The one-woman protest march screams at the top of her lungs, as if she were supporting one of the two teams: “We don’t need Derrida, we have Jimi Hendrix!”
Distracted by Cruella Redgrave’s disconcerting slogan, Paul de Man does not hear the man approach him from behind until a voice says: “Turn around, man. And face your enemy.” A guy in a tweed suit is standing there, his jacket too big for his skinny body, the sleeves too short for his long arms, his hair side-parted with a lock of hair hanging over his forehead; he looks like a supporting actor in a Sydney Pollack film, except for his eyes, which are so piercing you feel as if they are x-raying you.
This is John Searle.
The bush-man observes Kristeva as she observes the scene. Attentive, concentrated, Kristeva lets her cigarette burn down to her fingertips. The bush-man’s eyes move from Searle to Kristeva, and from Kristeva to Searle.
Paul de Man tries to appear simultaneously ironic and conciliatory, and he is only half-convincing in this role of a man at ease. “Peace, my friend!” he says. “Put your sword down and help me separate those kids.” Which, for reasons unknown, serves to annoy Searle, who advances toward Paul de Man. Everyone thinks that he is about to hit him. Kristeva squeezes one young man’s arm, and he takes advantage of the situation to hold her hand. Paul de Man remains immobile, paralyzed, fascinated by the menacing body coming toward him and the idea of a fist’s impact, but when he moves to protect himself or—who knows?—maybe even attack, a third voice rings out, its falsely jovial intonation barely concealing a faintly hysterical anxiety: “Dear Paul! Dear John! Welcome to Cornell! I’m so glad you could come!”
This is Jonathan Culler, the young researcher who has organized the conference. He rushes over to hold out his hand to Searle, who shakes it with bad grace; his hand is limp and his expression malicious as he stares at Paul de Man. In French, he says to the Belgian: “Take your Derrida boys and piss off. Now.” Paul de Man leads the little group away, and the incident is over. The young man hugs Kristeva as if they’d escaped from great danger, or at least as if they’d lived through a moment of great intensity together, and perhaps Kristeva feels something similar—in any case, she doesn’t push him away.
The sound of a car engine roars through the dusk. A Lotus Esprit comes to a sudden halt with a screech of tires. A spry man in his forties gets out, cigar between his lips, bucket hat on his head, silk pocket handkerchief, and heads straight for Kristeva. “Hey, chica!” He kisses her hand. She turns to her young admirers and points at the newcomer: “Boys, allow me to introduce Morris Zapp, a specialist in structuralism, poststructuralism, New Criticism, and lots of other things.”
Morris Zapp smiles and adds, in a tone sufficiently detached that one does not immediately suspect him of vanity (but in French, all the same): “The first professor in the world with a six-figure salary!”
The young men say “Wow” as they smoke their joint.
Kristeva laughs her clear laugh and asks: “Have you prepared your presentation on Volvos?”
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.