The Seventh Function of Language

In the large entrance hall, Simon and Bayard are talking to Judith, who sips a Bloody Mary through a straw. Bayard sees Slimane. Simon sees the Carthaginian princess, who comes in with her two friends, the short Asian girl and the tall Egyptian. A male student yells: “Cordelia!” The princess turns around. Hugs, kisses, effusive greetings. The student immediately trots off to fetch her a gin and tonic. Judith tells Bayard and Simon (who is not listening): “The power can be understood by considering the model of divine power, according to which making an utterance is equivalent to creating the utterance.” Foucault comes up from the basement with Hélène Cixous, grabs a Malibu and O.J., and disappears upstairs. Seeing this, Judith quotes Foucault: “Discourse is not life; its time is not our time.” Bayard nods. Some boys gather around Cordelia and her friends, who seem very popular. Judith quotes Lacan, who said somewhere: “The name is the time of the object.” Bayard wonders if one might as easily say “the time is the name of the object,” or “the time is the object of the name,” or maybe “the object is the name of the time,” or even “the object is the time of the name,” or simply “the name is the object of the time,” but he grabs another beer, takes a hit of the joint that’s being passed around, and nearly cries out: “But you already have the right to vote, get divorced, and have an abortion!” Cixous would like to talk to Derrida, but he is hemmed in by a dense mob of transfixed admirers. Slimane avoids Kristeva. Bayard asks Judith: “What do you want?” Cixous hears Bayard and joins the conversation: “Let’s get a room!” Sylvère Lotringer, the founder of the magazine Sémiotext(e), holds an orchid and talks to Derrida’s translators Jeffrey Mehlman and Gayatri Spivak, who shouts: “Gramsci is my brother!” Slimane talks with Jean-François Lyotard about the economics of lust or a postmodern transaction. Pink Floyd sing: “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”

Cixous tells Judith, Bayard, and Simon that the new history that’s coming is beyond the male imagination, and for good reason, it will deprive them of their conceptual crutches and begin by ruining their illusion machine, but Simon is no longer listening. He observes Cordelia’s group like a general sizing up the enemy army: six people, three boys and three girls. Approaching her would have been extremely difficult anyway, but in this grouping it now seems particularly inconceivable.

All the same, he starts to move toward them.

“White, physically attractive, with a skirt and fake jewelry, I employ all the codes of my sex and my age,” he thinks, attempting to enter the girl’s head. Passing close, he hears her say, in French, in a tone of perfectly erotic worldliness: “Couples are like birds, inseparable, abundant, uselessly beating their wings outside the cage.” He detects no accent. An American says something to her in English that Simon doesn’t understand. She replies, first in English (also accentless, as far as he can tell), then in French, throwing back her throat: “I’ve never been able to have affairs, only novels.” Simon goes off to grab a drink, maybe two. (He hears Gayatri Spivak say to Slimane: “We were taught to say yes to the enemy.”)

Bayard takes advantage of his absence to ask Judith to explain the difference between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Judith tells him that the illocutionary act of discourse is itself the thing that it performs, whereas the perlocutionary act provokes certain effects that are not to be confused with the act of discourse. “For example, if I ask you: ‘Do you think there are any free rooms upstairs?,’ the objective illocutionary reality contained in the question is that I’m hitting on you. By asking that question, I hit on you. But the perlocutionary stakes are played at another level: knowing that I am hitting on you, are you interested in my proposition? The illocutionary act will be performed with success if you understand my invitation. But the perlocutionary act will be fulfilled only if you follow me to a room. It’s a subtle difference, isn’t it? And it’s not always stable, in fact.”

Bayard stammers something incomprehensible, but the fact of his stammering indicates that he has understood. Cixous smiles her Sphinx-like smile and says: “So let’s perform!” Bayard follows the two women, who pick up a six-pack and climb the stairs, where Chomsky and Camille Paglia are making out. In the corridor, they pass a Latin American student wearing a D&G-branded silk shirt, who Judith buys some little pills from. As he isn’t aware of that particular brand, Bayard asks Judith what the initials stand for and Judith tells him it’s not a brand but the initials of “Deleuze & Guattari.” The same two letters feature on the pills.

Down below, an American guy tells Cordelia: “You are the muse!”