The Seventh Function of Language

He places his hand on the dissecting table. One of the judges gets to his feet: a tall and very thin man, armed with a small, blue-bladed hatchet.

When the hatchet chops off Antonioni’s finger, the echo of the severed bone mingles with that of the blade hitting marble and the director’s scream.

Monica Vitti bandages his hand with her gauze scarf while the judge respectfully picks up the finger and hands it to the actress.

Bifo proclaims loudly: “Onore agli arringatori.” The audience choruses: Honor to the duelists.

Luciano’s mother returns to sit down next to her son.

As at the end of a movie when the lights have not yet come back up, when the return to the real world is experienced as a slow, hazy awakening, when the images are still dancing behind our eyes, several minutes pass before the first spectators, stretching their numb legs, stand up and leave the room.

The anatomical theater empties slowly. Bifo and his fellow judges gather pages of notes into cardboard folders then retire ceremoniously. The session of the Logos Club dissolves into the night.

Bayard asks the man in gloves if Bifo is the Great Protagoras. He shakes his head like a child. Bifo is a tribune (level six), but not a sophist (level seven, the highest). The man in gloves thought it was Antonioni, who, it was said, used to be a sophist in the 1960s.

Sollers and BHL slip out discreetly. Bayard does not see them leave, because in the bottleneck near the door, they are hidden behind the man with the bag. He must make a decision. He decides to follow Antonioni. Turning back, he says out loud to Simon, in front of everyone: “Tomorrow, ten o’clock at the station. Don’t be late!”

3:22 a.m.

The amphitheater is almost empty. The crowd from the Drogheria has gone. Simon wants to leave last, just to be sure. He watches the man in gloves walk out. He watches Enzo and the young student leaving together. He notes with satisfaction that Bianca has not moved. He might even suppose that she is waiting for him. They are the last ones. They stand up, walk slowly toward the door. But just as they are about to exit the room, they stop. Gallienus, Hippocrates, and the others observe them. The flayed men are absolutely motionless. Desire, alcohol, the intoxication of being away from home, the warm welcome that French people so often receive when they travel abroad … all these things give Simon a boldness—albeit a very shy boldness!—that he knows he would never have had in Paris.

Simon takes Bianca’s hand.

Or maybe it’s the other way around?

Bianca takes Simon’s hand and they walk down the steps to the stage. She turns in a circle and the statues flash past her eyes like a ghostly slide show, like images-mouvements.

Does Simon realize at this precise moment that life is role-play, in which it is up to us to play our part as best we can, or does the spirit of Deleuze suddenly breathe life into his young, supple, slim body, with his smooth skin and short nails?

He puts his hands on Bianca’s shoulders and slips off her low-cut top. Suddenly inspired, he whispers into her ear, as if to himself: “I desire the landscape that is enveloped in this woman, a landscape I do not know but that I can feel, and until I have unfolded that landscape, I will not be happy…”

Bianca shivers with pleasure. Simon whispers to her with an authority that he has never felt before: “Let’s construct an assemblage.”

She gives him her mouth.

He tips her back and lays her on the dissecting table. She takes off her skirt, spreads her legs, and tells him: “Fuck me like a machine.” And while her breasts spill out, Simon begins to flow into her assemblage. His tongue-machine slides inside her like a coin in a slot, and Bianca’s mouth, which also has multiple uses, expels air like a bellows, a powerful, rhythmic breathing whose echo—“Si! Si!”—reverberates in the pulsing blood in Simon’s cock. Bianca moans, Simon gets hard, Simon licks Bianca, Bianca touches her breasts, the flayed men get hard, Gallienus starts to jerk off under his robe, and Hippocrates under his toga. “Si! Si!” Bianca grabs Simon’s dick, which is hot and hard as if it’s just come out of a forge, and connects it to her mouth-machine. Simon declaims as if to himself, quoting Artaud in an oddly detached voice: “The body under the skin is an overheated factory.” The Bianca factory automatically lubricates her devenir-sexe. Their mingled moans ring out through the deserted anatomical theater.

Well, not entirely deserted: the man in gloves has come back to check out the two youngsters. Simon sees him, crouching in a shadowy angle of the tiered seating. Bianca sees him while she is sucking Simon. The man in gloves sees Bianca’s dark eyes shine as they observe him, even as she goes down on Simon.