laurent binet the seventh function of language

It is as if a roman policier has collided with the kind of campus novel Kingsley Amis would have written had he been of the generation and temperament to read Derrida's Of Grammatology. 'No small pleasure is to be had from the amusing, sometimes scabrous, satirical portraiture of illustrious figures. Binet has written both a send-up and a wildly exuberant celebration of the French intellectual tradition. Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.”Ī brilliantly erudite comedy with more than a dash of The Da Vinci Code- The Seventh Function of Language takes us from the cafés of Saint-Germain to the corridors of Cornell University, and into the duels and orgies of the Logos Club, a secret philosophical society that dates to the Roman Empire. In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva-as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with the French version of Roland Barthes for Dummies).

But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies-struck by a laundry van-after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. From the prizewinning author of HHhH, “the most insolent novel of the year” ( L’Express ) comes a romp through the French intelligentsia of the twentieth century.

Laurent binet the seventh function of language