End for France’s most pretentious intellectuals
he’d had lunch with François Mitterand, then a presidential candidate.
“Life is not a novel. Or at least you would like to believe so,” the book begins gamesomely, before starting off with this scene, just as it took place — except that in this book the accident is no accident.
In the novel, Barthes is carrying with him a secret document in which the great linguistic theorist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), who famously (in real life) distinguished the six functions of language, has described a “seventh function”, one giving those who know about it and can use it the most remarkable power of influence over others.
It’s this incredibly significant document that has got Barthes murdered — and there are many dangerous factions competing to get their hands on it. There are cops and robbers, Bulgarian agents with poison umbrellas, Japanese protectors devoted to the memory of Barthes, gay hustlers and anarchist Italian students — plus appearances by every French intellectual from the heyday of theory: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Bernard-Henri Levy...
Set on the case by Mitterand is a tough police superintendant, Jacques Bayard, who, since he knows nothing of semiotics, recruits a young lecturer, Simon Herzog, expert at decoding signs in a frankly Sherlock Holmesian way. Together the pair uncover a Dan Brown-style ancient and global secret debating society, the Logos Club — and they set off on an academic wild goose-chase that takes them all over, to Bologna, Cornell University in New York State, Venice…
Numerous outrages on reality are committed. Derrida is killed by ferocious dogs unleashed by the American linguistic philosopher John Searle, he of the “performative utterance”. Philippe Sollers is castrated for losing a high-flown debate, after uttering a series of idiotic puns, believing this to be the secret power. Morris Zapp jokily reappears from David Lodge’s campus novel Changing Places. Mitterand is elected after unexpectedly winning the presidential debate against Giscard d’Estaing (which happened) — after using the 7th function.
Meanwhile, Simon intermittently complains about the kind of novel he finds himself in. So it’s all fun and games, ever so clever, and highly selfcongratulatory for those of us who wasted years studying the abstruse and ultimately worthless theories of these French thinkers a couple of decades ago and never expected to have any use whatsoever for our knowledge of “Signature, Event, Context” and the like again. Now at least it gives us, if no wisdom or literary insight, deep background for this spoof.
As a thriller, as a detective book, however, The 7th Function of Language soon palls, never even faintly credible. Binet evidently finds intellectual games and narrative trickery more intriguing than addressing the world we live in — and in this he is the opposite of the contemporary he loftily despises, Michel Houellebecq. Binet says he likes being played with as a reader.
I’d say he likes playing with himself as a writer as well.