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 k
now, 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. Cho
msky, 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.”
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The Seventh Function of Language Page 21