The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  “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 gâtea
u: 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, poststructuralis
m, 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.