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 w
ho 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 na
ture,” 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?”
The Seventh Function of Language Page 24