The Seventh Function of Language

“Monsieur Foucault, what a surprise!… It’s an honor! I adore your work … What are you working on at the moment?… Still sex?”

Foucault narrows his eyes.

Bayard walks down the far aisle but is blocked by a stewardess pushing a drinks cart. She calmly serves cups of tea and glasses of red wine to the passengers while trying to sell them duty-free, and Bayard hops up and down behind her.

Simon doesn’t listen to Foucault’s reply because he is concentrating on his next question. Behind Foucault, Slimane grows impatient. “Can we move forward?” Simon grabs his opportunity: “Oh, you’re with someone? Enchanté, enchanté! So does he call you Alcibiades too? Ha ha … uh … So have you been to the United States before?”

At a pinch, Bayard could push past the stewardess, but there is no way he could get around the cart, and he still has another three rows to go.

Simon asks: “Have you read Peyrefitte? What a load of crap, huh? We miss you at Vincennes, you know.”

Gently but firmly, Foucault takes Simon by the shoulders and makes a sort of tango move, pivoting with him, so that Simon finds himself between Foucault and Slimane, which effectively means that Foucault has got past him and that nothing but a few paces now separates him from his seat.

Finally, Bayard comes level with the toilets at the back of the plane, where he is able to cross to the opposite aisle. He reaches Foucault’s seat, but the philosopher is moving toward him and he is going to see him putting the bags back in the overhead compartment.

Simon, who does not need glasses and is well aware of the situation, has seen Bayard before Foucault has, so he cries out: “Herculine Barbin!”

The passengers jump. Foucault turns around. Bayard opens the compartment, shoves the two bags in, and closes it again. Foucault stares at Simon. Simon smiles stupidly and says: “We’re all Herculine Barbins, don’t you think, Monsieur Foucault?”

Bayard moves past Foucault, apologizing, as if he is just returning from the toilets. Foucault watches Bayard pass, then shrugs, and at last everyone returns to his own seat.

“Who’s that, Herculine Whatsisname?”

“A nineteenth-century hermaphrodite who had a very unfortunate life. Foucault edited his memoirs. He turned it into a slightly personal thing, used it to denounce the normative assignments of biopower, which force us to choose our sex and our sexuality by recognizing only two possibilities, man or woman, in both cases heterosexual, unlike the Greeks, for example, who were much more relaxed about the question, even if they had their own norms, which were…”

“Okay, got it.”

“Who’s the young guy with Foucault?”

The rest of the journey passes without any problems. Bayard lights a cigarette. The stewardess comes over to remind him that smoking is prohibited during landing, so the superintendent falls back on his emergency miniatures.

We know that the young guy with Foucault is called Slimane; we don’t know his surname. But when they reach American soil, Simon and Bayard see him deep in discussion with several policemen at passport control because his visa is not valid, or rather, because he does not have a visa at all. Bayard wonders how he was allowed to take off from Roissy. Foucault tries to intervene on his behalf, but it’s no good: American policemen are not in the habit of joking around with foreigners. Slimane tells Foucault not to wait for him, and not to worry—he’ll be fine. Then Simon and Bayard lose sight of them and get on a suburban train.

They do not arrive by ship like Céline in Journey to the End of the Night, but emerge from underground at Madison Square Garden, and their sudden entrance into central Manhattan is no less of a shock: the two stunned men stare at the skyscrapers lining the sidewalks to vanishing point and the smear of light on Eighth Avenue, filled at once with a feeling of unreality and a no less powerful feeling of familiarity. Simon, who used to read Strange, expects to see Spider-Man leaping over the yellow taxis and red lights. (But Spider-Man is a “supernumerary,” so this is impossible.) A busy-looking native stops spontaneously to ask if they need help and this completes the two Parisians’ disorientation, so unused are they to such solicitude. In the New York night, they walk up Eighth Avenue until they reach the Port Authority Bus Terminal, opposite the gigantic building that houses The New York Times, as the massive gothic letters on the façade unequivocally indicate. Then they get on a bus to Ithaca. Goodbye to the skyscraper wonderland.

As the journey lasts five hours and everyone is tired, Bayard takes a small, multicolored cube out of his bag and starts to play with it. Simon cannot believe it: “You nicked that kid’s Rubik’s Cube?” Bayard finishes his first row as the bus emerges from the Lincoln Tunnel.

58

“Shift into overdrive in the linguistic turn”