The Seventh Function of Language

Barthes wishes he were elsewhere. He has better things to do than make small talk. He regrets having agreed to this lunch: his leftist friends will give him hell again, although at least Deleuze will be happy. Foucault, of course, will utter a few contemptuous barbs, and make sure they are repeated by others.

“Arab fiction no longer hesitates to question its limits. It wants to struggle out of the straitjacket of classicism, break free from the conceptual novel…”

This is probably the price he has to pay for having eaten lunch with Giscard. “A very successful grand bourgeois”? Yes, certainly, but these bourgeois have done pretty well, too … Come on, once the wine’s been poured, you have to drink it. And actually, it is pretty good, this white. What is it? Chardonnay, I reckon.

“Have you read the latest Moravia? I like Leonardo Sciascia. Do you read Italian?”

What distinguishes them? Nothing, in principle.

“Do you like Bergman?”

Look at the way they stand, speak, dress … Without a shadow of a doubt the habitus of the Right, as Bourdieu would say.

“With the possible exception of Picasso, no other artist can rival Michelangelo’s critical standing. And yet nothing has been said about the democratic nature of his work!”

And me? Do I have right-wing habitus? Being badly dressed is not enough to get off the hook. Barthes touches the back of his chair to check that his old jacket is still there. Calm down. No one’s going to steal it. Ha! You’re thinking like a bourgeois.

“Modernity? Pfft! Giscard dreams of a feudal France. We’ll see if the French people are looking for a master or a guide.”

He doesn’t so much speak as plead. Every inch a lawyer. Some good smells coming from the kitchen.

“It’s coming, it’s almost ready! And you, my good sir, what are you working on at the moment?”

On words. A smile. A knowing look. No need to go into details. A little Proust, that always goes down well.

“You won’t believe me, but I have an aunt who knew the Guermantes.” The young actress is quite spiky. Very French.

I feel tired. What I really wanted was to take an anti-rhetorical path. But it’s too late now. Barthes sighs sadly. He hates being bored, and yet so many opportunities are offered to him, and he accepts them without really knowing why. But today is a little different. It’s not as if he didn’t have anything better to do.

“I’m friends with Michel Tournier. He’s not at all as wild as you’d imagine, ha ha.”

Oh, look, fish. Hence the white.

“Come and sit down, ‘Jacques’! You’re not going to spend the whole meal in the kitchen, are you?”

The curly-haired young man with goatlike features finishes serving his hot pot and comes to join us. He leans on the back of Barthes’s chair before sitting down next to him.

“It’s a cautriade: a mix of different fish. There’s red mullet, whiting, sole, mackerel, along with shellfish and vegetables, spiced up by a dash of vinaigrette, and I put a bit of curry in it with a pinch of tarragon. Bon appétit!”

Oh yes, that’s good. It’s chic and at the same time working-class. Barthes has often written about food: steak-frites, the simple ham sandwich, milk and wine … But this is something else, obviously. It has an aura of simplicity, but it has been cooked and prepared with effort, care, love. And also, always, a show of strength. He has already theorized about this in his book on Japan: Western food—accumulated, dignified, swollen into the majestic, linked to some prestigious operation—always tends toward excess, abundance, copiousness; Eastern food goes in the opposite direction, it blossoms into the infinitesimal: the future of the cucumber is not its piling up or its thickening, but its division.

“It’s a Breton fishermen’s meal: it was cooked originally using seawater. The vinaigrette was meant to counterbalance the salt’s thirst-inducing effect.”

Memories of Tokyo … To divide the baguette, pull it apart, pick at it, spread it open, instead of cutting and gripping it, as we do with our cutlery; never assault the food …

Barthes does not object when his glass is filled again. Around the table, the guests eat in a somewhat intimidated silence, and he observes that little man with the hard mouth who vacuums up his mouthfuls of whiting with a light sucking sound that is proof of a good bourgeois education.

“I declared that power was property. That is not entirely false, of course.”

Mitterrand puts down his spoon. The silent listeners stop eating to indicate to the little man that they are concentrating on what he says.