the 7th function of language by laurent binet

He loved his mother (dead), Mao Zedong (a French intellectual conceit), and young men (many). With considerably more seriousness, and considerably less screen time, Barthes nevertheless had the same function in life as Monty Python: ripping the guts out of language and its implicit pretensions to power. Roland Barthes, the motivator of the action in The 7th Function of Language, was the French equivalent of Monty Python during the 1970’s. The focus of Monty Python’s humor was not so much human behaviour as it was the very meaning of meaning to human beings - its relativity, its conventionality, and its inherent absurdity. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the surrealist English television and film troupe, famous for among other things the hysterically funny Life of Brian, was the new wave of British comedy in the 1970’s. 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 that recalls Flaubert’s Parrot and The Name of the Rose-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 )

The 7th function of language by laurent binet