The Seventh Function of Language

Bayard asks Judith why she is interested in him. Judith, nestled against his shoulder, meows and replies, in her Jewish Midwestern accent: “Because you didn’t seem to fit in here.”

“The goddess said: ‘I came, that is just and good.’”

There is a knock at the door and someone comes in. Bayard sits up and recognizes Kristeva, who says: “You should get dressed.”

“The very first goddess, the very first female powers. Humanity by, on, in her. The ground, the atmosphere, water, fire. Language.”

A church bell tolls twice.

“Thus the day came when the little prankster appeared. He didn’t look like much but was self-confident. He said: ‘I am God, I am the son of man, they need a father to pray to. They will know how to be faithful to me: I know how to communicate.’”

The cemetery is only about a hundred yards away. The sounds of the party echo over the tombs, giving the ritualistic ceremony a decidedly anachronistic soundtrack: the stereo plays ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).”

“Thus man imposed the image, the rules, and the veneration of all human bodies endowed with a dick.”

Simon turns his face away to hide his embarrassment and his arousal, and it is then that he makes out, about thirty yards away, two figures meeting under a tree. He sees the slimmer figure pass the earphones of his Walkman to the stockier figure, who is carrying a sports bag in one hand. He realizes that Derrida is checking the merchandise, and that the merchandise is a cassette recording of the seventh function of language.

“The real is out of control. The real fabricates stories, legends, and creatures.”

He watches as Derrida—only a few yards away, beneath a tree, amid the gravestones of Ithaca’s cemetery—listens to the seventh function of language.

“On horseback on a tomb, we will feed our sons with their fathers’ entrails.”

Simon wants to intervene, but cannot move a single muscle in his body in order to stand up, nor even the muscle of his tongue (which he knows is the most powerful) in order to articulate a word, particularly as the stage following the symbolic castration is that of the symbolic rebirth, and that the dawning of the new man is here symbolized by fellatio. When Cordelia takes him in her mouth and he feels the heat of the Carthaginian princess’s mucus membranes spreading through every particle of him, he knows that as far as the mission is concerned the game is up.

“We form with our mouths the breath and the power of the Sorority. We are one and many, we are a female legion…”

The exchange will take place, and he will do nothing to prevent it.

But throwing his head back, he sees at the top of the hill, illuminated by the lights of the campus, an unreal vision (and that unreality itself terrifies him more than the vision’s possible reality): a man with two huge, ferocious dogs on a leash.

In spite of the darkness, he knows it is Searle. The dogs bark. The startled spectators look over at them. Donna interrupts her prayer. Cordelia stops sucking Simon’s cock.

Searle makes a noise with his mouth and unleashes the two dogs, which rush at Slimane and Derrida. Simon gets up and runs to help them, but suddenly he feels a powerful grip on his arm: it’s the bull-necked man, the one who fucked Cordelia on the photocopier, who pulls him back and then punches him in the face. Simon, sprawled on the ground, naked and helpless, sees the two dogs leap on the philosopher and the gigolo, who fall backward.

Growls and screams.

The bull-necked man is completely indifferent to the drama being played out behind him and clearly wants to rip Simon to pieces. Simon hears insults in English, and understands that the fellow expected some exclusivity in his carnal relations with Cordelia. Meanwhile, the dogs are about to tear Slimane and Derrida limb from limb.

The mingled cries of men and beasts have petrified the apprentice Bacchae and their friends. Derrida rolls between gravestones, propelled by the slope and the fury of the dog pursuing him. Slimane is younger and tougher, and has blocked the animal’s jaw with his forearm, but the pressure bearing down on his muscles and bones is so powerful that he will faint any second, and then nothing can stop the beast devouring him. Suddenly, though, he hears a squeal and sees Bayard appear out of nowhere to dig his fingers into the dog’s head, gouging out its eyes. The dog makes a horrible yelping noise and runs away, stumbling blindly into gravestones as it goes.

Then Bayard hurtles down the hill to help Derrida, who is still rolling.