They are bent over like slaves in antiquity pushing blocks of stone, but these are students puffing and panting as they roll barrels of beer across the floor. It is going to be a long evening and they will need reserves. The Seal and Serpent Society is an old fraternity founded in 1905, one of the most prestigious and therefore, in American terminology, one of the most “popular.” Lots of people are expected because we are celebrating the end of the conference tonight. All the guest speakers are invited and this is the last chance for the students to see the stars until their next visit. In the entrance to the fraternity’s Victorian lodge, someone has written on a sheet: “Uncontrolled skid in the linguistic turn. Welcome.” Though entry is theoretically reserved for undergrads, tonight the lodge is hosting people of all ages. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it is open to just anyone: there are always those who come in and those who remain outside the door, in accordance with universal social and/or symbolic criteria.
Slimane is unlikely to forget this, being regularly refused entry in France, and it looks as though it’s going to be the same old story here when a pair of students acting as bouncers bar his way. But, without anyone knowing how he does it, or in what language, he talks to them briefly and passes through, his Walkman around his neck, watched enviously by the outcasts in acrylic turtleneck sweaters.
The first person he sees, inside, is telling an audience of young people: “Heraclitus contains everything that is in Derrida and more.” It’s Cruella Redgrave alias Camille Paglia. She holds a mojito in one hand and in the other a cigarette holder, with a black cigarette exhaling a sweet perfume. Next to her Chomsky is talking with a student from El Salvador, who explains that the Revolutionary Democratic Front has just been decapitated by his country’s paramilitaries and government forces. In fact, there is no remaining left-wing opposition, which seems to greatly worry Chomsky, who sucks nervously at a joint.
Perhaps because he is used to back rooms, Slimane goes down to look around in the basement, where Black Sabbath’s “Die Young” is playing. He finds bunches of well-dressed and already drunk students, lap dancing haphazardly. Foucault is there too, in a black leather jacket, without his sunglasses (so he can taste the fog of life, thinks Slimane, who knows him well). He gives him a friendly wave and points to a student in a skirt who is entwined around a metal pole like a stripper. Slimane notes that she is not wearing a bra but is wearing white knickers that match her white Nike sneakers, each with a large red swoosh (like Starsky and Hutch’s car, but with the colors reversed).
Kristeva, who is dancing with Paul de Man, spots Slimane. De Man asks her what she’s thinking about. She replies: “We are in the catacombs of the first Christians.” But her eyes do not leave the gigolo.
He looks as though he’s searching for someone. He climbs upstairs. Bumps into Morris Zapp on the staircase, who winks at him. The stereo plays “Misunderstanding” by Genesis. He grabs a paper cup of tequila. Behind bedroom doors, he hears students fucking or vomiting. Some doors are open and inside the rooms he sees them smoking, drinking beers, sitting cross-legged on single beds, talking about sex, politics, literature. Behind one closed door he thinks he recognizes Searle’s voice, and some strange growling noises.
In the large entrance hall, Simon and Bayard are talking to Judith, who sips a Bloody Mary through a straw. Bayard sees Slimane. Simon sees the Carthaginian princess, who comes in with her two friends, the short Asian girl and the tall Egyptian. A male student yells: “Cordelia!” The princess turns around. Hugs, kisses, effusive greetings. The student immediately trots off to fetch her a gin and tonic. Judith tells Bayard and Simon (who is not listening): “The power can be understood by considering the model of divine power, according to which making an utterance is equivalent to creating the utterance.” Foucault comes up from the basement with Hélène Cixous, grabs a Malibu and O.J., and disappears upstairs. Seeing this, Judith quotes Foucault: “Discourse is not life; its time is not our time.” Bayard nods. Some boys gather around Cordelia and her friends, who seem very popular. Judith quotes Lacan, who said somewhere: “The name is the time of the object.” Bayard wonders if one might as easily say “the time is the name of the object,” or “the time is the object of the name,” or maybe “the object is the name of the time,” or even “the object is the time of the name,” or simply “the name is the object of the time,” but he grabs another beer, takes a hit of the joint that’s being passed around, and nearly cries out: “But you already have the right to vote, get divorced, and have an abortion!” Cixous would like to talk to Derrida, but he is hemmed in by a dense mob of transfixed admirers. Slimane avoids Kristeva. Bayard asks Judith: “What do you want?” Cixous hears Bayard and joins the conversation: “Let’s get a room!” Sylvère Lotringer, the founder of the magazine Sémiotext(e), holds an orchid and talks to Derrida’s translators Jeffrey Mehlman and Gayatri Spivak, who shouts: “Gramsci is my brother!” Slimane talks with Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard about the economics of lust or a postmodern transaction. Pink Floyd sing: “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”
Cixous tells Judith, Bayard, and Simon that the new history that’s coming is beyond the male imagination, and for good reason, it will deprive them of their conceptual crutches and begin by ruining their illusion machine, but Simon is no longer listening. He observes Cordelia’s group like a general sizing up the enemy army: six people, three boys and three girls. Approaching her would have been extremely difficult anyway, but in this grouping it now seems particularly inconceivable.
All the same, he starts to move toward them.
“White, physically attractive, with a skirt and fake jewelry, I employ all the codes of my sex and my age,” he thinks, attempting to enter the girl’s head. Passing close, he hears her say, in French, in a tone of perfectly erotic worldliness: “Couples are like birds, inseparable, abundant, uselessly beating their wings outside the cage.” He detects no accent. An American says something to her in English that Simon doesn’t understand. She replies, first in English (also accentless, as far as he can tell), then in French, throwing back her throat: “I’ve never been able to have affairs, only novels.” Simon goes off to grab a drink, maybe two. (He hears Gayatri Spivak say to Slimane: “We were taught to say yes to the enemy.”)