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A review by marc129
La septième fonction du langage by Laurent Binet
3.0
To be honest: I don't like the thriller genre and I’m rather skeptical towards postmodernism as a philosophical movement. The fact that I have given this book a positive rating (3 stars is quite good for me), indicates that this is a valuable book, and I really enjoyed reading it. Let's start with the praise.
Binet offers an unquestionably brilliant evocation of French postmodernism of the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly the "gang" of Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Sollers, Kristeva and others; my knowledge of these figures is not really indepth, but I have the impression that Binet really brought them to life, with their own personality and their specific philosophical approach. At the same time, he has clearly done his own thing with it: he has made them the main characters in a political-philosophical thriller. I cannot put it in another way, but this book could just as well have been written by Umberto Eco, and that is meant as a compliment. By the way, Eco also plays a small but very distinct role in this book.
Binet has given the French philosophy scene pretty hilarious proportions, with regularly incredibly funny, cleverly drawn scenes, which at the same time uncover facets of the structuralist and deconstructionist approach of the philosophers involved, with their great and especially their small sides. I also found it brilliant how top politicians Giscard and Mitterrand and their environment have been portrayed, just in the crucial phase of the 1981 presidential election; both gentlemen play a major role in the plot.
By way of contrast, the entire thriller plot is carried by an improbable ‘investigators duo’, the blunt police commissioner Jacques Bayard (who meets all the clichés of his profession) and the young and eager linguist Simon Herzog; they serve as a kind of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and it is just wonderful how the evolving dynamic between them both supports the story and takes us along.
Time to focus on the lesser sides of the novel.
Occasionally this thriller derailes in burlesque and grotesque scenes, often towards the absurdist; and occasionally there are incredibly banal scenes (especially the sex scene in the Archiginnasio of Bologna is of such a lousy level, in contrast to the sparkling intellectual fireworks all around, that I would like to think that Binet did this on purpose too). Binet also threw a lot together, a little too much for my taste. In the second chapter for instance, which takes place in Bologna, he focuses very much on Italian intellectual anarchism with its hollow left-wing phraseology and violence. To complicate matters even more, he also presents the Bulgarian connection, the crude bomb attack at the Bologna station in August 1980, and a few obscure Japanese rescuers.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m not a fan of postmodernism; beware, I absolutely acknowledge the merits of the aforementioned gentlemen-academics: they have pointed to the systemic underlay in our culture and especially to the importance of the linguistic and textual, and for that we should be grateful to them; but in doing so they made the mistake of being extremely reductionist and of sometimes declaring their systems, languages and texts to be the only reality; quod non, of course. No wonder their fame only lasted the blink of an eye.
With all this, the question naturally arises of what Binet thought of them. And that is the great thing about this novel: you don't really know. Or better: he constantly misleads you. One moment he seems to offer a kind of tribute, to put in the spotlight what a valuable, new view of reality they have offered. But the next moment, while sticking out his tongue, he makes fun of the hollow phraseology that they often produced and of the crude hardness of the inexorable struggle between stubborn, egocentric academics.
And then there is that so-called seventh function of the language, around which the story orbits. I am not going to betray here what it is all about, but it is a really nice find of Binet to make this aspect the supporting element of the novel. Only, in doing so, he exposes precisely the great weakness of the French school: the intellectual fireworks of structuralists, linguists, semiotics, post-structuralists, etc., have stuck in the long run. They have proceeded in such an analytical way, with the aim of exposing the systems and mechanisms contained in our language and culture, that they detracted the view on the manipulative aspects of both day-to-day reality and the lofty world of culture and politics. It came as no surprise that their crusade against Western metaphysics ultimately led to the triumph of rhetoric, as Binet illustrates brilliantly. Perhaps Mitterrand was the winner of the 1981 presidential election, but in the longer run the deconstruction of Western culture led to lousy phenomena such as Trump and Johnson who perversely make fun of the system. I don't think Binet, who published this novel in 2015, already had those two in mind, but both are the perfect illustration of the underlying message of this book.
Finally, a small warning: this may be an entertaining, well-structured and even sometimes spectacular story, it requires quite some prior knowledge of modern philosophy, the international situation in 1980 and the French political scene of that time. Only with these arms, you can really enjoy this book and have real reading pleasure. Very well done, Mr. Binet.
Binet offers an unquestionably brilliant evocation of French postmodernism of the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly the "gang" of Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Sollers, Kristeva and others; my knowledge of these figures is not really indepth, but I have the impression that Binet really brought them to life, with their own personality and their specific philosophical approach. At the same time, he has clearly done his own thing with it: he has made them the main characters in a political-philosophical thriller. I cannot put it in another way, but this book could just as well have been written by Umberto Eco, and that is meant as a compliment. By the way, Eco also plays a small but very distinct role in this book.
Binet has given the French philosophy scene pretty hilarious proportions, with regularly incredibly funny, cleverly drawn scenes, which at the same time uncover facets of the structuralist and deconstructionist approach of the philosophers involved, with their great and especially their small sides. I also found it brilliant how top politicians Giscard and Mitterrand and their environment have been portrayed, just in the crucial phase of the 1981 presidential election; both gentlemen play a major role in the plot.
By way of contrast, the entire thriller plot is carried by an improbable ‘investigators duo’, the blunt police commissioner Jacques Bayard (who meets all the clichés of his profession) and the young and eager linguist Simon Herzog; they serve as a kind of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and it is just wonderful how the evolving dynamic between them both supports the story and takes us along.
Time to focus on the lesser sides of the novel.
Occasionally this thriller derailes in burlesque and grotesque scenes, often towards the absurdist; and occasionally there are incredibly banal scenes (especially the sex scene in the Archiginnasio of Bologna is of such a lousy level, in contrast to the sparkling intellectual fireworks all around, that I would like to think that Binet did this on purpose too). Binet also threw a lot together, a little too much for my taste. In the second chapter for instance, which takes place in Bologna, he focuses very much on Italian intellectual anarchism with its hollow left-wing phraseology and violence. To complicate matters even more, he also presents the Bulgarian connection, the crude bomb attack at the Bologna station in August 1980, and a few obscure Japanese rescuers.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m not a fan of postmodernism; beware, I absolutely acknowledge the merits of the aforementioned gentlemen-academics: they have pointed to the systemic underlay in our culture and especially to the importance of the linguistic and textual, and for that we should be grateful to them; but in doing so they made the mistake of being extremely reductionist and of sometimes declaring their systems, languages and texts to be the only reality; quod non, of course. No wonder their fame only lasted the blink of an eye.
With all this, the question naturally arises of what Binet thought of them. And that is the great thing about this novel: you don't really know. Or better: he constantly misleads you. One moment he seems to offer a kind of tribute, to put in the spotlight what a valuable, new view of reality they have offered. But the next moment, while sticking out his tongue, he makes fun of the hollow phraseology that they often produced and of the crude hardness of the inexorable struggle between stubborn, egocentric academics.
And then there is that so-called seventh function of the language, around which the story orbits. I am not going to betray here what it is all about, but it is a really nice find of Binet to make this aspect the supporting element of the novel. Only, in doing so, he exposes precisely the great weakness of the French school: the intellectual fireworks of structuralists, linguists, semiotics, post-structuralists, etc., have stuck in the long run. They have proceeded in such an analytical way, with the aim of exposing the systems and mechanisms contained in our language and culture, that they detracted the view on the manipulative aspects of both day-to-day reality and the lofty world of culture and politics. It came as no surprise that their crusade against Western metaphysics ultimately led to the triumph of rhetoric, as Binet illustrates brilliantly. Perhaps Mitterrand was the winner of the 1981 presidential election, but in the longer run the deconstruction of Western culture led to lousy phenomena such as Trump and Johnson who perversely make fun of the system. I don't think Binet, who published this novel in 2015, already had those two in mind, but both are the perfect illustration of the underlying message of this book.
Finally, a small warning: this may be an entertaining, well-structured and even sometimes spectacular story, it requires quite some prior knowledge of modern philosophy, the international situation in 1980 and the French political scene of that time. Only with these arms, you can really enjoy this book and have real reading pleasure. Very well done, Mr. Binet.