The Seventh Function of Language

Slimane knows the Marais quarter well, and in particular Rue Beaubourg, where students line up as soon as the library opens. He knows it because he’s seen all this when coming out of clubs, exhausted by the night’s excesses and wondering how two worlds could coexist in parallel like this without ever touching.

But today, he is in the line. He smokes, his Walkman’s earphones stuck in his ears, trapped between two students with their noses in books. Discreetly, he tries to read the titles. The student in front is reading a book by Michel de Certeau entitled The Practice of Everyday Life. The other, behind him, Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born.

Slimane listens to “Walking on the Moon” by the Police.

The line advances very slowly. Someone says it’ll be another hour before they get in.

“MAKE BEAUBOURG FOLD! The new watchword of the revolution. No need to burn it. No need to protest it. Come on! It’s the best way of destroying it. Beaubourg’s success is no longer a mystery: people go there for that very reason; they rush to enter this building, whose fragility already exudes catastrophe, with the single aim of making it fold.”

Slimane has not read Baudrillard but when his turn comes he goes through the turnstile, unaware that he is participating in this post-Situationist undertaking.

He crosses a sort of press room where people are looking at microfiche on viewers, and takes an escalator up to the reading room, which resembles a huge textile workshop, except that the workers are not cutting out and assembling shirts using sewing machines but reading books and making notes in little notebooks.

Slimane also spots youngsters who’ve come to cruise and tramps who’ve come to sleep.

What impresses Slimane is the silence, but also the height of the ceiling: half factory, half cathedral.

Behind a large glass wall, an immense TV screen shows images from Soviet television. Soon, the images switch to an American channel. Spectators of various ages are sprawled in red chairs. It smells a bit. Slimane does not hang around here, but begins striding through the aisles of shelves.

Baudrillard writes: “The people want to accept everything, swipe everything, eat everything, touch everything. Looking, deciphering, studying doesn’t move them. The one mass affect is that of touching, or manipulating. The organizers (and the artists, and the intellectuals) are alarmed by this uncontrollable impulse, for they reckoned only with the apprenticeship of the masses to the spectacle of culture.”

Inside, outside, on the square, on the ceiling, there are windsocks everywhere. If he survives this adventure, Slimane, like everyone else, will associate the identity of Beaubourg—this big, futuristic ocean liner—with the image of the windsock.

“They never anticipated this active, destructive fascination—this original and brutal response to the gift of an incomprehensible culture, this attraction which has all the semblance of housebreaking or the sacking of a shrine.”

Slimane glances randomly at titles. Have You Read René Char? by Georges Mounin. Racine and Shakespeare by Stendhal. Promise at Dawn by Gary. The Historical Novel by Georg Lukács. Under the Volcano. Paradise Lost. Pantagruel (that one rings a bell).

He passes Jakobson without seeing it.

He bumps into a guy with a mustache.

“Oh, sorry.”

Perhaps it’s time to give some substance to this Bulgarian so he doesn’t end up like his partner, an anonymous soldier fallen in a secret war where the whys are clear but the wherefores remain hazy.

Let’s suppose his name is Nikolai. In any case, his real name will remain unknown. Along with his partner, he followed the investigators’ leads, which brought them to the gigolos. They killed two of them. He still doesn’t know if he ought to kill this one, too. Today, he is unarmed. He has come without his umbrella. The specter of Baudrillard whispers in his ear: “Panic in slow motion, without external movement.” He asks: “What arrre you looking for?” Slimane, who has been suspicious of strangers since the deaths of his two friends, rears back and replies: “Nothing.” Nikolai smiles at him: “That’s like everrrything: difficult to find.”

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