The two young men smoke cigarettes that Slimane knows are stuffed with opium, because this is their technique to cushion the comedown. Curiously, Foucault has never had to resort to this, such is his tolerance for all drugs: he can be at his typewriter at nine in the morning after spending the whole of the previous night on LSD. The young men look less on form. All the same, they greet Slimane, hollow-voiced. Foucault offers him coffee, but just then there is a loud noise in the kitchen and a third young man appears, looking distressed, holding a bit of plastic. This is Mathieu Lindon, who has just broken the coffeepot. The two others cannot suppress a tubercular giggle. Foucault, in a debonair way, suggests tea. Slimane sits down and begins buttering a biscotte while the tall bald man in his black kimono returns to his lecture on elephants.
For Fran?ois de Sales, bishop of Geneva in the seventeenth century and author of Introduction to the Devout Life, the elephant is a model of chastity: faithful and temperate, he has only one partner, with whom he mates once every three years for a period of five days, away from prying eyes, before they wash each other at length in order to purify themselves. Handsome Hervé, in his underpants, grumbles from behind his cigarette about the truth behind this elephant fable: the horror of Catholic morality, on which he spits—at least symbolically, as he is short on saliva, so he just coughs on it instead. Foucault, in his kimono, becomes animated: “Exactly! What is very interesting here is that even in Pliny we find the same analysis of the elephant’s morals. So if we trace the genealogy of this moral, as Nietzsche would say, we realize that its roots reach deep into an epoch prior to Christianity, or at least into an epoch where its development was still largely embryonic.” Foucault looks jubilant. “You see, we talk about Christianity as if it were a single thing … But Christianity and paganism do not constitute clearly defined and distinct entities. One mustn’t think of impenetrable blocks that appear out of nowhere and disappear just as suddenly, without influencing each other, interpenetrating, metamorphosing.”
Mathieu Lindon, who is still standing holding the handle of the broken coffeepot, asks: “But, uh, Michel, what’s your point exactly?”
Foucault gives Lindon one of his dazzling smiles: “In fact, paganism can’t be regarded as a single entity, but the same is even more true of Christianity! We need to reevaluate our methods, you understand?”
Slimane bites into his biscotte and says: “Hey, Michel, you know that conference at Cornell, are you still going? Where is that place, exactly?”
Foucault, always happy to answer questions, no matter what they might be, and unsurprised that Slimane should be interested in his conference, replies that Cornell is a large American university situated in a small city in the northern United States named Ithaca, like Ulysses’s island. He doesn’t know why he accepted the invitation, because it’s a conference on language, the “linguistic turn” as they say over there, and he hasn’t worked in that field for a long time (The Order of Things came out in 1966) but anyway he said yes and he doesn’t like to go back on his word, so he’ll be there. (In fact, he knows perfectly well why he accepted: he adores the United States.)
When Slimane has finished chewing his biscotte, he drinks a mouthful of the scorchingly hot tea, lights a cigarette, clears his throat, and asks: “Do you think I could come with you?”
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“No, darling, you can’t come with me. It’s a conference for academics only and you hate it when people call you Monsieur Kristeva.”
Sollers’s smile cannot conceal the wound to his ego that, alas, may never heal.
Can you imagine Montaigne or Pascal or Voltaire doing a postgraduate degree?
Why do those pathetic Americans obstinately refuse to take any notice of him, this giant among giants, who will be read and reread in 2043?
Can you imagine Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo? Will I one day have to ask permission to think?
The funniest thing is that they’re inviting Derrida, obviously. But aren’t you aware, my dear Yankee friends, that your idol, this man you revere because he writes différance with an a (the world decomposes, the world dissolves), wrote his masterpiece, Dissemination (the world disseminates), as an homage to his own Nombres, which no one in New York or California has ever bothered to translate! Seriously, it’s just priceless!
Sollers laughs and pats his stomach. Ho ho ho! Without him, no Derrida! Ah, if only the world knew … Ah, if only the Americans knew …
Kristeva listens patiently to this speech, which she knows by heart.
“Can you imagine Flaubert, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Claudel, Proust, Breton, Artaud, taking a postgraduate degree?” Sollers abruptly stops talking and pretends to think, but Kristeva knows what he is going to say next: “It’s true that Céline wrote a doctoral thesis, but it was for a medical degree, although in literary terms it was superb.” (Subtext: He has read Céline’s medical thesis. How many academics can say as much?)
Then he rubs against his wife, sliding his head under her arm, and says in a dopey voice:
“But why do you want to go, my beloved squirrel?”
“You know why. Because Searle will be there.”
“And all the others!” Sollers explodes.
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?”
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