Louis Althusser holds the precious sheet of paper in his hand. The discipline of the Party, which formed him, his obedient temperament, his years as a docile prisoner of war, all command him not to read the mysterious document. At the same time, his rather un-Communist individualism, his fondness for enigmas, his historical propensity to cheat, all encourage him to unfold the page. If he did, not knowing but suspecting what it contains, his act would join the long list of dishonesties that started with a fraudulent 17/20 on a philosophy dissertation in his classe préparatoire for the école Normale Supérieure (a sufficiently important episode in his personal mythology that he thinks about it all the time). But he is afraid. He knows what they’re capable of. He decides, wisely (spinelessly, he feels), not to read the document.
But, then, where should he hide it? He looks at the great mess piled up on his desk and thinks of Poe: he slips the page into an open envelope that had contained some flyer (for a local pizzeria, say, or maybe a bank; I don’t remember what kinds of flyers we got in our mailboxes back then); what matters is that he places this envelope on his desk, clearly visible amid a clutter of manuscripts, works-in-progress, and rough drafts, almost all devoted to Marx, Marxism, and, in particular—in order to draw out the “practical” consequences of his recent “antitheoreticist autocriticism”—to the unpredictable material relationship between “popular movements” and the ideologies to which they have given themselves or in which they have invested. The letter will be safe here. There are also a few books—Machiavelli, Spinoza, Raymond Aron, André Glucksmann—that look as if they have been read, which is not the case (he thinks about this often, as part of his carefully constructed neurosis that he is an impostor) for most of the thousands of books that fill his shelves: Plato (well, he read that), Kant (never read), Hegel (leafed through), Heidegger (skimmed), Marx (read volume 1 of Capital, but not volume 2), etc.
He hears the key in the door. It’s Hélène, coming home.
44
“What’s it about?”
The bouncer looks like every other bouncer in the world except that he is wearing a thick wool scarf and he is white, ageless, gray-skinned, with a cigarette stub in his mouth, and his gaze is not expressionless, staring behind you as if you weren’t there, but malignant and staring right into you, as if trying to read your soul. Bayard knows he cannot show his card, because he must remain incognito in order to see what happens behind this door, so he gets ready to invent some pathetic lie, but Simon, struck by sudden inspiration, beats him to it and says: “Elle sait.”
The wood creaks, the door opens. The bouncer moves aside and, with an ambiguous gesture, invites them in. They enter a vaulted cellar that smells of stone, sweat, and cigarette smoke. The room is full, as if for a concert, but the people have not come to see Boris Vian and the walls have forgotten the jazz chords that once ricocheted from them. Instead, amid the vague hubbub of preshow conversations, a voice like a circus ringmaster’s declaims:
“Welcome to the Logos Club, my friends. Come demonstrate, come deliberate, come praise and criticize the beauty of the Word! O Word that sweeps away hearts and commands the universe! Come attend the spectacle of litigants jousting for oratory supremacy and for your utmost pleasure!”
Bayard gives Simon a puzzled look. Simon whispers into his ear that Barthes’s last words were not the beginning of a phrase, but two initials. Not “elle sait” (she knows), but “LC” for “Logos Club.” Bayard looks impressed. Simon shrugs modestly. The voice continues to warm up the room:
“My zeugma is beautiful, and so is my asyndeton. But there is a price to pay. Tonight you will know the price of language once again. Because this is our motto, and this should be the law of the world: None may speak with impunity! At the Logos Club, fine words are not enough. Are they, my darlings?”
Bayard goes up to an old white-haired man who has two phalanges missing on his left hand. In a tone he hopes sounds neither professional nor like a tourist, Bayard asks: “What’s going on here?” The old man stares at him without hostility: “First time? Then I would advise you just to watch. Don’t rush to join in. You have plenty of time to learn. Listen, learn, progress.”
“Join in?”
“Well, you could always play a friendly, of course—that won’t cost you anything—but if you’ve never seen a session before, you’d be better off staying a spectator. The impression your first combat leaves will be the basis of your reputation, and reputation is important: it’s your ethos.”
He takes a drag from a cigarette held between his mutilated fingers while the invisible ringmaster, hidden in some dark corner of the stone vaults, continues at the top of his voice: “Glory to the Great Protagoras! Glory to Cicero! Glory to the Eagle of Meaux!” Bayard asks Simon who these people are. Simon tells him that the Eagle of Meaux is Bossuet. Bayard again feels an overriding desire to slap him.
“Eat stones like Demosthenes! Long live Pericles! Long live Churchill! Long live de Gaulle! Long live Jesus! Long live Danton and Robespierre! Why did they kill Jaurès?” At least Bayard knows those people. Well, apart from the first two.
Simon asks the old man about the rules of the game. The old man explains to them: all the matches are duels; they draw a subject; it is always a closed question to which the answer is either yes or no, or a “for or against” type of question, so that the two adversaries can defend their opposing positions.
“Tertullian! Augustine! Maximilian! Let’s go!” yells the voice.
The first part of the evening consists of friendly matches. The real matches come at the end. There is always one, sometimes two. Three is rare, but it does happen. Theoretically, there’s no limit to the number of official matches but, for reasons that the old man thinks obviously don’t need explaining, there is not exactly a long line of volunteers.
“Disputatio in utramque partem! Let the debate begin! And here are two smooth talkers, who will do battle over the lively question: Is Giscard a fascist?”