The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  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 spr
inter 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.