From behind a tree, a third man appears. He has a wool tie and a haircut that matches his surroundings. He has perhaps been hiding there since the beginning.
In any case, he is holding a cassette.
And he has unspooled its length of tape.
With his other hand, he thumbs the wheel of a lighter.
Searle, horrified, cries out: “Roman, don’t do that!”
The old man in the wool tie brings the Zippo’s flame to the tape, which is instantly set alight. From a distance, it is just a little green glimmer in the great dark night.
Searle screams as though someone has just torn his heart out.
Bayard turns around. So does the bull-man. Simon can at last escape. He moves toward the bush-man like a sleepwalker (he is still naked) and asks, hollow-voiced: “Who are you?”
The old man readjusts his tie and says simply: “Roman Jakobson, linguist.”
Simon’s blood turns to ice.
Down the hill, Bayard is not sure he heard correctly. “What? What did he say? Simon!”
The last scraps of tape crackle before being transformed into ash.
Cordelia has hurried over to Derrida. She tears her dress to make a bandage for his neck. She is hoping she can stop the bleeding.
“Simon?”
Simon makes no reply, but silently answers Bayard’s silent question: Why didn’t he tell him that Jakobson was alive? You never asked.
The truth is that Simon never imagined that the man who was there at the birth of Structuralism, the man who gave Lévi-Strauss the idea for Structuralism when they met in New York in 1941, the Russian formalist from the Prague School, one of the most important pioneers of linguistics after Saussure, could still be alive. For Simon, he belonged to another age. The age of Lévi-Strauss, not Barthes. He laughs at the stupidity of this reasoning: Barthes is dead, but Lévi-Strauss is alive, so why not Jakobson?
Jakobson crosses the few yards between him and Derrida, taking care not to trip on a stone or a clod of earth.
The philosopher is lying with his head on Cordelia’s knees. Jakobson takes his hand and says: “Thank you, my friend.” Derrida articulates feebly: “I would have listened to the tape, of course. But I would have kept the secret.” He lifts his eyes to the weeping Cordelia: “Smile for me as I will have smiled for you until the end, my child. Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival…”
And with these words, Derrida dies.
Searle and Slimane have disappeared. So has the sports bag.
78
“Is it not pathetic, na?ve, and downright childish to come before the dead to ask for their forgiveness?”
Never before has the little cemetery of Ris-Orangis been trodden by so many feet. Lost in the Parisian suburb, beside the Route Nationale 7 highway, bordered by blocks of brutalist council flats, the place is crushed under the weight of a silence only large crowds can produce.
In front of the coffin, above the hole in the ground, Michel Foucault gives the funeral oration.
“Out of a fervor born of friendship or gratitude, out of approval, too, we could be content to cite, to accompany the other, more or less directly, to let him speak, to efface ourselves before him … But through this excessive concern for fidelity, we will end up saying nothing, and sharing nothing.”
Derrida will not be buried in the Jewish section but with the Catholics, so that when the time comes his wife will be able to join him.
In the front row, Sartre listens to Foucault, his expression serious, head bowed, standing next to Etienne Balibar. He isn’t coughing anymore. He looks like a ghost.
“Jacques Derrida is his name, but he can no longer hear it or bear it.”
Bayard asks Simon if that’s Simone de Beauvoir next to Sartre.
Foucault does Foucault: “How can we believe in the contemporary? Even if we seem to belong to the same era, whether in terms of historic dates or social horizons, et cetera, it would be easy to show that their time remains infinitely heterogeneous? And, truth be told, unrelated.”
Avital Ronell cries softly. Cixous leans on Jean-Luc Nancy and stares down expressionlessly into the hole. Deleuze and Guattari meditate on serial singularities.
The three little public housing blocks with their cracked paintwork, their rusted balconies, watch over the cemetery like sentinels, or like teeth planted in the sea.
In June 1979, at the “Estates General of Philosophy,” organized in the main lecture hall of the Sorbonne, Derrida and BHL literally got into a fistfight, but BHL is present at the funeral of the man he will soon call, or is already calling, “my old master.”
Foucault goes on: “Contrary to popular wisdom, the individual ‘subjects’ who live in the most important zones are not authoritarian ‘superegos’; they do not possess a power, supposing that Power can be possessed.”
Sollers and Kristeva have come too, of course. Derrida had participated in Tel Quel, at the beginning. Dissemination had been published in the “Tel Quel” collection, but he had broken with the magazine, though no one knew what part personal feelings played in the separation and what part politics. However, in December 1977, when Derrida was arrested in Prague, trapped by the Communist regime that planted drugs in his luggage, he received and accepted Sollers’s support.
Bayard has still not received the order to arrest Sollers or Kristeva. Apart from the Bulgarian connection he has no proof that they were involved in Barthes’s death. But above all, he has no proof, even if he is almost certain, that they have the seventh function.
It was Kristeva who told Bayard about the meeting at the cemetery in Ithaca, and he thinks she told Searle, too. Bayard’s theory is that she wished to sabotage the transaction by bringing together all those involved, thus multiplying the potential disruptions, because she didn’t know or refused to believe that Derrida, in concert with Jakobson, was working toward the destruction of the copy. Jakobson always believed his discovery should not be made public. To this end, he helped Derrida raise the money to buy the cassette from Slimane.
While Foucault continues his oration, a woman materializes behind Simon and Bayard.
Simon recognizes Anastasia’s perfume.
She whispers something to them and, instinctively, the two men do not turn around.
Foucault: “For what was earlier called ‘following the death,’ ‘on the occasion of the death,’ we have a whole series of typical solutions. The worst ones, or the worst in each of them, are either base or derisory, and yet so common: still to maneuver, to speculate, to try to profit or derive some benefit, whether subtle or sublime, to draw from the dead a supplementary force to be turned against the living, to denounce or insult them more or less directly, to authorize and legitimate oneself, to raise oneself to the very heights where we presume death has placed the other beyond all suspicion.”
Anastasia: “There will soon be a major event organized by the Logos Club. The Great Protagoras has been challenged. He is going to defend his title. That will mean a huge meeting. But only accredited people will be able to attend.”
Foucault: “In its classical form, the funeral oration had a good side, especially when it permitted one to call out directly to the dead, sometimes very informally. This is of course a supplementary fiction, for it is always the dead in me, always the others standing around the coffin whom I call out to. But because of its caricatured excess, the overstatement of this rhetoric at least pointed out that we ought not to remain among ourselves.”
Bayard asks where the meeting will take place. Anastasia replies that it will be in Venice, in a secret venue that has probably not yet been chosen because the “organization” she works for has not been able to locate it.
Foucault: “The interactions of the living must be interrupted, the veil must be torn toward the other, the other dead in us, though other still, and the religious promises of an afterlife could indeed still grant this ‘as if.’”