"This language stuff is what you study, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
"It's very different from theology."
"Is it?" I say. "Some of that stuff you were saying the other night at Heather's ... It made me think about Baudrillard and his idea of the simulacrum: a world made up of illusion, of copies of copies of things that don't exist anymore; copies with no original. And Derrida's difference and the way we defer meaning rather than ever really experiencing it. Derrida talks about faith a lot. He wrote a lot about religion."
"It's still not fun, is it? It still has the power to tell you what to do. It's like: Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules. I want something that tells me I don't have to follow the rules."
"Oh, well, maybe then you're back to the existentialists. I think they have more fun. Although the problem there is they don't really know they're having fun."
I think about Camus and The Outsider. I think about the scene where Mersault drinks coffee in the funeral parlor and the way that this is used, later, as evidence that he is a bad person. Having sex in a priory would therefore make you what sort of person?
"So Derrida is not an existentialist?"
"No. But it all comes from the same background: Heidegger; phenomenology."
"And what does that say about life?"
"What? Phenomenology?"
"Yeah."
"Um ... This is all stuff I'm still thinking about, and the way I understand it might not be quite right, but basically it's to do with the world of things: phenomena."
I think back to Lumas's story "The Blue Room," about the philosophers trying to establish whether or not ghosts exist. It reminds me of the time I was first trying to properly understand phenomenology (a process still not complete). I'd been reading Levinas's Discovering Existence with Husserl—Husserl was Heidegger's mentor—and I was trying to come to grips with his work, but it was very difficult. I was lying in the bath, trying not to get the book wet, and, as a thought experiment, asking myself the old question: "Is there a ghost in this room?" I reminded myself that if I were a rationalist, I could answer no, quite confidently, as long as I had already established that ghosts don't exist using logic and a priori statements. You can be a rationalist with your eyes shut. I know ghosts don't exist, so there is no ghost in this room. If you're a rationalist, and you've made your world out of a logic that says that when things are dead they are dead and that's it, then you could be there in a room full of screaming ghouls and still conclude that there is no ghost in the room. If I were an empiricist I'd look for evidence from my senses: I would see that there was no ghost in the room and conclude that if I was not experiencing it, then it wasn't there. I'd got all that. But phenomenology, it seemed to me, wasn't interested in whether or not the ghost was there. Phenomenology seemed to be asking, What the fuck is a ghost, anyway?
I try to summarize this for Adam.
"Basically, phenomenology says that you exist and the world exists but the relationship between the two is problematic. How do we define entities? Where does one entity stop and another begin? Structuralism seemed to say that objects are objects and you can name them anything you like. But I'm more interested in questions about what makes an object. And how an object can have meaning outside of the language we use to define it."
"So everything's just language in the end. There's nothing beyond words. Is that the main point?"
"Kind of. It's not just words though. Maybe 'language' is the wrong term to use in this context. Maybe 'information' is better." I sigh. "This is so hard to put into words. Maybe Baudrillard does it best when he talks about the copy without an originaclass="underline" the simulation. Like, you know the way Plato thought that everything on earth was a copy—or a shadow—of some 'ideal object.' Well, what if we've created a world in which even that shadowy level of reality isn't the final copy? One in which anything that was ever 'real' is now gone, and the copies that referred to things—in other words the language, the signs—don't refer to anything anymore? What if all our stupid pictures and signs don't make reality at all? What if they don't refer out to anything else, but only inward towards themselves and other signs? That's hyperreality. If we wanted to talk about it in Derridean terms we could talk of a world that constantly defers the real. And it is language that does that. It promises us a table, or a ghost, or a rock, but can never actually deliver one for us."
"Isn't it depressing?" Adam asks.
I laugh, but it sounds hollow in here. "Surely no more depressing than your idea that everything is an illusion?"
"But I was talking about an illusion that covers something up. Some definite reality. You're talking about a world where nothing is not an illusion."
"Well, maybe I do want to believe that there's something outside the simulacrum. I don't know. But it is exciting to think about it. Like finding out that everything is just quarks and electrons. I find it exciting because everything you learn about the basic units of things—language, atoms, whatever—you find that they are absurd. That stuff I was telling you the other night about quantum physics: It's so crazy it can't be true. And then what you were saying about truth existing outside reality: I found that exciting as well. There's always another level that we just don't know. The scientists have it down to the quarks and electrons, and the various weird variations of them that come down in cosmic rays and so on, but they don't know if that's it, if they have found indivisible matter—what the Greeks called atomos. It could even be that there's infinite divisibility. And there are still these big questions that no one can solve: What came before the beginning and what will happen after the end. The fact that these big questions still exist is exciting. No one really knows anything very important—and there's still such a lot to know."
"So now we're back to religion."
"I thought you said religion was part of the illusion. I mean, it's made of language like everything else..."
"But faith," he says now. "What's faith made of?" Adam touches the curtains but doesn't open them. "But you can't base anything on faith. Nothing based on faith is true."
"Isn't it? You could argue that we all have faith. We have faith in language, for example."
"Faith doesn't always pay off, though, does it? You don't always get back what you want."
He turns and looks at me. His face is pale and I remember what he said about not feeling "so good" at the moment. But he's still probably the most attractive human being I have ever seen, and for a second I can't believe he is here in this room with me, with his long, unwashed hair and his old grayscale clothes, like there's so much more to him than flesh, so much more than just atoms. How easy it would be to just close my eyes and let him in. But then he'd go away again and I'd be left with what I'd done. I don't want him to go away. I can't have sex with him, so I'm going to have to keep him talking. And then maybe we could just go to sleep in each other's arms? Don't be stupid, Ariel. Here that would be as bad as fucking.
"You could say we have faith in a shared culture," I say.
"Based on what?"
"Shared language. I mean, we do share a culture, and that culture is made up of things that we've broken down and labelled, like the way the nineteenth-century natural scientists classified everything. Of course, people still debate all those classifications. Are two similar fish actually one sort offish or two? Is everything different from everything else or the same?"
He's looking at me with the most sulky expression I've ever seen, everything on his face pointing downwards, including his gaze, which now drifts to the floor. But I'm still thinking that I want to drown in him; I want to drown in a pool of sulky, pissed-off Adam. I want him so much more now that he's cross with me for not agreeing to sleep with him. It's as if the lines of force between us have become elastic, and they're trying to contract. Are we different from one another or the same?