The Seventh Function of Language

Cordelia pouts disdainfully, and Simon guesses she has practiced this expression to show off her voluptuous lips: “That’s not enough.”

This is the moment Simon chooses to approach her, in front of all her friends, with the resolve of an Acapulco diver. Feigning a cool spontaneity, as if he just happened to be passing, he says that having overheard her remark he couldn’t help responding: “Well, sure, who wants to be an object?” Silence. He reads in Cordelia’s eyes: “Okay, now you have my attention.” He knows he must not only show himself to be urbane and cultivated but must pique her curiosity, provoke her without shocking her, demonstrate his spirit in order to arouse hers, mix lightheartedness with profundity while avoiding pedantry and pretentiousness, indulge the comedy of social life but suggest that neither of them is fooled by it, and, naturally, immediately eroticize the relationship.

“You are made for powerful physical love and you love the iterability of photocopiers, right? A sublimated fantasy is nothing other than a fantasy fulfilled. Anyone who claims the opposite is a liar, a priest and an exploiter of the people.” He hands her one of the two glasses he is holding. “You like gin and tonic?”

The stereo plays “Sexy Eyes” by Dr. Hook. Cordelia takes the glass.

She raises it for a toast and says: “We are lies of trust.” Simon lifts his glass and drinks it almost in a single gulp. He knows he has passed the first test.

Instinctively, he scans the room and spots Slimane, leaning with one hand on the banister of the staircase, on the half-landing, surveying the crowd in the hall, making a V-for-victory sign with his free hand, then using both hands to draw a sort of cross, the hand forming the horizontal bar slightly above the midpoint of the vertical hand. Simon tries to make out who he is addressing the sign to, but all he can see are students and professors drinking and dancing and flirting to Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” and he senses that something is wrong, though he can’t tell what. And the increasingly tight group forming around Derrida: it is him Slimane is looking at.

He does not see Kristeva or the old man with the bush hair and the wool tie, but they are there, all the same, and if he could see them, if they weren’t hidden in different but equally concealed positions, he would see that both had their eyes fixed on Slimane and he would know that both had intercepted the sign Slimane was making with his hands and he would guess that both had guessed that the sign was addressed to Derrida, hidden, too, behind his admirers.

Nor does he see the man with the bull’s neck who fucked Cordelia on the photocopier, but he is there too, staring at her with his bull’s eyes.

He searches for Bayard in the crowd but doesn’t find him, for the very good reason that Bayard is in a bedroom upstairs, beer in hand, unidentified chemical substance coursing through his veins, discussing pornography and feminism with his new friends.

He hears Cordelia say: “The Church, in the goodness of its heart, did at least ask the council of Mâcon in 585 if a woman had a soul…,” so to please her, he adds: “… and was very careful not to find a response.”

The tall Egyptian girl quotes a line of Wordsworth whose provenance Simon does not manage to pinpoint. The short Asian girl explains to an Italian man from Brooklyn that she is writing her thesis on the queer in Racine.

Someone says: “Everyone knows that psychoanalysts don’t even talk anymore, and they don’t do much interpreting either.”

Camille Paglia screams: “French go home! Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores.”

Morris Zapp laughs and yells across the hall: “You’re damn right, General Custer!”

Gayatri Spivak thinks: “You’re not Aristotle’s granddaughter, you know.”

In the bedroom, Judith asks Bayard: “So where do you work, actually?” Bayard, taken by surprise, replies dumbly, immediately hoping that Cixous does not pick up on it: “I do research … at Vincennes.” But Cixous, of course, raises an eyebrow, so he looks her in the eye and says: “In law.” Cixous raises her other eyebrow. Not only has she never seen Bayard at Vincennes, but the university has no law department. To create a diversion, Bayard puts a hand under her blouse and squeezes a breast through her bra. Cixous suppresses a look of surprise but decides not to react, then Judith puts a hand on her other breast.