The Seventh Function of Language

He grabs the second dog’s head to break its neck, but the dog turns on him, knocking him off balance. He immobilizes the hind legs, but the beast’s gaping mouth is only four inches from his face, so Bayard plunges a hand into his jacket pocket and takes out the Rubik’s Cube, the six faces perfectly assembled, and stuffs it down the dog’s throat, all the way to the esophagus. The dog makes a vile gurgling noise, smashes its head against trees, rolls in the grass, goes into convulsions, and finally lies still, choked to death on the toy.

Bayard crawls over to the human form lying next to it. He hears a horrible liquid noise. Derrida is bleeding profusely. The dog literally went for his jugular.

While Bayard is busy killing dogs and Simon is engaged in a full and frank discussion with the bull-man, Searle has rushed over to Slimane, who is still lying on the ground. Now that he understands where the seventh function was hidden, he naturally wants to take the Walkman. He turns over Slimane, who groans with pain, puts his hand on the tape player, and presses eject.

But the cassette holder is empty.

Searle roars like a rabid dog.

From behind a tree, a third man appears. He has a wool tie and a haircut that matches his surroundings. He has perhaps been hiding there since the beginning.

In any case, he is holding a cassette.

And he has unspooled its length of tape.

With his other hand, he thumbs the wheel of a lighter.

Searle, horrified, cries out: “Roman, don’t do that!”

The old man in the wool tie brings the Zippo’s flame to the tape, which is instantly set alight. From a distance, it is just a little green glimmer in the great dark night.

Searle screams as though someone has just torn his heart out.

Bayard turns around. So does the bull-man. Simon can at last escape. He moves toward the bush-man like a sleepwalker (he is still naked) and asks, hollow-voiced: “Who are you?”

The old man readjusts his tie and says simply: “Roman Jakobson, linguist.”

Simon’s blood turns to ice.

Down the hill, Bayard is not sure he heard correctly. “What? What did he say? Simon!”

The last scraps of tape crackle before being transformed into ash.

Cordelia has hurried over to Derrida. She tears her dress to make a bandage for his neck. She is hoping she can stop the bleeding.

“Simon?”

Simon makes no reply, but silently answers Bayard’s silent question: Why didn’t he tell him that Jakobson was alive? You never asked.

The truth is that Simon never imagined that the man who was there at the birth of Structuralism, the man who gave Lévi-Strauss the idea for Structuralism when they met in New York in 1941, the Russian formalist from the Prague School, one of the most important pioneers of linguistics after Saussure, could still be alive. For Simon, he belonged to another age. The age of Lévi-Strauss, not Barthes. He laughs at the stupidity of this reasoning: Barthes is dead, but Lévi-Strauss is alive, so why not Jakobson?

Jakobson crosses the few yards between him and Derrida, taking care not to trip on a stone or a clod of earth.

The philosopher is lying with his head on Cordelia’s knees. Jakobson takes his hand and says: “Thank you, my friend.” Derrida articulates feebly: “I would have listened to the tape, of course. But I would have kept the secret.” He lifts his eyes to the weeping Cordelia: “Smile for me as I will have smiled for you until the end, my child. Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival…”

And with these words, Derrida dies.

Searle and Slimane have disappeared. So has the sports bag.

78

“Is it not pathetic, naïve, and downright childish to come before the dead to ask for their forgiveness?”

Never before has the little cemetery of Ris-Orangis been trodden by so many feet. Lost in the Parisian suburb, beside the Route Nationale 7 highway, bordered by blocks of brutalist council flats, the place is crushed under the weight of a silence only large crowds can produce.

In front of the coffin, above the hole in the ground, Michel Foucault gives the funeral oration.

“Out of a fervor born of friendship or gratitude, out of approval, too, we could be content to cite, to accompany the other, more or less directly, to let him speak, to efface ourselves before him … But through this excessive concern for fidelity, we will end up saying nothing, and sharing nothing.”

Derrida will not be buried in the Jewish section but with the Catholics, so that when the time comes his wife will be able to join him.

In the front row, Sartre listens to Foucault, his expression serious, head bowed, standing next to Etienne Balibar. He isn’t coughing anymore. He looks like a ghost.

“Jacques Derrida is his name, but he can no longer hear it or bear it.”

Bayard asks Simon if that’s Simone de Beauvoir next to Sartre.