The Seventh Function of Language

Morris Zapp puts on an apologetic tone: “You know … I don’t think the world is ready.” He glances over at Searle and Culler, who are talking together on the lawn. He doesn’t hear Searle explain to Culler that all the speakers at the conference are crap except for him and Chomsky, but he decides not to go over and say hello to them anyway, and tells Kristeva: “Well, I’ll see you later. I have to check in at the Hilton.”

“You’re not sleeping on campus?”

“What? My God, certainly not!”

Kristeva laughs. And yet Telluride House, which is where all Cornell’s visiting speakers are put up, has an impeccable reputation. In some people’s eyes, Morris Zapp has elevated the academic career to the ranks of the fine arts. Watching him get back in his Lotus, rev the engine, almost crash into the bus from New York, and tear off up the hill at top speed, she thinks that those people are not wrong.

Then she spots Simon Herzog and Superintendent Bayard getting off the bus, and her face falls.

She pays no further attention to the bush-man, still watching her from under his tree, but he in turn does not notice that he is being watched by a skinny young North African man. The old man with the receding hairline wears a pinstriped suit in thick cloth that looks like it belongs in a Kafka novel, and a woolen tie. He mumbles something under his tree. No one hears it, but even if they had, very few would understand it because it’s in Russian. The young Arab puts his Walkman headphones back over his ears. Kristeva walks along the grass, looking up at the stars. After five hours on the bus, Bayard has succeeded in doing only one side of the Rubik’s Cube. Simon stands there, amazed by the beauty of the campus, and can’t help thinking about Vincennes, which in comparison is a total dump.

60

“In the beginning, there was philosophy and science and until the eighteenth century they walked hand in hand, basically so they could fight against the Church’s obscurantism, and then, gradually, from the nineteenth century on, with Romanticism and all that stuff, they started to get into the spirit of the Enlightenment, and philosophers in Germany and France (but not in England) started saying: science cannot penetrate the secret of life; science cannot penetrate the secret of the human soul; only philosophy can do that. And suddenly, continental philosophy was not only hostile to science but also to its principles: clarity, intellectual rigor, the culture of proof. It became increasingly esoteric, increasingly freestyle, increasingly spiritualist (except for the Marxists), increasingly vitalist (with Bergson, for example).

“And all this culminated in Heidegger: a reactionary philosopher, in the full meaning of the term, who decided that philosophy had been heading the wrong way for centuries and that it had to return to the primordial question, which is the question of Being, so he wrote Being and Time, where he says he’s going to search for Being. Except he never found it, ha ha, but anyway. So it was he who really inspired this fashion for nebulous philosophers full of complicated neologisms, convoluted reasoning, dubious analogies, and risky metaphors, leading to Derrida, who’s the heir to all that stuff now.

“Meanwhile the English and the Americans stayed faithful to a more scientific idea of philosophy. This is called analytic philosophy, and Searle is the leader of that movement.”

[Anonymous student, interviewed on campus.]

61

Let’s be honest: the food is excellent in the United States, and especially so at the cafeteria in Cornell reserved for the professors, which even if it’s self-service is more like a restaurant in terms of culinary quality.

It is lunchtime, and most of the conference’s speakers are scattered through the refectory in a geopolitical pattern that Bayard and Simon have not yet figured out. The room consists of tables that can seat six to eight, none of them fully occupied. But—Simon and Bayard can scent this in the air—there are clearly various camps.