the 7th function of language by laurent binet

25, 1985, before being fatally struck by a van becomes grounds for a grand conspiracy.

And so the fact that Barthes had just had lunch with Fran ois Mitterrand the man who would become the president of France on Feb. Barthes was the father of semiotics, 'a science that studies the life of signs within society,' and this novel is alive with the potential signifiers lurking behind language. Binet has written both a send-up and a wildly exuberant celebration of the French intellectual tradition.īinet, author of the Prix Goncourt winning HHhH, ups the metafictional ante with The Seventh Function of Language, which draws a detective story out of the true details surrounding the death of French philosopher Roland Barthes. 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, 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.

The 7th function of language by laurent binet