The Seventh Function of Language

An undergrad named Donna has joined Cordelia’s group, and the Carthaginian princess asks her: “How’s Greek life so far?” In fact, Donna and her sorority sisters are planning to stage a bacchanal. Cordelia is excited and amused by the idea. Simon thinks that Slimane must have been arranging to meet Derrida. Maybe the sign he made was not a V for victory, but the time of the meeting. Two o’clock, but where? Had it been a church, Slimane would have made a standard sign of the cross, rather than that bizarre gesture. He asks: “Is there a cemetery nearby?” Young Donna claps her hands: “Oh yeah! That’s a great idea! Let’s go to the cemetery!” Simon is about to say that that was not what he meant, but Cordelia and her friends seem so thrilled by the proposal that in the end he says nothing.

Donna says she’ll go and fetch the stuff. The stereo plays “Call Me” by Blondie.

It is already almost one o’clock.

He hears someone say: “The interpretative priest, the soothsayer, is one of the despot-god’s bureaucrats, you see? Here’s another aspect of the priest’s treachery, damn it: the interpretation goes on forever and never finds anything to interpret that is not itself already an interpretation!” It’s Guattari, clearly quite drunk, hitting on an innocent postgrad from Illinois.

He has to tell Bayard.

The stereo sends Debbie Harry’s voice ricocheting from the walls: “When you’re ready, we can share the wine.”

Donna returns with a toiletry bag and says they can go now.

Simon rushes upstairs to tell Bayard to meet them at the cemetery at two o’clock. He opens all the doors, finding all kinds of stoned students, some more active than others. He finds Foucault jerking off in front of a poster of Mick Jagger, finds Andy Warhol writing poems (in fact, it’s Jonathan Culler filling out pay stubs), finds a greenhouse with marijuana plants growing up to the ceiling, even finds some well-behaved students watching baseball on a sports channel while they smoke crack, then finally locates Bayard.

“Oh? Sorry!”

He quickly closes the door, but he has time to see Bayard wedged between the legs of a woman he is unable to identify while Judith fucks him with a strap-on, yelling: “I am a man and I fuck you! Now you feel my performative, don’t you?”

Impressed by this vision, he doesn’t have the presence of mind to leave a message and rushes downstairs to join Cordelia’s group.

He passes Kristeva on the stairs, but pays no attention to her.

He is well aware that he is not following the emergency protocol, but his attraction to Cordelia’s white skin is too strong. After all, he’ll be at the meeting place, he thinks, legitimizing a plan he knows full well is driven only by the logic of his desire.

Kristeva knocks on the door with the strange growling noises behind it. Searle opens it. She does not go in, but whispers something to him. Then she heads for the room she saw Bayard go into with his two friends.

The cemetery in Ithaca is on a wooded hillside, and the gravestones look as if they have been scattered randomly between the trees. The only sources of light are the moon and the city. The group gathers around the tomb of a woman who died very young. Donna explains that she is going to recite the secrets of the Sibyl, but that they must prepare the “birth ceremony of the new man,” and that they need a volunteer. Cordelia volunteers Simon. He would like to ask for more details, but when she starts undressing him, he lets her do it. Around them, a dozen people have come to watch the spectacle, and this seems like a crowd to Simon. When he is completely naked, she lays him down in the grass, at the foot of the gravestone, and whispers in his ear: “Relax. We’re going to kill the former man.”

Everyone has been drinking, everyone is extremely disinhibited, so all this could happen in reality, thinks Simon.

Donna hands the toiletry bag to Cordelia, who takes out a cutthroat razor and solemnly opens it. As Simon hears Donna mention the radical feminist Valerie Solanas in her introduction, he does not feel entirely reassured. But Cordelia also takes out a can of shaving foam and sprays it over his crotch before carefully shaving off his pubic hair. A symbol of symbolic castration, Simon thinks, following the operation attentively, all the more so when he feels Cordelia’s fingers delicately moving his penis.

“In the beginning, no matter what they say, there was only a goddess. One goddess, and one only.”

All the same, he would have preferred it if Bayard were there.

But Bayard is smoking a cigarette in the dark, naked, stretched out on the carpet of a student bedroom, between the naked bodies of his two friends, one of whom has fallen asleep, her arm across his chest, her hand holding the other woman’s.

“In the beginning, no matter what they think, women were all and one. The only power was female, spontaneous, and plural.”