Summary

Part 5 begins back in Paris, sometime after Venice, May 5, 1981, to be exact. Simon is at Bayard's house, where they are eating, drinking and watching the presidential debates together. They interact like old friends, and Bayard is careful to accommodate Simon's handicap. Mitterand dominates in the debate, and Simon realizes that he is using the seventh function of language.

Simon and Bayard attend the celebration at the Bastille in honor of Mitterand's presidential victory and they track down Jack Lang, one of Mitterand's head advisors. They ask him about the seventh function, and he tells them the whole story. The day Barthes was hit by a car, Lang stole the document out of his pocket while they were eating lunch. He rushed it to Derrida, who read it and fabricated a false document based on the original which they snuck back...