The Seventh Function of Language

“I wish I could get a rundown on the different forces here,” says Bayard to Simon, choosing a double rib steak with mashed potato, plantains, and boudin blanc. The black chef, who overheard him, responds in French: “You see the table near the door? That’s where the analytics sit. They’re in enemy territory, and they’re outnumbered, so they’re sticking together.” There is Searle, Chomsky, and Cruella Redgrave, whose real name is Camille Paglia, a specialist in the history of sexuality and a direct rival of Foucault, whom she detests with all her being. “On the other side, near the window, there’s a belle brochette, as you say in France: Lyotard, Guattari, Cixous, and Foucault in the middle—you know him, of course, the tall bald guy who’s talking, right? Kristeva is over there, with Morris Zapp and Sylvère Lotringer, the boss of the magazine Sémiotext(e). In the corner, on his own, the old guy with the wool tie and the weird hair, I don’t know who that is. [Strange-looking man, thinks Bayard.] And the young lady with the violet hair behind him? I don’t know her, either.” His Puerto Rican sous-chef glances over and remarks tonelessly: “Probably Heideggerians.”

A professional reflex rather than any genuine interest prompts Bayard to ask how serious the rivalries between the professors are. In reply, the black chef just points at Chomsky’s table, where a young, mousy man is passing. Searle calls out to him:

“Hey, Jeffrey, you need to translate that asshole’s latest piece of crap for me.”

“Hey, John, I’m not your bitch. Do it yourself, okay?”

“Fine, dickhead. My French is good enough for that shit.”

The black chef and his Puerto Rican assistant burst out laughing and high-five each other. Bayard didn’t understand the dialogue, but he gets the idea. Behind him in the line, an impatient voice grumbles: “Can you move along, please?” Simon and Bayard recognize the young Arab who was on the plane with Foucault. He is holding a tray of chicken curry, purple potatoes, hardboiled eggs, and celery purée, but he does not have official accreditation so is held back at the checkout. Foucault, seeing this, starts to intervene, but Slimane signals that everything is fine, and after brief negotiations he is allowed through with his tray.

Bayard sits down next to Simon at the solitary old man’s table.

Then he sees Derrida arrive, recognizing him in spite of never having seen him before: head pulled into his shoulders, square-jawed, thin-lipped, eagle-nosed, wearing a corduroy suit, the top buttons of his shirt undone, silver hair springing up from his head like flames. He helps himself to couscous and red wine. He is accompanied by Paul de Man. The people at Searle’s table stop speaking, and so does Foucault. Cixous gestures to him but he doesn’t see her: his eyes have immediately sought and found Searle. A moment’s indecision, his meal tray in hand, then he goes over to join his friends. Cixous kisses him on both cheeks, Guattari pats him on the back, Foucault shakes his hand while looking surly (the consequence of an old article by Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in which, roughly speaking, he suggested that Foucault had completely misunderstood Descartes). The young woman with violet hair also goes over to say hello: her name is Avital Ronell, she is a Goethe specialist and a great admirer of deconstruction.

Bayard observes the body language and facial expressions. He eats his boudin in silence while Simon talks about the program of events that lies on the table between them: “Have you seen? There’s a symposium on Jakobson. Shall we go?”

Bayard lights a cigarette. He almost feels like saying yes.

62

“The analytic philosophers are real drudges. They’re Guillermo Vilas, you know? They’re so boring. They spend hours defining their terms. For each argument, they never fail to write the premise, and then the premise of the premise, and so on. They’re fucking logicians. Essentially, they take twenty pages to explain stuff that could easily be summarized in ten lines. Weirdly, they often make exactly that criticism of the continentals, while also having a go at them for their unbridled whimsy, for not being rigorous, for not defining their terms, for writing literature rather than philosophy, for lacking the crucial mathematical spirit, for being poets, basically, guys who aren’t serious, who are like crazy mystics (even though they’re all atheists, ha!). But anyway, the continentals are more like McEnroe. At least they’re never boring.”

[Anonymous student, interviewed on campus.]

63

Simon is generally considered to have a reasonably good grasp of English, but oddly, what is considered reasonable in France, in terms of mastery of a foreign language, always seems to prove woefully inadequate in reality.