The rest of the journey passes without any problems. Bayard lights a cigarette. The stewardess comes over to remind him that smoking is prohibited during landing, so the superintendent falls back on his emergency miniatures.
We know that the young guy with Foucault is called Slimane; we don’t know his surname. But when they reach American soil, Simon and Bayard see him deep in discussion with several policemen at passport control because his visa is not valid, or rather, because he does not have a visa at all. Bayard wonders how he was allowed to take off from Roissy. Foucault tries to intervene on his behalf, but it’s no good: American policemen are not in the habit of joking around with foreigners. Slimane tells Foucault not to wait for him, and not to worry—he’ll be fine. Then Simon and Bayard lose sight of them and get on a suburban train.
They do not arrive by ship like Céline in Journey to the End of the Night, but emerge from underground at Madison Square Garden, and their sudden entrance into central Manhattan is no less of a shock: the two stunned men stare at the skyscrapers lining the sidewalks to vanishing point and the smear of light on Eighth Avenue, filled at once with a feeling of unreality and a no less powerful feeling of familiarity. Simon, who used to read Strange, expects to see Spider-Man leaping over the yellow taxis and red lights. (But Spider-Man is a “supernumerary,” so this is impossible.) A busy-looking native stops spontaneously to ask if they need help and this completes the two Parisians’ disorientation, so unused are they to such solicitude. In the New York night, they walk up Eighth Avenue until they reach the Port Authority Bus Terminal, opposite the gigantic building that houses The New York Times, as the massive gothic letters on the façade unequivocally indicate. Then they get on a bus to Ithaca. Goodbye to the skyscraper wonderland.
As the journey lasts five hours and everyone is tired, Bayard takes a small, multicolored cube out of his bag and starts to play with it. Simon cannot believe it: “You nicked that kid’s Rubik’s Cube?” Bayard finishes his first row as the bus emerges from the Lincoln Tunnel.
58
“Shift into overdrive in the linguistic turn”
Cornell University, Ithaca, fall 1980
(CONFERENCE ORGANIZER: Jonathan D. Culler)
LIST OF TALKS:
Noam Chomsky
Degenerative grammar
Hélène Cixous
Les larmes de l’hibiscus
Jacques Derrida
A Sec Solo
Michel Foucault
Jeux de polysémie dans l’onirocritique d’Artémidore
Félix Guattari
Le régime signifiant despotique
Luce Irigaray
Phallogocentrisme et métaphysique de la substance
Roman Jakobson
Stayin’ Alive, structurally speaking
Fredric Jameson
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act
Julia Kristeva
Le langage, cette inconnue
Sylvère Lotringer
Italy: Autonomia—Post-political politics
Jean-François Lyotard
PoMo de bouche: la parole post-moderne
Paul de Man
Cerisy sur le gâteau: la déconstruction en France
Jeffrey Mehlman
Blanchot, the laundry man
Avital Ronell
“Because a man speaks, he thinks he’s able to speak about language.”—Goethe & the metaspeakers
Richard Rorty
Wittgenstein vs Heidegger: Clash of the continents?
Edward Said
Exile on Main Street
John Searle
Fake or feint: performing the F words in fictional works
Gayatri Spivak
Should the subaltern shut up sometimes?
Morris J. Zapp
Fishing for supplement in a deconstructive world
59
“Deleuze isn’t coming, right?”
“No, but Anti-Oedipus is playing tonight. I’m so excited!”
“Have you heard the new single?”
“Yeah, it’s awesome. So L.A.!”
Kristeva is sitting on the grass between two boys. Stroking their hair, she says: “I love America. You are so ingenuous, boys.”
One of them tries to kiss her neck. She pushes him away, laughing. The other whispers in her ear: “You mean ‘genuine,’ right?” Kristeva giggles. She feels a shiver of electricity run down her squirrelish body. Facing them, another student finishes rolling and lights a joint. The pleasant smell of the grass spreads through the air. Kristeva takes a few hits. Her head spins a little bit. She pontificates soberly: “As Spinoza said, each negation is a definition.” The three young pre–New Wave post-hippies laugh and exclaim rapturously: “Wow, say that again! What did Spinoza say?”
On campus, students come and go, some looking busy, others less so, crossing the wide lawn between Gothic, Victorian, and Neoclassical buildings. A sort of bell tower overlooks the scene, itself perched on top of a hill that rises above a lake and some gorges. We may be in the middle of nowhere, but at least we’re in the middle. Kristeva bites into a club sandwich because the baguette, which she loves so much, has not yet reached the remote Tompkins County, in deepest New York State, halfway between New York City and Toronto, former territory of the Cayuga tribe, which was part of the Iroquois Confederation, and home to the small city of Ithaca, home in turn to the prestigious Cornell University. She frowns and says: “Unless it’s the other way around…”
They are joined by a fourth young man, who comes out of the hotel-management school carrying an aluminum packet in one hand and Of Grammatology in the other (but he doesn’t dare ask Kristeva if she knows Derrida). He’s brought muffins, oven fresh, that he made himself. Kristeva is happy to take part in this improvised picnic, getting tipsy on tequila. (Unsurprisingly, the bottle is hidden inside a paper bag.)
She watches the students walk past, carrying books or hockey sticks or guitar cases under their arms.
An old man with a receding hairline, his abundant hair brushed back as if he once had a thick bush on his head, mumbles to himself under a tree. His hands, which shake in front of him, look like branches.
A young, short-haired woman, who looks a bit like a cross between Cruella in 101 Dalmatians and Vanessa Redgrave, appears to be the only member of an invisible protest march. She shouts slogans that Kristeva does not understand. She seems very angry.
A group of young guys is playing with an American football. One recites Shakespeare while the others drink red wine from the bottle. (Not wrapped in paper, the rebels.) They throw the ball to one another, taking care to get a good spiral. The one with the bottle fails to catch the ball in his other hand (which is holding a cigarette), so the others make fun of him. They already seem pretty drunk.
Kristeva looks at the bush-man with the receding hairline; he looks back at her and they hold each other’s gaze, just for an instant, but a touch too long for it to be insignificant.
The angry young woman stands in front of Kristeva and says: “I know who you are. Go home, bitch.” Kristeva’s friends stare wide-eyed at each other, burst out laughing, then reply excitedly: “Are you stoned? Who the fuck do you think you are?” The woman walks away and Kristeva watches as she recommences her solitary protest. She is fairly certain she has never seen her before in her life.
Another group of young people bear down on the football players, and the atmosphere changes immediately; from where she is sitting, Kristeva can tell that the two groups are openly hostile to each other.
A church bell rings.