The Seventh Function of Language

Bayard immediately brings in Simon Herzog to translate for him. Lying in bed, Barthes is becoming increasingly agitated. Bayard leans over him and asks: “Monsieur Barthes, did you see your attacker?” Barthes opens his madman’s eyes, grabs Bayard by the back of the neck, and declares, in an anguished, breathless voice: “The tutor signifier will be cut up into a series of short, contiguous fragments, which we shall call lexias, since they are units of reading. This cutting up, it must be said, will be arbitrary in the extreme; it will imply no methodological responsibility, because it will be carried out only on the signifier, while the proposed analysis will be carried out only on the signified…” Bayard shoots a quizzical look at Herzog, who shrugs. Barthes whistles threateningly between his teeth. Bayard asks him: “Monsieur Barthes, who is Sophia? What does she know?” Barthes looks at him without understanding, or perhaps understanding all too well, and starts singing in a hoarse voice: “The text is comparable in its mass to a sky, at once flat and smooth, deep, without edges and without landmarks; like the soothsayer drawing on it with the tip of his staff an imaginary rectangle wherein to consult, according to certain principles, the flight of birds, the commentator traces through the text certain zones of reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings, the outcropping of codes, the passage of citations.” Bayard curses Herzog, whose puzzled face reveals all too clearly that he is incapable of explaining this gobbledygook, but Barthes is on the verge of hysteria when he starts shouting, as if his life depended on it: “It’s all in the text! You understand? Find the text! The function! Oh, this is so stupid!” Then he falls back on his pillow and quietly intones: “The lexia is only the wrapping of a semantic volume, the crest line of the plural text, arranged like a berm of possible meanings (but controlled, attested to by a systematic reading) under the flux of discourse: the lexia and its units will thereby form a kind of polyhedron faceted by the word, the group of words, the sentence of the paragraph, i.e., with the language which is its ‘natural’ excipient.” And he faints. Bayard tries to shake him back to consciousness. The blond nurse has to force him to put the patient down, then she clears the room again.

When Bayard asks Simon Herzog to give him the lowdown, the young professor wants to tell him that he shouldn’t take too much notice of Sollers and BHL, but at the same time he sees an opportunity, so he says with relish: “We should begin by interrogating Deleuze.”

On his way out of the hospital, Simon Herzog bumps into the blond nurse who is looking after Barthes. “Oh, excuse me, mademoiselle!” She gives him a charming smile: “No prrroblem, monsieur.”

17

Hamed wakes early. His body, still soaked with last night’s steam and drugs, jolts him from a bad sleep. Dazed and groggy, disoriented, all at sea in this unfamiliar room, it takes him a few seconds to recall how he got here and what he did. He slides out of bed, trying not to wake the man next to him, puts on his sleeveless T-shirt and his Lee Cooper jeans, goes into the kitchen to make himself coffee, finishes a joint from the night before which he finds in a Jacuzzi-shaped ashtray, grabs his jacket, a black-and-white Teddy Smith with a large red F near the heart, and leaves, slamming the door behind him.