The Seventh Function of Language

As Sollers does not speak Bulgarian, he watches the play while he waits for them. The conflict is between Guignol and two others: an unshaven burglar, and a gendarme who rolls his r’s like Sergei. The story revolves around a simple dispute that is the pretext for multiple action scenes involving violence perpetrated with a stick. Essentially, Guignol must recover the Marquise’s necklace, stolen by the thief. Sollers immediately suspects the Marquise of having given it to the thief of her own free will in exchange for sexual favors.

Kristeva asks what kind of books Slimane has been reading.

Guignol asks the children if the thief went thataway.

Nikolai replies that most of the books he saw Slimane consulting were about linguistics and philosophy, but that, in his opinion, the gigolo is not really sure what he is looking for.

The children cry out: “Yeeeeeesssss!”

Kristeva thinks the main point is that he is looking for something. When she tries to repeat this to Sollers, he cries out: “Yeeeesss!”

Nikolai specifies: mostly Anglophone authors. Chomsky, Austin, Searle, and also a Russian, Jakobson, two Germans, Bühler and Popper, and one Frenchman, Benveniste.

The list speaks for itself as far as Kristeva is concerned.

The thief asks the children to betray Guignol.

The children shout: “Nooooooo!” Sollers, facetiously, says “Yeeesss!” but his answer is drowned out by the children’s cries.

Nikolai becomes even more specific: Slimane only leafed through some of the books, but he read Austin with particular care.

Kristeva deduces from this that he is seeking to contact Searle.

The thief sneaks up behind Guignol, armed with a stick. The children try to warn Guignol: “Watch out! Watch out!” But each time Guignol turns around, the thief hides. Guignol asks the children if the thief is nearby. The children try to tell him, but he acts like he’s deaf, pretending not to understand, which makes them hysterical. They scream, and Sollers screams with them: “Behind you! Behind you!”

Guignol is hit by the stick. Anxious silence in the theater. He looks as if he’s been knocked out, but in fact he’s just pretending. Phew.

Kristeva thinks.

A cunning trick allows Guignol to knock out the thief. For good measure, he rains blows on him with the stick. (In the real world, thinks Nikolai, no one would survive head trauma like that.)

The gendarme arrests the thief and congratulates Guignol.

The children clap until their hands are sore. In the end, we don’t know if Guignol has handed over the necklace or kept it for himself.

Kristeva puts a hand on her husband’s shoulder and shouts into his ear: “I have to go to the USA.”

Guignol waves: “Goodbye, children!”

The children and Sollers: “Goodbye, Guignol!”

The gendarme: “Goodbye, childrrren!”

Sollers, turning around: “Bye, Sergei.”

Nikolai: “Goodbye, Monsieur Krrristeva.”

Kristeva to Sollers: “I’m going to Ithaca.”

53

Slimane also wakes up in a bed that is not his own, but other than him the bed is empty, containing only the outline of a body, as if drawn in chalk on the still-warm sheets. Rather than a bed, he is lying on a mattress placed on the floor in a dark, windowless, almost completely bare room. From the other side of the door, he can hear men’s voices mixed with the sound of classical music. He remembers exactly where he is and he knows that music. (It’s Mahler.) He opens the door and, without bothering to get dressed, goes into the living room.

It is a very long and narrow room, with a long bay window overlooking Paris (toward Boulogne and Saint-Cloud). We are on the ninth floor. Around a low table, Michel Foucault, wrapped in a black kimono, is explaining the mysteries of elephant sexuality to two young men in underpants, one of whom has his portrait reproduced in three photographs hung on a pillar next to the sofa.

Or more exactly, Slimane thinks he understands, how elephant sexuality was perceived and described in seventeenth-century France.

The two young men smoke cigarettes that Slimane knows are stuffed with opium, because this is their technique to cushion the comedown. Curiously, Foucault has never had to resort to this, such is his tolerance for all drugs: he can be at his typewriter at nine in the morning after spending the whole of the previous night on LSD. The young men look less on form. All the same, they greet Slimane, hollow-voiced. Foucault offers him coffee, but just then there is a loud noise in the kitchen and a third young man appears, looking distressed, holding a bit of plastic. This is Mathieu Lindon, who has just broken the coffeepot. The two others cannot suppress a tubercular giggle. Foucault, in a debonair way, suggests tea. Slimane sits down and begins buttering a biscotte while the tall bald man in his black kimono returns to his lecture on elephants.