foucault says quickly: “How did your conference go? I wasn’t able to make it.”

“Oh, you know … nothing revolutionary.” She pauses. Foucault hears his stomach rumble. “I keep the revolutions for special occasions.”

Foucault pretends to laugh, then excuses himself. “The coffee here makes me want to piss.” He gets up and walks as calmly as possible toward the toilets, where liquid will gush from every orifice.

Kristeva takes his seat. Slimane looks at her but does not say a word. She noticed Foucault’s paleness, and she knows he won’t return from the bathroom until he thinks he can fool her about his physical state, so she guesses she has two or three minutes to play with.

“I am told that you have in your possession something that may find a buyer here.”

“You must be mistaken, madame.”

“On the contrary, I think it is you who is about to make a mistake. A mistake that would be regrettable, for everyone.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, madame.”

“Nevertheless, I am prepared to purchase it myself, for a substantial compensation, but what I want, more than anything, is a guarantee.”

“What sort of guarantee, madame?”

“The assurance that no one else will benefit from this acquisition.”

“And how do you imagine you will obtain this guarantee, madame?”

“That’s for you to say, Slimane.”

Slimane notes the use of his first name.

“Listen to me carefully, you stupid bitch. This isn’t Paris, and your two lapdogs aren’t with you now. Talk to me again and I’ll bleed you like a pig and throw your body in the lake.”

Foucault returns from the toilets. He has obviously splashed water on his face, but his bearing is impeccable. The illusion would be perfect, thinks Kristeva, were it not for a waxy look in his eyes. You would swear he was ready to give a talk—and in fact that is exactly what he is going to do, just as long as he can remember what time his lecture is supposed to take place.

Kristeva excuses herself as she gives him back his seat. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Slimane.” She doesn’t offer him her hand because she knows he won’t take it. He won’t drink from bottles that have already been opened. He will not use the salt cellar on the table. He will avoid all physical contact of any kind whatsoever. He’s deeply suspicious, that one, and he’s right to be. Without Nikolai, things are going to be a bit more complicated. But nothing, she thinks, that she can’t deal with.

69

“Deconstructing a speech consists in showing how it undermines the philosophy to which it lays claim, or the hierarchy of oppositions to which it appeals, by identifying within the text the rhetorical operations that confer on its contents a presumed foundation, its key idea or premise.”

[Jonathan Culler, organizer of the conference Shift into Overdrive in the Linguistic Turn.]

70

“We are, so to speak, in the golden age of the philosophy of language.”

Searle is making his speech, and all of American academia knows it is going to be an all-out attack on Derrida to avenge the honor of his master, Austin, whose reputation the American logician believes was seriously damaged by the French deconstructionist.

Simon and Bayard are in the room, but they don’t understand anything, or not much anyway, because the talk is in English. It mentions “speech acts,” and they get that part. Simon gets “illocutionary” and “perlocutionary.” But what does “utterance” mean?

Derrida didn’t come, but he has sent emissaries, who will report back on the speech’s contents: his faithful lieutenant Paul de Man, his translator Gayatri Spivak, his friend Hélène Cixous … In truth, everyone is there, except for Foucault, who did not feel like leaving his room. Maybe he is relying on Slimane to give him a summary, or maybe he just doesn’t care.

Bayard spots Kristeva, along with all the people he saw in the cafeteria, including the old man in the wool tie.

Searle repeats several times that it is not necessary to restate this or that, that he will not insult his esteemed audience by explaining such and such a point, that there is no need to dwell here on what is so blindingly obvious, etc.

In spite of this, Simon gathers that Searle thinks you must be really, really stupid to confound “iterability” with “permanence,” written language with spoken language, a serious discourse with a fake discourse. Essentially, Searle’s message is: Fuck Derrida.

Jeffrey Mehlman leans down to whisper into Morris Zapp’s ear: “I had failed to note that the charmingly spiky Searle had the philosophical temperament of a cop.” Zapp laughs. Students in the row behind shush him.

When the speech is over, a student asks a question: Does Searle think that the dispute between himself and Derrida (because, even though he took care not to name his adversary, everyone realizes the Frenchman was the subject and the target of his ire—murmurs of approval in the lecture hall) is emblematic of the confrontation between two great philosophical traditions (analytic and continental)?

Searle responds in tones of suppressed anger: “I think it would be a mistake to believe so. The confrontation never quite takes place.” The understanding of Austin and his theory of speech acts by “some so-called continental philosophers” has been so confused, so approximate, so filled with errors and misinterpretations, “as I just demonstrated,” that it is pointless to dwell on the subject any longer. And Searle adds, like a severe clergyman: “Stop wasting your time on those lunacies, young man. This is not the way serious philosophy works. Thank you for your attention.”

Then, contemptuously ignoring the tumult in the lecture hall, he stands up and leaves.

But while the audience starts to scatter, Bayard spots Slimane walking after the philosopher. “Herzog, look! Seems like the Arab has some questions about the perlocutionary function…” Simon mechanically notes the latent racism and anti-intellectualism. But it has to be said, behind the petit-bourgeois reactionary sarcasm of Bayard’s question, the cop does have a point: What exactly does Slimane want with Searle?

71

“‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”

[Dead Sea Scrolls, the second century B.C., the oldest occurrence of the performative function yet found in the Judeo-Christian world.]

72

Even as he presses the elevator button, Simon knows he is about to go up to heaven. The doors open at the floor for Romance Studies and Simon enters a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lit by dull, flickering neon lamps. The sun never sets on Cornell’s library, open twenty-four hours a day.

All the books Simon could desire are there, and all the others, too. He is like a kid in a candy store, and all he has to do if he wants to fill his pockets is complete a form. Simon’s fingertips brush the books’ spines as if he were caressing ears of wheat in a field that was about to become his property. This, he thinks, is true communism: what’s yours is mine, and vice versa.

At this hour of the night, however, the library is in all likelihood deserted.

Simon strides along the Structuralism aisle. Look—a book about Japan by Lévi-Strauss?

He stops at the Surrealism aisle and thrills at the sight of such wonders: Connaissance de la Mort by Roger Vitrac … Dark Spring by Unica Zürn … La Papesse du Diable, attributed to Desnos … rare books by Crevel in French and English … unpublished works by Annie Le Brun and Radovan Ivsic …

A creak. Simon freezes. The sound of footsteps. Instinctively—because he feels as if his presence in the middle of the night in a university library must be, if not illegal, at least, as the Americans say, inappropriate—he hides behind the volumes on sex on the Surrealist Studies bookshelf.

He sees Searle walk past Tzara’s collected letters.

He hears him talking to someone in an adjacent aisle. Simon delicately withdraws the folder containing twelve photocopied issues of Révolution Surréaliste to get a better view and, through the crack, recognizes Slimane’s slender figure.

Searle is whispering too quietly, but Simon distinctly hears Slimane tell him: “You’ve got twenty-four hours. After that, I sell to the highest bidder.” Then he puts his Walkman back on and returns toward the elevator.

But Searle does not walk back with him. He leafs distractedly through a few books. Who can say what he’s thinking? Simon has a feeling of déjà-vu, but he drives it from his mind.

Trying to put Révolution Surréaliste back in its place, Simon accidentally knocks a copy of Grand Jeu to the floor. Searle pricks up his ears, like a pointer. Simon decides to slip away as discreetly as possible, and silently zigzags through the bookshelves as he hears the philosopher of language behind him picking Grand Jeu off the floor. He imagines him sniffing the magazine. Hearing footsteps, he quickens his pace. He crosses the Psychoanalysis aisle and enters the Nouveau Roman aisle, but this is a dead end. He turns around and jumps when he sees Searle moving toward him, a paper knife in one hand, Grand Jeu in the other. Automatically, he grabs a book to defend himself (The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein: he’s not going to get far with that, he thinks, tossing it on the floor and grabbing another, The Flanders Road: yes, that’s better); Searle does not raise his arm in a Psycho fashion, but Simon feels certain that he is going to have to protect his vital organs from the blade, when he hears the doors of the elevator open.

Nestled in their cul-de-sac, Simon and Searle see a young woman in boots and a man with a bull-like body pass them in the direction of the photocopier. Searle puts the paper knife in his pocket, Simon lowers his Claude Simon, and, moved by the same sense of curiosity, the two men observe the couple through the complete works of Nathalie Sarraute. They hear the photocopier’s hum and see its blue light, but soon the bull-man wraps himself around the young woman as she leans against the machine. She lets loose an imperceptible sigh and, without looking at him, puts her hand on his crotch. (Simon thinks of Othello’s handkerchief.) Her skin is very white and her fingers are very long. The bull-man unbuttons her dress and it falls to her feet. She is not wearing any undergarments, and her body is like a Raphael painting: her breasts are heavy, her waist slender, her hips wide, her shoulders sturdy, and her pussy shaved. Her black, square-cut hair gives her triangular face the look of a Carthaginian princess. Searle and Simon stare wide-eyed as she kneels down to take the bull-man’s cock in her mouth. They want to see if the man’s cock is bull-sized too. Simon puts down The Flanders Road. The bull picks up and flips over the young woman and thrusts inside her as she rears back, pulling apart her buttocks with her own hands as he holds her in place by the scruff of her neck. He does what it is in a bull’s nature to do: he charges into her, first slowly and heavily, then with a growing ferocity, and they hear the photocopier banging against the wall until it is lifted from the floor and the girl emits a long yowl that echoes through the aisles of what they think is the deserted library.

Simon cannot tear his eyes from this Jupiterian coupling, and yet he must. But he has qualms about interrupting such a magnificent fucking session. With a violent effort of will, his sense of self-preservation forces him to knock all the Duras books from the shelf in front of him. They tumble to the floor with a noise that immobilizes everyone in the room. The carnal moans cease instantly. Simon looks Searle straight in the eye. He slowly walks around him, and the philosopher does not move a muscle. When he emerges into the central aisle, he turns toward the photocopier. The bull-man glares at him, prick in the air. The young woman carefully picks up her dress, while staring defiantly at Simon, and puts it over one leg, then the other, then turns her back to the bull-man so he can zip her up. Simon realizes that she never took her boots off. He flees down the emergency staircase.

Outside, on the campus lawn, he spots Kristeva’s young friends, who to judge from the empty bottles and chip bags strewn over the grass around them have not moved in the past three days. At their invitation, he sits down with them, helps himself to a beer, and gratefully accepts the joint they hand him. Simon knows that he is out of danger (if there ever was any danger—is he sure he saw that paper knife?) but the fear in his chest has not subsided. There is something else.

In Bologna, he had sex with Bianca in a seventeenth-century amphitheater and narrowly escaped death in the bombed train station. Here, he has almost been stabbed in a library at night by a linguistics philosopher and has witnessed a decidedly mythological doggy-style sex scene on a photocopier. He met Giscard in the Élysée Palace, bumped into Foucault in a gay sauna, took part in a car chase that ended with an attempt on his life, saw a man kill another man with a poisoned umbrella, discovered a secret society where people had their fingers cut off if they lost a debate, and crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a mysterious document. In the course of a few months he has lived through more extraordinary events than he expected to witness in his entire lifetime … Simon knows how to spot the novelistic when he sees it. He thinks again about Umberto Eco’s supernumeraries. He takes a drag on the joint.

“What’s up, man?”

Simon passes around the joint. The film of the past few months flashes through his mind, and he is powerless to stop it. As it is his job, he analyzes it for its narrative structures, its additives, its adversaries, its allegorical significance. A sex scene (actor), an attack (bomb) in Bologna. An attack (paper knife), a sex scene (spectator) at Cornell. (Chiasmus.) A car chase. A rewriting of the final duel in Hamlet. The recurrent library motif (but why does he think of Beaubourg?) The pairs of characters: the two Bulgarians, the two Japanese, Sollers and Kristeva, Searle and Derrida, Anastasia and Bianca … And, most of all, the implausibilities: Why would the third Bulgarian wait until they realized there was a copy of the manuscript at Barthes’s apartment before going there to search for it? How did Anastasia, supposedly a Russian spy, manage to be assigned so quickly to the hospital ward where Barthes was being kept? Why did Giscard not have Kristeva arrested and tortured by one of his henchmen until she talked, rather than sending him and Bayard to the USA to keep an eye on her? Why would the document be written in French, rather than Russian or English? Who translated it?

Simon takes his head in his hands and utters a groan.

“I think I’m trapped in a fucking novel,” he says.

“What?”

“I think I’m trapped in a novel.”

The student he says this to lies back, blows cigarette smoke toward the sky, watches the stars speed past in the ether, drinks a mouthful of beer from the bottle, leans on one elbow, lets a long silence linger in the American night, and says: “Sounds cool, man. Enjoy the trip.”

73

“And so the paranoiac participates in this powerlessness of the deterritorialized sign that assails him from all sides in the slippery atmosphere, but in his majestic feeling of anger he accedes all the more to the overarching power of the signifier as the master of the network that spreads through the atmosphere.”

[Guattari, spoken at the Cornell conference, 1980.]

74

“Come on, hurry up, it’s time for the talk on Jakobson.”

“Nah, it’s okay, I’ve had my fill.”

“You’re fucking kidding? That’s really annoying—you told me you’d go. There’ll be lots of people there. We’ll learn stuff … Put that Rubik’s Cube down!”

Click click. Bayard nonchalantly twists and turns the multicolored rows. He has almost completed two of the six faces.

“All right, but Derrida’s on later, we mustn’t miss that.”

“Why not? What makes that knob any more interesting than the others?”

“He’s one of the most interesting thinkers in the world. But that’s not the point, you moron. He’s seriously embroiled with Searle in a row over Austin’s theory.”

Click click.

“Austin’s theory is the performative function, remember? The illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Saying is doing? How to do stuff by talking? How to make people do stuff simply by talking to them? For example, if I had stronger perlocutionary powers, or if you were less of an idiot, all I’d have to say is ‘Derrida conference’ and you’d jump up straight away and we’d already have our places booked. It’s obvious that if the seventh function is anywhere around here, Derrida won’t be far away.”

“Why is everyone looking for Jakobson’s seventh function if Austin’s functions are freely available?”

“Austin’s work is purely descriptive. It explains how it works, but not what to do to make it work. Austin describes the mechanisms in operation when you make a promise or a threat or when you address someone with the intention of making them act in one way or another, but he doesn’t tell you how to make your listener believe you and take you seriously or act how you want him to. He just notes that a speech act can succeed or fail, and he sets out certain conditions for success: for example, in France, you must be mayor or deputy mayor for the phrase ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’ to function. (But that is for pure performative utterances.) He doesn’t tell you how to succeed for sure. It’s not a user manual, it’s just an analysis—you understand the subtle difference?”

Click click.

“And Jakobson’s work isn’t just descriptive?”

“Well, yeah, it is, actually, but this seventh function … we’d have to assume it’s not.”

Click click.

“Fuck, it’s not working.”

Bayard cannot quite finish off the second face.

He feels Simon’s accusing gaze on him.

“All right. What time is it on?”

“Don’t be late!”

Click click. Bayard changes his strategy and, instead of trying to complete a second face, attempts to build a crown around the first face. While he manipulates his cube with growing dexterity, he thinks that he has not really grasped the difference between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary.

Simon is on his way to the conference on Jakobson, which he is excited to attend, with or without Bayard, but as he is crossing the campus lawn, he’s arrested by a burst of throaty but crystal-clear laughter, and when he turns around he spots the young woman from the photocopier. The Carthaginian princess in leather boots, now fully clothed. She is chatting to a small Asian girl and a tall Egyptian girl (or maybe she’s Lebanese, thinks Simon, who instinctively noted her Arab features and the little cross hanging from her neck; maybe a Maronite, but more likely a Copt, in his opinion). (What clue is he basing this assessment on? It’s a mystery.)

The three young women head cheerfully toward the upper town.

Simon decides to follow them.

They pass a science building where the brain of the serial killer and supposed genius Edward Rulloff is preserved in formaldehyde.

They pass the hotel-management school, with its pleasant odor of baking bread.

They pass the veterinary school. Concentrating fully on following the girls, Simon does not see Searle entering the building with a large bag of dog biscuits. Or perhaps he does see him without bothering to decode this information.

They pass the Romance Studies building.

They cross the bridge over the gorge that separates campus from town.

They sit at a table in a bar named after the serial killer. Simon discreetly takes a seat at the bar.

He hears the princess in boots say to her friends: “Jealousy doesn’t interest me, and competition even less … I’m tired of men who are afraid of what they want…”

Simon lights a cigarette.

“I always say that I don’t love Borges … But to what extent, at every moment, I shoot myself in the foot…”

He orders a beer and opens the Ithaca Journal.

“I’m not afraid to say that I’m made for powerful physical love.”

The three young women burst out laughing.

The conversation moves on to the mythological and sexist reading of the constellations and to the way Greek heroines are perpetually sidelined (Simon checks them off in his head: Ariadne, Phaedra, Penelope, Hera, Circe, Europa…).

So he, too, ends up missing the conference on Jakobson’s living structures, because he preferred to spy on a black-haired young woman eating a hamburger with two friends.

75

There is electricity in the air. Everyone is there: Kristeva, Zapp, Foucault, Slimane, Searle. The lecture hall is packed, overflowing; it’s impossible to move without standing on a student’s or a professor’s toes. There’s a loud murmur among the audience, as at the theater, and the master arrives: Derrida, onstage, it’s happening now.

He smiles at Cixous in the front row, makes a brief sign of friendship to his translator Gayatri Spivak, spots his friends and his enemies. Spots Searle.

Simon is there, with Bayard. They are sitting next to Judith, the young lesbian feminist.

“The word of reconciliation is the speech act through which by speaking a word we make a start, we offer reconciliation by addressing the other person; which means that, at least before this word, there was war, suffering, trauma, a wound…”

Simon spots the Carthaginian princess, which has the immediate effect of muddling his powers of concentration, so much so that he does not manage to decode the subtext of Derrida’s opening words, which suggest he is going to be placatory.

And in fact, Derrida comes calmly and methodically to Austin’s theory, developing some objections to it, in strictly academic terms and in what appears to be the most objective manner possible.

The theory of speech acts, which posits that the word is also an act—in other words that the speaker acts at the same time as he speaks—implies a presupposition that Derrida disputes: intentionality. Namely: that the speaker’s intentions preexist his speech and are perfectly clear to him as well as to his receiver (assuming that the receiver is clearly identified).

If I say, “It’s late,” it is because I want to go home. But what if I actually wanted to stay? If I wanted the other person to keep me there? To prevent me from leaving? If I wanted the other person to reassure me by saying: “No, it’s not that late.”

When I write, do I really know what I want to write? Isn’t it the case that the text reveals itself as it is formulated? (Does it ever really reveal itself?)

And when I do know what I want to say, does my receiver receive it exactly as I think it (as I think I thought it)? Does what he understands of what I say correspond exactly to what I think I wanted to tell him?

It’s clear that these opening remarks deal a serious blow to the theory of speech acts. These modest objections make it perilous to evaluate the illocutionary (and especially the perlocutionary) power in terms of success or failure, as Austin does (in lieu of truth or falsehood, as the philological tradition has done until now).

Hearing me say “It’s late,” my receivers believed that I wanted to go home and they offer to accompany me. Success? But what if, in fact, I wanted to stay? If someone or something deep inside me wanted to stay, without me even being aware of it?

“In fact, in what sense does Reagan claim to be Reagan, president of the United States? Who will ever know him, strictly speaking? Him?”

The audience laughs. Everyone is at maximum attentiveness. They have forgotten the context.

It is now that Derrida chooses to strike.

“But what would happen if in promising ‘Sarl’ to criticize him I went beyond what his Unconscious desires, for reasons we’ll analyze, and do everything I can to provoke him? Would my ‘promise’ be a promise or a threat?”

In a whisper, Bayard asks Judith why Derrida pronounces it “Sarl.” Judith explains that he is mocking Searle: in French, as far as she understands, “Sarl” signifies “Société à responsabilité limitée,” a private limited company. Bayard thinks this is quite funny.

Derrida goes on:

“What is the unity or identity of the speaker? Is he responsible for speech acts dictated to him by his unconscious? Because I have mine, too, which might want to give pleasure to Sarl inasmuch as he wants to be criticized, or cause him pain by not criticizing him, or give him pleasure by not criticizing him, or cause him pain by criticizing him, to promise him a threat or to threaten him with a promise, or offer myself up for criticism by taking pleasure in saying things that are obviously false, enjoying my weakness or loving exhibitionism more than anything, et cetera.”

The whole audience turns toward Searle, of course, who, as if he had anticipated this moment, is sitting in the exact center of the tiered seating. The lone man in the middle of the crowd: it’s like a scene from Hitchcock. His face remains impassive under this barrage of scrutiny. He looks like he’s been killed and stuffed.

And besides, when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking? How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of preexisting words? When we are influenced by so many external forces: our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic “tics” so precious that they form our identity, the speeches we are constantly bombarded with in every possible and imaginable form.

Who has never caught a friend, a parent, a colleague or a father-in-law repeating an argument they have read in a newspaper or heard on the television almost word for word, as if he were speaking for himself, as if he had appropriated that speech, as if he were the source of those thoughts rather than a sponge for them, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone, as if he were not simply the medium through which a newspaper’s prerecorded voice repeated the words of a politician who himself had read them in a book whose author, and so on … the medium through which the nomadic, sourceless voice of a ghostly speaker expresses itself, communicates, in the sense of two places communicating via a passage.

Repeating what he has read in a newspaper … to what extent can the conversation with your father-in-law be considered a citation?

Derrida has returned seamlessly to the central thread of his argument. Now he touches on his other principal argument: citationality, or rather, iterability. (Simon is not sure he’s really grasped the distinction.)

To be understood, at least partially, by our receiver, we must use the same language. We must repeat (reiterate) words that have already been used, otherwise our receiver will not be able to understand them. So we are always, fatally, in some form of citation. We use the words of others. Now, as with Chinese whispers, it is more than probable—it is inevitable—that through repetitions each and every one of us will employ the words of others, in a slightly different sense to those others.

Derrida’s pied-noir voice becomes more formal and bombastic:

“Even that which will ensure the functioning of the mark (psychic, oral, graphic, whatever) beyond this moment, namely the possibility of being repeated, even that begins, divides, expropriates the fullness or the intrinsically ‘ideal’ presence of intention, of the desire to express, and a fortiori the harmony between meaning and saying.”

Judith, Simon, the young black-haired woman, Cixous, Guattari, Slimane, everyone in the lecture hall, even Bayard, is hanging on his every word when he says:

“Limiting even that which authorizes, transgressing the code or law that it constitutes, iterability irreducibly inscribes alteration in the repetition.”

And he adds, imperiously:

“The accident is never an accident.”

76

“Even in what Sarl calls ‘real life,’ the possibility of parasitic contamination is already there—that ‘real life’ of which he is so assured, with a confidence that is almost, not quite, inimitable, of knowing what it is, where it begins and where it ends; as if the meaning of those words (‘real life’) could immediately create unanimity, without the slightest risk of parasitical contamination, as if literature, theater, lying, infidelity, hypocrisy, infelicity, parasitical contamination, the simulation of real life did not form part of real life!”

[Words spoken by Derrida at the Cornell conference, 1980, or dreamed by Simon Herzog.]

77

They are bent over like slaves in antiquity pushing blocks of stone, but these are students puffing and panting as they roll barrels of beer across the floor. It is going to be a long evening and they will need reserves. The Seal and Serpent Society is an old fraternity founded in 1905, one of the most prestigious and therefore, in American terminology, one of the most “popular.” Lots of people are expected because we are celebrating the end of the conference tonight. All the guest speakers are invited and this is the last chance for the students to see the stars until their next visit. In the entrance to the fraternity’s Victorian lodge, someone has written on a sheet: “Uncontrolled skid in the linguistic turn. Welcome.” Though entry is theoretically reserved for undergrads, tonight the lodge is hosting people of all ages. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it is open to just anyone: there are always those who come in and those who remain outside the door, in accordance with universal social and/or symbolic criteria.

Slimane is unlikely to forget this, being regularly refused entry in France, and it looks as though it’s going to be the same old story here when a pair of students acting as bouncers bar his way. But, without anyone knowing how he does it, or in what language, he talks to them briefly and passes through, his Walkman around his neck, watched enviously by the outcasts in acrylic turtleneck sweaters.

The first person he sees, inside, is telling an audience of young people: “Heraclitus contains everything that is in Derrida and more.” It’s Cruella Redgrave alias Camille Paglia. She holds a mojito in one hand and in the other a cigarette holder, with a black cigarette exhaling a sweet perfume. Next to her Chomsky is talking with a student from El Salvador, who explains that the Revolutionary Democratic Front has just been decapitated by his country’s paramilitaries and government forces. In fact, there is no remaining left-wing opposition, which seems to greatly worry Chomsky, who sucks nervously at a joint.

Perhaps because he is used to back rooms, Slimane goes down to look around in the basement, where Black Sabbath’s “Die Young” is playing. He finds bunches of well-dressed and already drunk students, lap dancing haphazardly. Foucault is there too, in a black leather jacket, without his sunglasses (so he can taste the fog of life, thinks Slimane, who knows him well). He gives him a friendly wave and points to a student in a skirt who is entwined around a metal pole like a stripper. Slimane notes that she is not wearing a bra but is wearing white knickers that match her white Nike sneakers, each with a large red swoosh (like Starsky and Hutch’s car, but with the colors reversed).

Kristeva, who is dancing with Paul de Man, spots Slimane. De Man asks her what she’s thinking about. She replies: “We are in the catacombs of the first Christians.” But her eyes do not leave the gigolo.

He looks as though he’s searching for someone. He climbs upstairs. Bumps into Morris Zapp on the staircase, who winks at him. The stereo plays “Misunderstanding” by Genesis. He grabs a paper cup of tequila. Behind bedroom doors, he hears students fucking or vomiting. Some doors are open and inside the rooms he sees them smoking, drinking beers, sitting cross-legged on single beds, talking about sex, politics, literature. Behind one closed door he thinks he recognizes Searle’s voice, and some strange growling noises.

In the large entrance hall, Simon and Bayard are talking to Judith, who sips a Bloody Mary through a straw. Bayard sees Slimane. Simon sees the Carthaginian princess, who comes in with her two friends, the short Asian girl and the tall Egyptian. A male student yells: “Cordelia!” The princess turns around. Hugs, kisses, effusive greetings. The student immediately trots off to fetch her a gin and tonic. Judith tells Bayard and Simon (who is not listening): “The power can be understood by considering the model of divine power, according to which making an utterance is equivalent to creating the utterance.” Foucault comes up from the basement with Hélène Cixous, grabs a Malibu and O.J., and disappears upstairs. Seeing this, Judith quotes Foucault: “Discourse is not life; its time is not our time.” Bayard nods. Some boys gather around Cordelia and her friends, who seem very popular. Judith quotes Lacan, who said somewhere: “The name is the time of the object.” Bayard wonders if one might as easily say “the time is the name of the object,” or “the time is the object of the name,” or maybe “the object is the name of the time,” or even “the object is the time of the name,” or simply “the name is the object of the time,” but he grabs another beer, takes a hit of the joint that’s being passed around, and nearly cries out: “But you already have the right to vote, get divorced, and have an abortion!” Cixous would like to talk to Derrida, but he is hemmed in by a dense mob of transfixed admirers. Slimane avoids Kristeva. Bayard asks Judith: “What do you want?” Cixous hears Bayard and joins the conversation: “Let’s get a room!” Sylvère Lotringer, the founder of the magazine Sémiotext(e), holds an orchid and talks to Derrida’s translators Jeffrey Mehlman and Gayatri Spivak, who shouts: “Gramsci is my brother!” Slimane talks with Jean-François Lyotard about the economics of lust or a postmodern transaction. Pink Floyd sing: “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”

Cixous tells Judith, Bayard, and Simon that the new history that’s coming is beyond the male imagination, and for good reason, it will deprive them of their conceptual crutches and begin by ruining their illusion machine, but Simon is no longer listening. He observes Cordelia’s group like a general sizing up the enemy army: six people, three boys and three girls. Approaching her would have been extremely difficult anyway, but in this grouping it now seems particularly inconceivable.

All the same, he starts to move toward them.

“White, physically attractive, with a skirt and fake jewelry, I employ all the codes of my sex and my age,” he thinks, attempting to enter the girl’s head. Passing close, he hears her say, in French, in a tone of perfectly erotic worldliness: “Couples are like birds, inseparable, abundant, uselessly beating their wings outside the cage.” He detects no accent. An American says something to her in English that Simon doesn’t understand. She replies, first in English (also accentless, as far as he can tell), then in French, throwing back her throat: “I’ve never been able to have affairs, only novels.” Simon goes off to grab a drink, maybe two. (He hears Gayatri Spivak say to Slimane: “We were taught to say yes to the enemy.”)

Bayard takes advantage of his absence to ask Judith to explain the difference between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Judith tells him that the illocutionary act of discourse is itself the thing that it performs, whereas the perlocutionary act provokes certain effects that are not to be confused with the act of discourse. “For example, if I ask you: ‘Do you think there are any free rooms upstairs?,’ the objective illocutionary reality contained in the question is that I’m hitting on you. By asking that question, I hit on you. But the perlocutionary stakes are played at another level: knowing that I am hitting on you, are you interested in my proposition? The illocutionary act will be performed with success if you understand my invitation. But the perlocutionary act will be fulfilled only if you follow me to a room. It’s a subtle difference, isn’t it? And it’s not always stable, in fact.”

Bayard stammers something incomprehensible, but the fact of his stammering indicates that he has understood. Cixous smiles her Sphinx-like smile and says: “So let’s perform!” Bayard follows the two women, who pick up a six-pack and climb the stairs, where Chomsky and Camille Paglia are making out. In the corridor, they pass a Latin American student wearing a D&G-branded silk shirt, who Judith buys some little pills from. As he isn’t aware of that particular brand, Bayard asks Judith what the initials stand for and Judith tells him it’s not a brand but the initials of “Deleuze & Guattari.” The same two letters feature on the pills.

Down below, an American guy tells Cordelia: “You are the muse!”

Cordelia pouts disdainfully, and Simon guesses she has practiced this expression to show off her voluptuous lips: “That’s not enough.”

This is the moment Simon chooses to approach her, in front of all her friends, with the resolve of an Acapulco diver. Feigning a cool spontaneity, as if he just happened to be passing, he says that having overheard her remark he couldn’t help responding: “Well, sure, who wants to be an object?” Silence. He reads in Cordelia’s eyes: “Okay, now you have my attention.” He knows he must not only show himself to be urbane and cultivated but must pique her curiosity, provoke her without shocking her, demonstrate his spirit in order to arouse hers, mix lightheartedness with profundity while avoiding pedantry and pretentiousness, indulge the comedy of social life but suggest that neither of them is fooled by it, and, naturally, immediately eroticize the relationship.

“You are made for powerful physical love and you love the iterability of photocopiers, right? A sublimated fantasy is nothing other than a fantasy fulfilled. Anyone who claims the opposite is a liar, a priest and an exploiter of the people.” He hands her one of the two glasses he is holding. “You like gin and tonic?”

The stereo plays “Sexy Eyes” by Dr. Hook. Cordelia takes the glass.

She raises it for a toast and says: “We are lies of trust.” Simon lifts his glass and drinks it almost in a single gulp. He knows he has passed the first test.

Instinctively, he scans the room and spots Slimane, leaning with one hand on the banister of the staircase, on the half-landing, surveying the crowd in the hall, making a V-for-victory sign with his free hand, then using both hands to draw a sort of cross, the hand forming the horizontal bar slightly above the midpoint of the vertical hand. Simon tries to make out who he is addressing the sign to, but all he can see are students and professors drinking and dancing and flirting to Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” and he senses that something is wrong, though he can’t tell what. And the increasingly tight group forming around Derrida: it is him Slimane is looking at.

He does not see Kristeva or the old man with the bush hair and the wool tie, but they are there, all the same, and if he could see them, if they weren’t hidden in different but equally concealed positions, he would see that both had their eyes fixed on Slimane and he would know that both had intercepted the sign Slimane was making with his hands and he would guess that both had guessed that the sign was addressed to Derrida, hidden, too, behind his admirers.

Nor does he see the man with the bull’s neck who fucked Cordelia on the photocopier, but he is there too, staring at her with his bull’s eyes.

He searches for Bayard in the crowd but doesn’t find him, for the very good reason that Bayard is in a bedroom upstairs, beer in hand, unidentified chemical substance coursing through his veins, discussing pornography and feminism with his new friends.

He hears Cordelia say: “The Church, in the goodness of its heart, did at least ask the council of Mâcon in 585 if a woman had a soul…,” so to please her, he adds: “… and was very careful not to find a response.”

The tall Egyptian girl quotes a line of Wordsworth whose provenance Simon does not manage to pinpoint. The short Asian girl explains to an Italian man from Brooklyn that she is writing her thesis on the queer in Racine.

Someone says: “Everyone knows that psychoanalysts don’t even talk anymore, and they don’t do much interpreting either.”

Camille Paglia screams: “French go home! Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores.”

Morris Zapp laughs and yells across the hall: “You’re damn right, General Custer!”

Gayatri Spivak thinks: “You’re not Aristotle’s granddaughter, you know.”

In the bedroom, Judith asks Bayard: “So where do you work, actually?” Bayard, taken by surprise, replies dumbly, immediately hoping that Cixous does not pick up on it: “I do research … at Vincennes.” But Cixous, of course, raises an eyebrow, so he looks her in the eye and says: “In law.” Cixous raises her other eyebrow. Not only has she never seen Bayard at Vincennes, but the university has no law department. To create a diversion, Bayard puts a hand under her blouse and squeezes a breast through her bra. Cixous suppresses a look of surprise but decides not to react, then Judith puts a hand on her other breast.

An undergrad named Donna has joined Cordelia’s group, and the Carthaginian princess asks her: “How’s Greek life so far?” In fact, Donna and her sorority sisters are planning to stage a bacchanal. Cordelia is excited and amused by the idea. Simon thinks that Slimane must have been arranging to meet Derrida. Maybe the sign he made was not a V for victory, but the time of the meeting. Two o’clock, but where? Had it been a church, Slimane would have made a standard sign of the cross, rather than that bizarre gesture. He asks: “Is there a cemetery nearby?” Young Donna claps her hands: “Oh yeah! That’s a great idea! Let’s go to the cemetery!” Simon is about to say that that was not what he meant, but Cordelia and her friends seem so thrilled by the proposal that in the end he says nothing.

Donna says she’ll go and fetch the stuff. The stereo plays “Call Me” by Blondie.

It is already almost one o’clock.

He hears someone say: “The interpretative priest, the soothsayer, is one of the despot-god’s bureaucrats, you see? Here’s another aspect of the priest’s treachery, damn it: the interpretation goes on forever and never finds anything to interpret that is not itself already an interpretation!” It’s Guattari, clearly quite drunk, hitting on an innocent postgrad from Illinois.

He has to tell Bayard.

The stereo sends Debbie Harry’s voice ricocheting from the walls: “When you’re ready, we can share the wine.”

Donna returns with a toiletry bag and says they can go now.

Simon rushes upstairs to tell Bayard to meet them at the cemetery at two o’clock. He opens all the doors, finding all kinds of stoned students, some more active than others. He finds Foucault jerking off in front of a poster of Mick Jagger, finds Andy Warhol writing poems (in fact, it’s Jonathan Culler filling out pay stubs), finds a greenhouse with marijuana plants growing up to the ceiling, even finds some well-behaved students watching baseball on a sports channel while they smoke crack, then finally locates Bayard.

“Oh? Sorry!”

He quickly closes the door, but he has time to see Bayard wedged between the legs of a woman he is unable to identify while Judith fucks him with a strap-on, yelling: “I am a man and I fuck you! Now you feel my performative, don’t you?”

Impressed by this vision, he doesn’t have the presence of mind to leave a message and rushes downstairs to join Cordelia’s group.

He passes Kristeva on the stairs, but pays no attention to her.

He is well aware that he is not following the emergency protocol, but his attraction to Cordelia’s white skin is too strong. After all, he’ll be at the meeting place, he thinks, legitimizing a plan he knows full well is driven only by the logic of his desire.

Kristeva knocks on the door with the strange growling noises behind it. Searle opens it. She does not go in, but whispers something to him. Then she heads for the room she saw Bayard go into with his two friends.

The cemetery in Ithaca is on a wooded hillside, and the gravestones look as if they have been scattered randomly between the trees. The only sources of light are the moon and the city. The group gathers around the tomb of a woman who died very young. Donna explains that she is going to recite the secrets of the Sibyl, but that they must prepare the “birth ceremony of the new man,” and that they need a volunteer. Cordelia volunteers Simon. He would like to ask for more details, but when she starts undressing him, he lets her do it. Around them, a dozen people have come to watch the spectacle, and this seems like a crowd to Simon. When he is completely naked, she lays him down in the grass, at the foot of the gravestone, and whispers in his ear: “Relax. We’re going to kill the former man.”

Everyone has been drinking, everyone is extremely disinhibited, so all this could happen in reality, thinks Simon.

Donna hands the toiletry bag to Cordelia, who takes out a cutthroat razor and solemnly opens it. As Simon hears Donna mention the radical feminist Valerie Solanas in her introduction, he does not feel entirely reassured. But Cordelia also takes out a can of shaving foam and sprays it over his crotch before carefully shaving off his pubic hair. A symbol of symbolic castration, Simon thinks, following the operation attentively, all the more so when he feels Cordelia’s fingers delicately moving his penis.

“In the beginning, no matter what they say, there was only a goddess. One goddess, and one only.”

All the same, he would have preferred it if Bayard were there.

But Bayard is smoking a cigarette in the dark, naked, stretched out on the carpet of a student bedroom, between the naked bodies of his two friends, one of whom has fallen asleep, her arm across his chest, her hand holding the other woman’s.

“In the beginning, no matter what they think, women were all and one. The only power was female, spontaneous, and plural.”

Bayard asks Judith why she is interested in him. Judith, nestled against his shoulder, meows and replies, in her Jewish Midwestern accent: “Because you didn’t seem to fit in here.”

“The goddess said: ‘I came, that is just and good.’”

There is a knock at the door and someone comes in. Bayard sits up and recognizes Kristeva, who says: “You should get dressed.”

“The very first goddess, the very first female powers. Humanity by, on, in her. The ground, the atmosphere, water, fire. Language.”

A church bell tolls twice.

“Thus the day came when the little prankster appeared. He didn’t look like much but was self-confident. He said: ‘I am God, I am the son of man, they need a father to pray to. They will know how to be faithful to me: I know how to communicate.’”

The cemetery is only about a hundred yards away. The sounds of the party echo over the tombs, giving the ritualistic ceremony a decidedly anachronistic soundtrack: the stereo plays ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).”

“Thus man imposed the image, the rules, and the veneration of all human bodies endowed with a dick.”

Simon turns his face away to hide his embarrassment and his arousal, and it is then that he makes out, about thirty yards away, two figures meeting under a tree. He sees the slimmer figure pass the earphones of his Walkman to the stockier figure, who is carrying a sports bag in one hand. He realizes that Derrida is checking the merchandise, and that the merchandise is a cassette recording of the seventh function of language.

“The real is out of control. The real fabricates stories, legends, and creatures.”

He watches as Derrida—only a few yards away, beneath a tree, amid the gravestones of Ithaca’s cemetery—listens to the seventh function of language.

“On horseback on a tomb, we will feed our sons with their fathers’ entrails.”

Simon wants to intervene, but cannot move a single muscle in his body in order to stand up, nor even the muscle of his tongue (which he knows is the most powerful) in order to articulate a word, particularly as the stage following the symbolic castration is that of the symbolic rebirth, and that the dawning of the new man is here symbolized by fellatio. When Cordelia takes him in her mouth and he feels the heat of the Carthaginian princess’s mucus membranes spreading through every particle of him, he knows that as far as the mission is concerned the game is up.

“We form with our mouths the breath and the power of the Sorority. We are one and many, we are a female legion…”

The exchange will take place, and he will do nothing to prevent it.

But throwing his head back, he sees at the top of the hill, illuminated by the lights of the campus, an unreal vision (and that unreality itself terrifies him more than the vision’s possible reality): a man with two huge, ferocious dogs on a leash.

In spite of the darkness, he knows it is Searle. The dogs bark. The startled spectators look over at them. Donna interrupts her prayer. Cordelia stops sucking Simon’s cock.

Searle makes a noise with his mouth and unleashes the two dogs, which rush at Slimane and Derrida. Simon gets up and runs to help them, but suddenly he feels a powerful grip on his arm: it’s the bull-necked man, the one who fucked Cordelia on the photocopier, who pulls him back and then punches him in the face. Simon, sprawled on the ground, naked and helpless, sees the two dogs leap on the philosopher and the gigolo, who fall backward.

Growls and screams.

The bull-necked man is completely indifferent to the drama being played out behind him and clearly wants to rip Simon to pieces. Simon hears insults in English, and understands that the fellow expected some exclusivity in his carnal relations with Cordelia. Meanwhile, the dogs are about to tear Slimane and Derrida limb from limb.

The mingled cries of men and beasts have petrified the apprentice Bacchae and their friends. Derrida rolls between gravestones, propelled by the slope and the fury of the dog pursuing him. Slimane is younger and tougher, and has blocked the animal’s jaw with his forearm, but the pressure bearing down on his muscles and bones is so powerful that he will faint any second, and then nothing can stop the beast devouring him. Suddenly, though, he hears a squeal and sees Bayard appear out of nowhere to dig his fingers into the dog’s head, gouging out its eyes. The dog makes a horrible yelping noise and runs away, stumbling blindly into gravestones as it goes.

Then Bayard hurtles down the hill to help Derrida, who is still rolling.

He grabs the second dog’s head to break its neck, but the dog turns on him, knocking him off balance. He immobilizes the hind legs, but the beast’s gaping mouth is only four inches from his face, so Bayard plunges a hand into his jacket pocket and takes out the Rubik’s Cube, the six faces perfectly assembled, and stuffs it down the dog’s throat, all the way to the esophagus. The dog makes a vile gurgling noise, smashes its head against trees, rolls in the grass, goes into convulsions, and finally lies still, choked to death on the toy.

Bayard crawls over to the human form lying next to it. He hears a horrible liquid noise. Derrida is bleeding profusely. The dog literally went for his jugular.

While Bayard is busy killing dogs and Simon is engaged in a full and frank discussion with the bull-man, Searle has rushed over to Slimane, who is still lying on the ground. Now that he understands where the seventh function was hidden, he naturally wants to take the Walkman. He turns over Slimane, who groans with pain, puts his hand on the tape player, and presses eject.

But the cassette holder is empty.

Searle roars like a rabid dog.

From behind a tree, a third man appears. He has a wool tie and a haircut that matches his surroundings. He has perhaps been hiding there since the beginning.

In any case, he is holding a cassette.

And he has unspooled its length of tape.

With his other hand, he thumbs the wheel of a lighter.

Searle, horrified, cries out: “Roman, don’t do that!”

The old man in the wool tie brings the Zippo’s flame to the tape, which is instantly set alight. From a distance, it is just a little green glimmer in the great dark night.

Searle screams as though someone has just torn his heart out.

Bayard turns around. So does the bull-man. Simon can at last escape. He moves toward the bush-man like a sleepwalker (he is still naked) and asks, hollow-voiced: “Who are you?”

The old man readjusts his tie and says simply: “Roman Jakobson, linguist.”

Simon’s blood turns to ice.

Down the hill, Bayard is not sure he heard correctly. “What? What did he say? Simon!”

The last scraps of tape crackle before being transformed into ash.

Cordelia has hurried over to Derrida. She tears her dress to make a bandage for his neck. She is hoping she can stop the bleeding.

“Simon?”

Simon makes no reply, but silently answers Bayard’s silent question: Why didn’t he tell him that Jakobson was alive? You never asked.

The truth is that Simon never imagined that the man who was there at the birth of Structuralism, the man who gave Lévi-Strauss the idea for Structuralism when they met in New York in 1941, the Russian formalist from the Prague School, one of the most important pioneers of linguistics after Saussure, could still be alive. For Simon, he belonged to another age. The age of Lévi-Strauss, not Barthes. He laughs at the stupidity of this reasoning: Barthes is dead, but Lévi-Strauss is alive, so why not Jakobson?

Jakobson crosses the few yards between him and Derrida, taking care not to trip on a stone or a clod of earth.

The philosopher is lying with his head on Cordelia’s knees. Jakobson takes his hand and says: “Thank you, my friend.” Derrida articulates feebly: “I would have listened to the tape, of course. But I would have kept the secret.” He lifts his eyes to the weeping Cordelia: “Smile for me as I will have smiled for you until the end, my child. Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival…”

And with these words, Derrida dies.

Searle and Slimane have disappeared. So has the sports bag.

78

“Is it not pathetic, naïve, and downright childish to come before the dead to ask for their forgiveness?”

Never before has the little cemetery of Ris-Orangis been trodden by so many feet. Lost in the Parisian suburb, beside the Route Nationale 7 highway, bordered by blocks of brutalist council flats, the place is crushed under the weight of a silence only large crowds can produce.

In front of the coffin, above the hole in the ground, Michel Foucault gives the funeral oration.

“Out of a fervor born of friendship or gratitude, out of approval, too, we could be content to cite, to accompany the other, more or less directly, to let him speak, to efface ourselves before him … But through this excessive concern for fidelity, we will end up saying nothing, and sharing nothing.”

Derrida will not be buried in the Jewish section but with the Catholics, so that when the time comes his wife will be able to join him.

In the front row, Sartre listens to Foucault, his expression serious, head bowed, standing next to Etienne Balibar. He isn’t coughing anymore. He looks like a ghost.

“Jacques Derrida is his name, but he can no longer hear it or bear it.”

Bayard asks Simon if that’s Simone de Beauvoir next to Sartre.

Foucault does Foucault: “How can we believe in the contemporary? Even if we seem to belong to the same era, whether in terms of historic dates or social horizons, et cetera, it would be easy to show that their time remains infinitely heterogeneous? And, truth be told, unrelated.”

Avital Ronell cries softly. Cixous leans on Jean-Luc Nancy and stares down expressionlessly into the hole. Deleuze and Guattari meditate on serial singularities.

The three little public housing blocks with their cracked paintwork, their rusted balconies, watch over the cemetery like sentinels, or like teeth planted in the sea.

In June 1979, at the “Estates General of Philosophy,” organized in the main lecture hall of the Sorbonne, Derrida and BHL literally got into a fistfight, but BHL is present at the funeral of the man he will soon call, or is already calling, “my old master.”

Foucault goes on: “Contrary to popular wisdom, the individual ‘subjects’ who live in the most important zones are not authoritarian ‘superegos’; they do not possess a power, supposing that Power can be possessed.”

Sollers and Kristeva have come too, of course. Derrida had participated in Tel Quel, at the beginning. Dissemination had been published in the “Tel Quel” collection, but he had broken with the magazine, though no one knew what part personal feelings played in the separation and what part politics. However, in December 1977, when Derrida was arrested in Prague, trapped by the Communist regime that planted drugs in his luggage, he received and accepted Sollers’s support.

Bayard has still not received the order to arrest Sollers or Kristeva. Apart from the Bulgarian connection he has no proof that they were involved in Barthes’s death. But above all, he has no proof, even if he is almost certain, that they have the seventh function.

It was Kristeva who told Bayard about the meeting at the cemetery in Ithaca, and he thinks she told Searle, too. Bayard’s theory is that she wished to sabotage the transaction by bringing together all those involved, thus multiplying the potential disruptions, because she didn’t know or refused to believe that Derrida, in concert with Jakobson, was working toward the destruction of the copy. Jakobson always believed his discovery should not be made public. To this end, he helped Derrida raise the money to buy the cassette from Slimane.

While Foucault continues his oration, a woman materializes behind Simon and Bayard.

Simon recognizes Anastasia’s perfume.

She whispers something to them and, instinctively, the two men do not turn around.

Foucault: “For what was earlier called ‘following the death,’ ‘on the occasion of the death,’ we have a whole series of typical solutions. The worst ones, or the worst in each of them, are either base or derisory, and yet so common: still to maneuver, to speculate, to try to profit or derive some benefit, whether subtle or sublime, to draw from the dead a supplementary force to be turned against the living, to denounce or insult them more or less directly, to authorize and legitimate oneself, to raise oneself to the very heights where we presume death has placed the other beyond all suspicion.”

Anastasia: “There will soon be a major event organized by the Logos Club. The Great Protagoras has been challenged. He is going to defend his title. That will mean a huge meeting. But only accredited people will be able to attend.”

Foucault: “In its classical form, the funeral oration had a good side, especially when it permitted one to call out directly to the dead, sometimes very informally. This is of course a supplementary fiction, for it is always the dead in me, always the others standing around the coffin whom I call out to. But because of its caricatured excess, the overstatement of this rhetoric at least pointed out that we ought not to remain among ourselves.”

Bayard asks where the meeting will take place. Anastasia replies that it will be in Venice, in a secret venue that has probably not yet been chosen because the “organization” she works for has not been able to locate it.

Foucault: “The interactions of the living must be interrupted, the veil must be torn toward the other, the other dead in us, though other still, and the religious promises of an afterlife could indeed still grant this ‘as if.’”

Anastasia: “Whoever challenges the Great Protagoras is the one who stole the seventh function. You have the motive.”

Neither Searle nor Slimane has been found. But they are not the prime suspects. Slimane wanted to sell it. Searle wanted to buy it. Jakobson helped Derrida outbid him, but Kristeva did everything she could to sink the transaction and Derrida is dead. The two men are still on the run, and one of them has the money, but—as far as Bayard’s employer is concerned—that is not what matters.

What we need, Bayard thinks, is to catch them red-handed.

Simon asks how they can obtain accreditation. Anastasia replies that they must be at least level six (tribune), and that there will be a big qualification tournament organized especially.

“The Novel is a death; it transforms life into destiny, a memory into a useful act, duration into an oriented and meaningful time.”

Bayard asks Simon why Foucault is talking about the novel.

Simon replies that it must be a quotation but he is wondering the same thing, and it is making him decidedly anxious.

79

Leaning over the bridge, Searle can barely make out the water at the bottom of the gorge, but he can hear it flowing in the darkness. It is night in Ithaca and the wind snakes through the corridor of vegetation formed by Cascadilla Creek. Pouring over its bed of stones and moss, the creek follows its course through the steep-sided valley, indifferent to the tragedies of humankind.

A pair of students holds hands as they cross the bridge. There are not many people around at this time of night. No one pays Searle any notice.

If only he’d known. If only he could have …

But it’s too late now to rewrite history.

Without a word, the philosopher steps over the railing, gets his balance on the parapet, glances down into the void, looks up at the stars one last time, lets go, and falls.

Barely even a spray of water: just a small splash. The brief sparkle of foam in the blackness.

The creek is not deep enough to cushion the impact, but the rapids take the body toward the falls and Cayuga Lake, where a long time ago fish were caught by Native Americans who probably—though who knows?—knew very little about the illocutionary and the perlocutionary.