The seventh language function

The seventh language function (French original: La Septième Fonction du langage ) is a novel by Laurent Binet , which was published in Paris in 2015 and a German translation in 2017. The plot is based on the mind game that Roland Barthes did not have a fatal accident in 1980, but was murdered. The investigating commissioner and his assistant conduct research in the Parisian intellectual milieu, in Bologna , during a scientific conference at Cornell University in Ithaca and in Venice . Apart from the murder fantasy and the ominous manuscript, which deals with a seventh language function, many historical events are correct, but are presented as if they had taken a completely different course. A whole series, not just French intellectuals of the 1980s, is presented ironically exaggerated.

action

On the way home from a meal with the presidential candidate François Mitterrand , Barthes is hit by a Bulgarian van and dies a few days later in a clinic. Soon it is said that it was murder, that Barthes was in possession of a manuscript on a previously unpublished seventh language function of the Russian semiotics Roman Jakobson . This function transforms what is merely asserted into pure truth. The hunt for the manuscript begins. Many want to get to the function that promises absolute power.

Umberto Eco , eminence gray to the plot

The police tasked the grumpy Chief Inspector Bayard with the search, who had no idea about semiotics and therefore hired Simon Herzog, a doctoral student from the left-wing University of Vincennes, to help. In its investigations, the unequal couple meets and questions the grandees of intellectual life. Jean Paul Sartre does not know anything about the matter and only appears marginally after an initial questioning. Louis Althusser kills his wife because she accidentally threw the envelope with the seventh language function, which he was supposed to keep, in the trash. Michel Foucault is somehow involved in the proceedings and is being interrogated in a gay sauna while an Arab rascal sits between his knees. Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) wants to play constantly: “Here comes BHL. You politely show him the door. Of course he'll come back in through the window. ” Jacques Derrida and John Searle engage in angry arguments. Later Derrida is mangled by dogs in the moonlight. The description of his funeral becomes name dropping . On Pierre Bourdieu , which will occur but not mentioned several times, all are talking bad, because holding their philosophical production for pure nonsense. Philippe Sollers overestimates himself immeasurably and has to pay very dearly for it. His wife Julia Kristeva uses the Bulgarian secret service. Umberto Eco , who is currently dealing with medieval monks, is the innocent gray eminence of the plot.

During their investigation, Bayard and Herzog are exactly at the time of the attack on the main train station in Bologna. They also do research in the "Logos Club", a secret society that organizes speaker duels, whose underdogs have a finger or even their testicles amputated.

reception

In the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, Sandra Kegel reports that none of the satirists sued the novelist. Enrico Ippolito says in Der Spiegel that Binet wrote a crazy academy thriller with The Seventh Language Function in which all philosophers are caricatures of themselves and the author breaks with novel conventions, but exaggerates it in some places with his voyeuristic and ironic considerations. Jutta person calls the novel in the time a "theory grotesque" in which the discourse Stars constantly running as caricatures of their own egotism through the picture. The novel exaggerates erudition, it is bursting with internal papers on illocution and perlocution , on French theory and also on Björn Borg and John McEnroe , whose match is read by the investigative semioticist Simon . After 500 pages one has great understanding for Chief Inspector Bayard, the intellectual hater.

The author was awarded the Prix ​​Interallié for the novel in 2015 .

expenditure

• La Septième Fonction du langage . Grasset, Paris 2015, ISBN 978-2-246-77601-7 .
  • The seventh language function . Novel. Translated from Kristian Wachinger. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2017, ISBN 978-3-498-00676-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sandra Kegel: Laurent Binet's new novel. Serving John McEnroe, Return Roland Barthes , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , December 16, 2016.
2. ↑ Enrico Ippolito: Philosophers Thriller. Don't touch our saints , Der Spiegel , January 6, 2017.
3. ↑ Jutta Person: The seventh language function. Here comes BHL , Die Zeit , February 9, 2017.