The Seventh Function of Language

Outside, the Bologna night finally begins to cool. Bayard lights a cigarette while he waits for Antonioni, who is dignified but dazed, to decide to move. At this stage of the investigation, he isn’t sure whether the Logos Club is just a bunch of harmless lunatics or something more dangerous, implicated in the deaths of Barthes and the gigolo, connected to Giscard, the Bulgarians, and the Japanese. A church bell strikes four times. Antonioni starts to walk, followed by Monica Vitti, the two of them followed by Bayard. They silently traverse arcades lined with chic boutiques.

Arched on the dissecting table, Bianca whispers to Simon, loud enough for the man in gloves to hear: “Scopami come una macchina.” Simon stretches over her, fits his cock into the mouth of her vulva, which is, he notes with pleasure, producing a constant flow of fluid, and when he finally thrusts inside her, he feels like pure liquid in its free state, unimpeded, sliding on the voluptuous Neapolitan’s writhing body.

After going up to the top of Via Farini, outside the Basilica of Santo Stefano of the Seven Churches (constructed during the interminable Middle Ages), Antonioni sits on a stone post. He is holding his mutilated hand in his other hand, and his head hangs low. Standing at a distance under the arcades, Bayard can tell he is crying. Monica Vitti walks up to him. Nothing appears to indicate that Antonioni knows she is there, just behind him, but he knows, all the same, and Bayard knows that he knows. Monica Vitti raises her hand, but it remains suspended in the air, hesitant, immobile above the lowered head, like the sketch of a fragile and undeserved halo. Behind his column, Bayard lights a cigarette. Antonioni sniffs. Monica Vitti looks like a dream in stone.

Bianca struggles more and more under the weight of Simon’s body, which she grips convulsively, crying out: “La mia macchina miracolante!” as Simon’s dick pumps inside her like a piston. From his hiding place, the man in gloves hallucinates the hybridization of a locomotive and a wild horse. The anatomical theater swells with their union, a muffled, irregular growl testifying to the fact that desiring machines continually break down as they run, but run only when they are breaking down. “The product is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and the machine parts are the fuel that makes it run.”

Bayard has had time to light another cigarette, and then another. Monica Vitti at last decides to put her hand on Antonioni’s head. The director is now sobbing openly. She strokes his hair with an ambiguous tenderness. Antonioni weeps and weeps. He can’t stop. She lowers her beautiful gray eyes to the director’s neck and Bayard is too far away to distinguish the expression on her face clearly. He tries to squint through the darkness but when he finally thinks he can see the compassion that his logical mind supposes, Monica Vitti turns her gaze away, lifting her eyes toward the massive edifice of the basilica. Perhaps she is already elsewhere. A cat’s yowling can be heard in the distance. Bayard decides it is time to go to bed.

On the dissecting table, Bianca is now the iron horse atop Simon, who lies on the marble slab, all his muscles tensed to give more depth to the Italian girl’s thrusts. “There is only one kind of production: the production of the real.” Bianca slides up and down Simon, faster and faster and harder, until they reach the point of impact, when the two desiring machines collide in an atomic explosion and become, finally, that body without organs: “For desiring machines are the fundamental category of the economy of desire; they produce a body without organs all by themselves, and make no distinction between agents and their own parts…” Deleuze’s phrases flash through the young man’s mind just as his body convulses, as Bianca’s bolts and breaks down, then collapses on top of him, exhausted, their sweat mingling.

The bodies relax, shaken by aftershocks.

“Thus fantasy is never individual: it is group fantasy.”

The man in gloves has not yet managed to leave. He, too, is exhausted, but it is not a pleasant form of exhaustion. His ghost fingers hurt him.

“The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel.”

Bianca explains the Deleuzian schizo to Simon as she rolls a joint. Outside, the first notes of birdsong can be heard. The conversation goes on until morning. “No, the masses were not deceived; they wanted fascism at that moment, in those circumstances…” The man in gloves ends up falling asleep in a row between seats.

8:42 a.m.