The Seventh Function of Language

Foucault does Foucault: “How can we believe in the contemporary? Even if we seem to belong to the same era, whether in terms of historic dates or social horizons, et cetera, it would be easy to show that their time remains infinitely heterogeneous? And, truth be told, unrelated.”

Avital Ronell cries softly. Cixous leans on Jean-Luc Nancy and stares down expressionlessly into the hole. Deleuze and Guattari meditate on serial singularities.

The three little public housing blocks with their cracked paintwork, their rusted balconies, watch over the cemetery like sentinels, or like teeth planted in the sea.

In June 1979, at the “Estates General of Philosophy,” organized in the main lecture hall of the Sorbonne, Derrida and BHL literally got into a fistfight, but BHL is present at the funeral of the man he will soon call, or is already calling, “my old master.”

Foucault goes on: “Contrary to popular wisdom, the individual ‘subjects’ who live in the most important zones are not authoritarian ‘superegos’; they do not possess a power, supposing that Power can be possessed.”

Sollers and Kristeva have come too, of course. Derrida had participated in Tel Quel, at the beginning. Dissemination had been published in the “Tel Quel” collection, but he had broken with the magazine, though no one knew what part personal feelings played in the separation and what part politics. However, in December 1977, when Derrida was arrested in Prague, trapped by the Communist regime that planted drugs in his luggage, he received and accepted Sollers’s support.

Bayard has still not received the order to arrest Sollers or Kristeva. Apart from the Bulgarian connection he has no proof that they were involved in Barthes’s death. But above all, he has no proof, even if he is almost certain, that they have the seventh function.

It was Kristeva who told Bayard about the meeting at the cemetery in Ithaca, and he thinks she told Searle, too. Bayard’s theory is that she wished to sabotage the transaction by bringing together all those involved, thus multiplying the potential disruptions, because she didn’t know or refused to believe that Derrida, in concert with Jakobson, was working toward the destruction of the copy. Jakobson always believed his discovery should not be made public. To this end, he helped Derrida raise the money to buy the cassette from Slimane.

While Foucault continues his oration, a woman materializes behind Simon and Bayard.

Simon recognizes Anastasia’s perfume.

She whispers something to them and, instinctively, the two men do not turn around.

Foucault: “For what was earlier called ‘following the death,’ ‘on the occasion of the death,’ we have a whole series of typical solutions. The worst ones, or the worst in each of them, are either base or derisory, and yet so common: still to maneuver, to speculate, to try to profit or derive some benefit, whether subtle or sublime, to draw from the dead a supplementary force to be turned against the living, to denounce or insult them more or less directly, to authorize and legitimate oneself, to raise oneself to the very heights where we presume death has placed the other beyond all suspicion.”

Anastasia: “There will soon be a major event organized by the Logos Club. The Great Protagoras has been challenged. He is going to defend his title. That will mean a huge meeting. But only accredited people will be able to attend.”

Foucault: “In its classical form, the funeral oration had a good side, especially when it permitted one to call out directly to the dead, sometimes very informally. This is of course a supplementary fiction, for it is always the dead in me, always the others standing around the coffin whom I call out to. But because of its caricatured excess, the overstatement of this rhetoric at least pointed out that we ought not to remain among ourselves.”

Bayard asks where the meeting will take place. Anastasia replies that it will be in Venice, in a secret venue that has probably not yet been chosen because the “organization” she works for has not been able to locate it.

Foucault: “The interactions of the living must be interrupted, the veil must be torn toward the other, the other dead in us, though other still, and the religious promises of an afterlife could indeed still grant this ‘as if.’”

Anastasia: “Whoever challenges the Great Protagoras is the one who stole the seventh function. You have the motive.”

Neither Searle nor Slimane has been found. But they are not the prime suspects. Slimane wanted to sell it. Searle wanted to buy it. Jakobson helped Derrida outbid him, but Kristeva did everything she could to sink the transaction and Derrida is dead. The two men are still on the run, and one of them has the money, but—as far as Bayard’s employer is concerned—that is not what matters.

What we need, Bayard thinks, is to catch them red-handed.