laurent binet the seventh function of language

He is a professor at the University of Paris III, where he lectures on French literature. His first novel, HHhH, was named one of the fifty best books of 2015 by The New York Times and received the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. Laurent Binet was born in Paris, France, in 1972. 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. A document explaining the seventh function of language - an idea so powerful it gives whoever masters it the ability to convince anyone, in any situation, to do anything.

From the prizewinning author of HHhH, “the most insolent novel of the year” ( L’Express)

Laurent binet the seventh function of language