The Seventh Function of Language

Kristeva lights a cigarette. She examines the embroidered motif on the cushion she is leaning against, a reproduction of the unicorn from Cluny’s tapestry, which she and Sollers bought together back in the old days, at the Singapore airport. Her legs are folded under her, her hair is in a ponytail, and she caresses the potted plant next to the sofa as she says in an undertone, articulating exaggeratedly with her very faint accent: “Yes … the otherrrs.”

To contain his nervousness, Sollers recites his little personal rosary:

“Foucault: too irritable, jealous, vehement. Deleuze? Too dark. Althusser? Too sick (ha ha!). Derrida? Too hidden in his successive envelopments (ha ha). Hate Lacan. Don’t see any harm in the Communists looking after security at Vincennes. (Vincennes: a place for monitoring the fanatics.)”

The truth, Kristeva knows, is that Sollers is afraid of not ending up published in the Pléiade collection, that one sure sign of having made it.

For now, the misunderstood genius strives to vilify the Americans, with their “gay and lesbian studies,” their totalitarian feminism, their fascination for “deconstruction” or for Lacanian psychoanalysis, when it’s obvious that they’ve never even heard of Molière!

And their women!

“American women? Mostly unbearable: money, complaints, family sagas, pseudo-psychological infection. Thankfully, in New York, there are Latino and Chinese girls, and quite a few Europeans, too.” But at Cornell! Pfft.

Kristeva drinks a jasmine tea while she leafs through an English-language psychoanalysis journal.

Sollers paces around the large living-room table, livid, shoulders hunched forward like a bull: “Foucault, Foucault, that’s all they think about.”

Then he suddenly lifts his head and thrusts out his chest, like a sprinter on the finishing line: “Oh, screw it, what do I care? I know how it works: you have to travel, give speeches, speak Anglo-American like a good slave, participate in tedious conferences, ‘work together,’ water down your thoughts, seem human.”

Putting her cup down, Kristeva speaks to him gently: “You’ll have your revenge, my love.”

Sollers, feverish now, starts talking about himself in the second person while touching his wrist: “You have a facility for elocution; it is flagrant, annoying (they’d prefer it if you stuttered, but never mind)…”

Kristeva takes his hand.

Sollers smiles at her and says: “Sometimes you need a little encouragement.”

Kristeva smiles back at him and says: “Come on, let’s read some Joseph de Maistre.”

55

Quai des Orfèvres. Bayard types up his report while Simon reads a Chomsky book on generative grammar, which he has to admit he doesn’t really understand.

Each time he comes to the edge of the page, Bayard uses his right hand to move the lever that sends the typewriter cylinder flying back across to the other side while, with his left, he grabs his cup of coffee, drinks a mouthful, takes a drag on his cigarette and puts it back on the edge of a yellow ashtray bearing the Pastis 51 logo. Crac tac tac tac, tac tac tac, crac tac tac tac, and so on.

But the tac-tac sound stops abruptly. Bayard sits up on his padded imitation leather chair, turns toward Simon, and asks:

“Actually, where’s it from, that name? Kristeva?”

56

Serge Moati is stuffing his face with slices of Savane marble cake when Mitterrand arrives. Fabius, in slippers, opens the door of his mansion in the Panthéon to let him in. Lang, Badinter, Attali, Debray, all wait patiently, drinking coffee. Mitterrand tosses his scarf to Fabius, moaning: “Your friend Mauroy? I’m going to give him a good beating!” He’s in a bad mood, no doubt about it. The young conspirators realize that this meeting is not going to be much fun. Mitterrand bares his teeth: “Rocard! Rocard!” No one says a word. “They messed up Metz and now suddenly they’re desperate to sign me up for the presidential election so they can be rid of me!” His young lieutenants sigh. Moati chews his Savane in slow motion. The young adviser with the birdlike face risks saying, “President…” but Mitterrand turns on him, cold-eyed, furious, poking his finger into his chest as he moves toward him: “Shut your mouth, Attali…” And Attali retreats all the way to the wall as the would-be candidate goes on: “They all want me to fail but I can thwart their strategy easily: all I have to do is not accept it! Let that idiot Rocard get a good hiding from that imbecile Giscard. Rocard, Giscard … it’ll be the war of the morons! Magnificent! Sublime! The Deuxième Gauche? Fiddlesticks, Debray! French fiddlesticks! Robert, get a pen, I’m going to dictate a press release. I abdicate! I fold. Ha! How do you like that?” He moans: “Fail! What does that mean, to fail?”

No one dares respond, not even Fabius, who does occasionally stand up to his boss but who wouldn’t dare get involved in a subject as sticky as this. Anyway, the question was purely rhetorical.