La septième fonction du langage par Laurent Binet (review)

Reviews 229 regarding the sale of real property took place. Some of the more interesting chapters of the book discuss the creation of new ways of marketing, which made it easier for clients to identify and visualize apartments available for rent. Real estate listings began to appear in newspapers, directories, and gazettes. Rental advertisements introduced graphic elements such as interior floor plans and eye-catching posters. Supplementing the discussion of the practices of large lending institutions such as the Compagnie Foncière de France,Yates provides an inventory of the apartment buildings owned by the company in an appendix. The depth and breadth of the research behind this work is evident in the 71-page section of endnotes. In addition, rare black-and-white plates of maps, advertising posters, layouts of apartment buildings and streets and even hand-drawn survey sketches nicely complement the book’s content. Texas Christian University Sharon L. Fairchild Creative Works edited by Jean-François Duclos Binet, Laurent. La septième fonction du langage. Paris: Grasset, 2015. ISBN 978-224677601 -7. Pp. 495. 22 a. This is The Da Vinci Code written by a Gallic intellectual. Roland Barthes was not an accident victim; he was murdered by persons unknown in order to steal the one copy of La septième fonction. Apparently Roman Jakobson, after establishing six functions of language, had theorized a seventh, one which would permit those who understood how it worked to convince anyone of anything, and thereby rule the world. Unbeknownst to most, Jakobson had actually determined the nature of the seventh function. He gave his single copy of the manuscript to Barthes who paid a terrible price for his possession. His death is investigated by a perplexed policeman—“il sent qu’il va falloir écouter un tas de conneries”(80)—assisted by a young linguistic scholar enlisted to decode the utterances of the deceased’s colleagues, Paris’s intellectual flora and fauna. Binet provides a series of irreverent portraits of these Left Bank glitterati. Foucault’s language is pontifical, Lacan’s Delphic:“C’est curieux comment une femme, quand elle cesse d’être une femme, peut écrabouiller l’homme qu’elle a sous la main” (173). Deleuze lapses into clarity only when discussing tennis, and Sollers makes enigma an art form: “Le roi est celui qui porte sur lui l’expérience de la castration la plus vive” (173). Bernard Henri-Lévy is just content to be at the center of the action. Later, when the investigation moves to a linguistic colloquium at Cornell, American intellectual luminaries such as Camille Paglia, dubbed “Cruella Redgrave” (324) and John Searle get a similar treatment; David Lodge’s infamously trendy academic, Morris Zapp (Small Word, 1984), shows up at this conference. Because of the struggle for the stolen manuscript,Derrida is murdered on the Cornell campus and Searle subsequently commits suicide. As the investigation broadens, a mysterious Logos Club becomes increasingly important. This is a debating society of sorts, whose Grand Master is Umberto Eco who, due to his own rhetorical effusions, once had an opponent urinate on his leg. The Logos Club is a place where verbal dexterity occasionally triumphs over content—Socrate“est un peu le Elvis de la rhétorique”(198)—yet the jousting is not really friendly. A loser risks having a finger chopped off, or, if the stakes are high enough, a more significant part of the anatomy. As the police enquiry lurches toward its conclusion, it becomes increasingly apparent that the culprits are among Barthes’s friends, and while nobody is arrested, a rough type of justice is done.Although the fate of the purloined manuscript remains unclear, it seems to have figured in Mitterrand’s surprise victory over Giscard in 1981, and in the blossoming American academic career of a former male prostitute. Binet’s novel also explores the blurred line between fiction and reality—“I think I’m trapped in a novel” (348)—but the initial reading is simply a prolonged experience of wicked delight. Florida State University, emeritus William Cloonan Castillon,Claire. Les pêchers.Paris: L’Olivier,2015.ISBN 978-2-82-360790-1.Pp.203. 17,50 a. This novel explores...