Parade of critical thinkers

This crime novel explores the power of language with guest appearances by some of Europe’s greatest philosophers.

IN 1967, French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes published an incendiary little essay entitled “The Death Of The Author” that changed the face of literary criticism forever. “The birth of the reader,” he writes, “must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

In 1980, Barthes, aged 64, is crossing the road after lunch and is hit by a laundry van. He dies a month later in hospital.

A stupid accident that just happened to kill one of the leading critical minds of the time – or is there something more?

What if Barthes, in his last moments, was carrying an allimportant secret document? What if it unlocked an unprecedented power of language, a weapon of mass linguistic destruction that must at all costs be kept out of the wrong hands?

So French novelist Laurent Binet would like to think. In The 7th Function Of Language (Harvill Secker), this motoring mishap morphs into a manic murder mystery featuring continental philosophy, Bulgarian spies with poison-tipped umbrellas (a historical fact, by the way) and what is, theoretically speaking, an underground fight club.

Binet was awarded the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, for a first novel for his debut HHhH (2010), about the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich.

He wrote The 7th Function, his second novel, in French in 2015; an English translation came out earlier this month.

Barthes, says the 44-year-old over the telephone from Paris, has had an enormous influence on his thinking since he encountered him as a literature student at the University of Paris.

Barthes was a semiotician – semiotics being the study of signs in linguistics – who produced seminal texts such as Mythologies (1957), which analyses modern cultural phenomena such as wrestling, soap advertisements, and the face of film star Greta Garbo.

“He gave me a guide not just to read texts, but also to read the world,” says Binet, who is single. “He made me smarter, or at least less stupid.”

So he owes Barthes a debt, although the semiotician is not his favourite philosopher – this honour is reserved for Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction theory.

“Derrida’s thoughts are very sexy,” says Binet. “I like the way he questions the root of everything and I try to do the same with my book. I want my novel to deconstruct itself.”

Barthes, Derrida, and a bevy of other famous critical thinkers parade through the novel as characters. Michel Foucault lounges naked in a bathhouse; Umberto Eco is attacked by hippies in a Bologna bar; Deleuze and Guattari have their own brand of drugs, hawked at university parties.

But Binet hopes everyone, not just erudite fans of critical theory, will enjoy the novel. The reader’s guides into the complex world of continental philosophy are Bayard, a policeman investigating Barthes’ death, and Simon Herzog, an academic press-ganged into helping him. It helps that there are car chases and explosions galore.

One of the novel’s highlights is the Logos Club, a secret society that melds sophistry with the heady violence of Chuck Palahniuk’s cult novel Fight Club (1996).

The first rule of the Logos Club may be that you do not talk about the Logos Club, but once inside it, you had better know what to talk about. Its members duel one another ver-