The Seventh Function of Language

Starred review from June 19, 2017
Binet, 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. 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. And so the fact that Barthes had just had lunch with François Mitterrand—the man who would become the president of France—on Feb. 25, 1985, before being fatally struck by a van becomes grounds for a grand conspiracy. Our hardboiled hero is superintendent Jacques Bayard, who is bewildered by the luminaries of the left that make up his suspects—including Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler—even as their antic discourse regarding everything from James Bond to LSD (which Foucault tries during a disastrous bondage club visit) make the novel a charming roman à clef like no other. Bayard eventually learns that Barthes may have been killed for possessing a manuscript that reveals the fabled seventh function of language (linguist Roman Jakobson outlined only six), but the mystery—which parodies The Da Vinci Code—is really just an excuse for this loving inquiry into 20th-century intellectual history that seamlessly folds historical moments, such as Louis Althusser’s murder of his wife and the prison death of Antonio Gramsci, into a brilliant illustration of the possibilities left to the modern novel.

June 1, 2017
A famous semiotician has been killed. Call the police! And the post-structuralists!It's 1980, and Roland Barthes has been struck by a van on a Paris street. He'll later die in the hospital, and the incident initially appears to be an accident; the famous decoder of signs and symbols in everyday culture could be absent-minded and had been drinking. But as Jacques Bayard, a police superintendent, begins his investigation, dark rumblings emerge that Barthes possessed knowledge of a "seventh function of language" coveted by scholars, gangsters, and politicians alike. To make sense of the dense thickets of linguistic theory and jargon required to crack the case, Jacques recruits Simon Herzog, a young semiotician, and soon this unlikely Holmes and Watson are traveling to Italy and the United States chasing clues, in the process infiltrating the Logos Club, a secret group that hosts high-end debates that are literally blood sport (the loser consents to having a finger chopped off). Binet's second novel (HHhH, 2012) is at once a mystery and a satire of mysteries, and though the storytelling is often baggy and thick with academic lingo, there's more action than the intellectual setting implies. There are high-stakes motives (the "seventh function" allegedly has mind-control powers), explosions, and a healthy amount of sex (male prostitutes play a critical role in the plot). But Binet also operates on a brainier level, giving some real-life drama to the likes of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco, and other thinkers who dealt in linguistic abstractions; his version of a sex scene is a union of "two desiring machines" on (symbolism alert) a dissecting table. "I think I'm trapped in a novel," Simon says, in just one of the novel's many overt displays of irony; students of post-structuralism will surely detect more subtle ones. A clever and surprisingly action-packed attempt to merge abstruse theory and crime drama.

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Starred review from May 15, 2017

Author of the Prix Goncourt-winning and National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated HHhH, Binet starts by assuming that literary theorist Roland Barthes's 1980 death after being hit by a laundry truck was in fact murder. Police superintendent Jacques Bayard senses something amiss and forcibly enlists the help of young linguistics lecturer Simon Herzog, who impresses him with an on-the-spot analysis of his life worthy of Sherlock Holmes. (As with Holmes, it's about reading the signs.) Soon they are being pursued by two men thugs in a black DS and two Japanese in a blue Fuego, as Herzog patiently explains to Bayard the six functions of language. The putative seventh function, for which they are risking their necks, was apparently detailed on a piece of paper lifted from Barthes and has such incantatory power that luminaries like Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva, not to mention Francois Mitterand's presidential campaign team, figure in the chase. Soon, our protagonists land at the elite Logos Club, where debaters pay a heavy price for losing. It gets bloody, it gets erotic, and the depiction of some real-life characters is spicily shocking. VERDICT Sensational fun for the intellectually astute. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

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