The Seventh Function of Language

Simon is on his way to the conference on Jakobson, which he is excited to attend, with or without Bayard, but as he is crossing the campus lawn, he’s arrested by a burst of throaty but crystal-clear laughter, and when he turns around he spots the young woman from the photocopier. The Carthaginian princess in leather boots, now fully clothed. She is chatting to a small Asian girl and a tall Egyptian girl (or maybe she’s Lebanese, thinks Simon, who instinctively noted her Arab features and the little cross hanging from her neck; maybe a Maronite, but more likely a Copt, in his opinion). (What clue is he basing this assessment on? It’s a mystery.)

The three young women head cheerfully toward the upper town.

Simon decides to follow them.

They pass a science building where the brain of the serial killer and supposed genius Edward Rulloff is preserved in formaldehyde.

They pass the hotel-management school, with its pleasant odor of baking bread.

They pass the veterinary school. Concentrating fully on following the girls, Simon does not see Searle entering the building with a large bag of dog biscuits. Or perhaps he does see him without bothering to decode this information.

They pass the Romance Studies building.

They cross the bridge over the gorge that separates campus from town.

They sit at a table in a bar named after the serial killer. Simon discreetly takes a seat at the bar.

He hears the princess in boots say to her friends: “Jealousy doesn’t interest me, and competition even less … I’m tired of men who are afraid of what they want…”

Simon lights a cigarette.

“I always say that I don’t love Borges … But to what extent, at every moment, I shoot myself in the foot…”

He orders a beer and opens the Ithaca Journal.

“I’m not afraid to say that I’m made for powerful physical love.”

The three young women burst out laughing.

The conversation moves on to the mythological and sexist reading of the constellations and to the way Greek heroines are perpetually sidelined (Simon checks them off in his head: Ariadne, Phaedra, Penelope, Hera, Circe, Europa…).

So he, too, ends up missing the conference on Jakobson’s living structures, because he preferred to spy on a black-haired young woman eating a hamburger with two friends.

75

There is electricity in the air. Everyone is there: Kristeva, Zapp, Foucault, Slimane, Searle. The lecture hall is packed, overflowing; it’s impossible to move without standing on a student’s or a professor’s toes. There’s a loud murmur among the audience, as at the theater, and the master arrives: Derrida, onstage, it’s happening now.

He smiles at Cixous in the front row, makes a brief sign of friendship to his translator Gayatri Spivak, spots his friends and his enemies. Spots Searle.

Simon is there, with Bayard. They are sitting next to Judith, the young lesbian feminist.

“The word of reconciliation is the speech act through which by speaking a word we make a start, we offer reconciliation by addressing the other person; which means that, at least before this word, there was war, suffering, trauma, a wound…”

Simon spots the Carthaginian princess, which has the immediate effect of muddling his powers of concentration, so much so that he does not manage to decode the subtext of Derrida’s opening words, which suggest he is going to be placatory.

And in fact, Derrida comes calmly and methodically to Austin’s theory, developing some objections to it, in strictly academic terms and in what appears to be the most objective manner possible.

The theory of speech acts, which posits that the word is also an act—in other words that the speaker acts at the same time as he speaks—implies a presupposition that Derrida disputes: intentionality. Namely: that the speaker’s intentions preexist his speech and are perfectly clear to him as well as to his receiver (assuming that the receiver is clearly identified).

If I say, “It’s late,” it is because I want to go home. But what if I actually wanted to stay? If I wanted the other person to keep me there? To prevent me from leaving? If I wanted the other person to reassure me by saying: “No, it’s not that late.”

When I write, do I really know what I want to write? Isn’t it the case that the text reveals itself as it is formulated? (Does it ever really reveal itself?)

And when I do know what I want to say, does my receiver receive it exactly as I think it (as I think I thought it)? Does what he understands of what I say correspond exactly to what I think I wanted to tell him?

It’s clear that these opening remarks deal a serious blow to the theory of speech acts. These modest objections make it perilous to evaluate the illocutionary (and especially the perlocutionary) power in terms of success or failure, as Austin does (in lieu of truth or falsehood, as the philological tradition has done until now).