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.”
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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?”
The Seventh Function of Language Page 25