The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet

    On the heels of reading Roland Barthes, I have here a novelization of his death: The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet (translated by Sam Taylor). Here’s a zero-context excerpt to entice you into reading it:

In Bologna, he had sex with Bianca in a seventeenth-century amphitheatre and narrowly escaped death in the bombed train station. Here, he has almost been stabbed in a library at night by a linguistics philosopher and has witnessed a decidedly mythological doggy-style sex scene on a photocopier. He met Giscard in the Élysée Palace, bumped into Foucault in a gay sauna, took part in a car chase that ended with an attempt on his life, saw a man kill another man with a poisoned umbrella, discovered a secret society where people had their fingers cut off if they lost a debate, and crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a mysterious document. In the course of a few months he has lived through more extraordinary events than he expected to witness in his entire lifetime … Simon knows how to spot the novelistic when he sees it. He thinks again about Umberto Eco’s supernumeraries. (247).

I hope this passage sparks your fancy because Binet is up to something delightful, comic, and profound with this historically-inspired murder mystery. In some ways, Binet brings forth the historical record accurately, at least in its broad strokes. For instance, it’s true that Roland Barthes was hit by the driver of a laundry van on February 25th 1980 and died a month later; it’s true that Louis Althusser murdered his wife. Where the story is not (necessarily) true is where Roland Barthes was carrying a secret document that outlines how to use language to magical effect and persuade people to act in a kind of hypnotic fashion. Where the story is not (necessarily) true is where Louis Althusser murdered his wife because she threw out a junk mail envelope that hid Barthes’ secret document. Where the story is not (necessarily) true is where Julia Kristeva and her husband Philppe Sollers sicced a pack of dogs on Derrida that tore out his throat and murdered him. The blend of past / present / reality / unreality is achieved with a sense of surprise (is this the new Bliss that Roland Barthes discusses in The Pleasure of the Text?!). There are passing moments that Binet shows his hand in a cheeky way. When Bernard-Henri Georges Lévy (BHL) appears, Binet narrates that “even back then, he is always where the action is.” Notice how the present creeps into the past. He is where the action is—even in the past.

In the wake of Barthes being hit by the laundry van, the central characters of the book are called upon to investigate: detective Jacques Bayard and a young professor named Simon Herzog, who gets enlisted as a“translator” (of deconstructionism) and co-investigator. Binet’s voice is fresh, lively, and intensely humorous, which allows the book to work well as a detective novel and a satirical lampoon. For example, the fact that the detectives interview Michel Foucault while he receives oral sex in a gay bath is such a ridiculous image, but it still works in the context of a mystery novel.

Progressing through the novel, Binet has a caravan of literary figures to progress the story. In addition to the previous figures mentioned, we see from the likes of Umberto Eco, Judith Butler, Jonathan Culler, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and a range of others. If I have one gripe about the novel, it is that Binet really makes readers rely on their extant knowledge of deconstructionists and French intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s and political figures like Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterand. Without at least baseline knowledge, this text could be pretty inaccessible. It was a little challenging to keep the circus in order.

I think what I love about the book is that it engages sincerely with philosophical discourse, even if it’s presented in a somewhat tongue-and-cheek manner. For instance, early in the book Simon Herzog is lecturing about James Bond (why is the topic so fruitful? I’ve seen all kinds of academics comment on it!). The professor does a semiotic reading (in the style of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. He talks about how the Double 0 is code for the right to murder because death is nothingness and “nothingness is zero” (25). He continues, “It is death times two: his own inevitable death [...] and that of the other” (25). He continues on to talk about the magic of the number 7 and then contrasts it with the protagonist Number 6 from The Prisoner who wants to assert his identity (25). James Bond is presented as antithetical: one who dwells in the anonymity, Number 6 is the one who longs for identity. Because of his special privileges, 007 works to maintain the established order:

“Where Number 6 is a revolutionary, 007 is a conservative. The reactionary 7 here opposes the revolutionary 6, and as the meaning of the word reactionary supposes the idea of posteriority (the conservatives ‘react’ to the revolution by working for a return to the ancient regime, i.e., the established order), it is logical that the reactionary figure succeeds the revolutionary figure (to put it as plainly as possible: that James Bond is not 005). The function of 007 is, therefore, to guarantee the return of the established order. The end of each episode coincides always with a return to ‘normality,’ i.e., ‘the old order.’ Umberto Eco calls James Bond a fascist. In actual fact, we can see that he is, above all, a reactionary” (26).

The passage gives a sense of Binet’s experience and facility with semiotic discourse. Clearly, Binet is much-learnèd, given that Simon is a fictional professor and serves as a voice for Laurent Binet. In the 007 scene, a student then raises the question of Q and the significance of his name. Herzog expands:

“Q is a paternal figure, because he is the one who provides James Bond with weapons and teaches him how to use them. He passes on his savoir faire. In this sense, he ought to be called F, for Father…. But if you watch the scenes involving Q carefully, what do you see? A distracted, impertinent, playful James Bond, who doesn’t listen (or pretends not to). And, at the end, you have Q, who always asks: ‘Questions?’ (or variations on the theme of ‘Do you understand?’). But James Bond never has any questions; although he plays the dunce, he has assimilated what has been explained to him perfectly because he is an extraordinarily quick study. So Q is the q of ‘questions’---questions that Q calls for and that Bond never asks, except in the form of jokes, and his questions are never those that Q is expecting.” (26).

I love this reading of the James Bond, first off. It’s somewhat absurd (I’m not sure if I give Ian Fleming so much credit), but also entirely plausible. Recognizing the role of questions in the James bond series like this, I think, provides a productive reading of the films (even if the premises are spurious). The conversation continues afterward, with the student pointing out the similarities in sound of Q and queue—people waiting to be served, dead time between action scenes (27). It’s a great observation, which Herzog acknowledges “that one interpretation never exhausts the sign, and that polysemy is a bottomless well where we can hear an infinite number of echoes: a word’s meaning never runs dry” (27).

It’s worthwhile to pause here for a moment to consider the epistemic framework of the book. At the two-thirds mark for the text, Binet offers a discussion of how continental philosophy has become more successful in the U.S. than europe. He outlines the process pretty poignantly where “For English departments, French Theory was a revolutionary weapon that enabled them to go from being the fifth wheel of the social sciences to being the one discipline that subsumes all the others” (235). The premise is that French Theory is “founded on the assumption that language is at the base of everything, then the study of language involves studying philosophy, sociology, psychology” (235-236). Then, people like Searles and Chomsky demand clarity and demystification. The passage outlining the process ends with an amusingly anticlimactic phrase: “But you have to admit, Foucault is a lot sexier than Chomsky” (236).

It’s surprising how well Binet can navigate the deeply intellectual with the shlocky fun of an action novel. Yes, the book involves car chases and kidnappings and mutilations and the highly political intrigue of a spy thriller. Yet, it also involves deeply intense intellectual debate. In fact, some of the most intense scenes of the novel are pages and pages of debate—for instance, which is better: written or spoken language? Throughout the book, there’s The Logos Club, a cultish debate society where people go up against one another and whoever is deemed to be the loser has a finger cut off (or, in the case of a bizarre scene between Sollers and Eco: a castration). I found myself completely engrossed in these debate scenes, the intellectual stakes being as high as the stakes of car chases and hostage negotiations.

The book is extraordinarily hard to summarize in its non-plot particulars. There are passages that are insightful tidbits of cultural criticism. For instance, one passage defends Machiavelli’s The Prince as a work not of “the height of political cynicism” but “a definitive Marxist manifesto” (176). The book is presented as making explicit the unspoken rules of political economies: “By publishing The Prince, he reveals the truths that would have remained hidden and reserved exclusively for the purposes of the powerful: so — it’s a subversive act, a revolutionary act” (176). The book “delivers the secrets of the Prince to the people. The arcana of political pragmatism stripped of fallacious divine or moral justifications. A decisive act in the liberation of humankind, as all acts of deconsecration are” (176). Reframing Machiavelli this way is an against-the-grain reading that I find illuminating—controversial, really. Similarly illuminating, Binet discusses how Baudrillard described the Centre Georges-Pompidou (an art museum that I absolutely adored—way more than the Louvre). Binet retells Baudrillard’s stance on the building and how it “risked ‘folding’ under too much pressure (200). Binet summarizes that “the mass (of visitors) magnetized by the structure should become a destructive variable for the structure itself” (200), destroying architecture and culture at the same time.

The quirky humour of the book, the last laugh of history, gets brought to the surface. Whether it be the odd couple buddy-cop dynamic of Simon and Bayard or the historically incongruous moments, Binet reaches multiple levels of humour—and he knows it. It’s a self-aware humour that invites the audience to play. Whether it’s Bayard and Simon arguing over language (whether to describe the same people as suspects or witnesses, or the joke of theorists’ affectations (“What would you do if you ruled the world?” The gigolo replied that he would abolish all laws. Barthes said: “Even grammar?” (44)), or the absurdity of situations (a revenge-driven climax in a volcano?), every layer is rewarding.

One of the funniest scenes, in my mind, is when Simon has sex with Bianca on a dissecting table following the cultish debate club (they wear Venetian masks, sometimes—it gets more and more like Eyes Wide Shut here!). The entire scene is described so grotesquely, borrowing language from Deleuze and Guattari. It’s deeply amusing to me to see their theoretical language appropriated (they would say reterritorialized) into a sexual context. Simon’s seductive line is “Let’s construct an assemblage”

 

Bianca shivers with pleasure. Simon whispers to her with an authority that he has never felt before: “Let’s construct an assemblage” (179). Following that, “She gives him her mouth” and tells him “Fuck me like a machine” (179). Then, SImon’s “tongue-machine slides insider her like a coin in a slot, and Bianca’s mouth, which also has multiple uses, expels air like a bellows” (179). The scene goes on; I’ll spare you the details, but it’s a hilarious use of gross-sounding language that makes the sexual act a completely inhuman exercise.

Of course, at the core of the novel is a discussion of language. The macguffin of the book is Roland Barthes’ copy of Roman Jakobson’s “the seventh function of language”, an idea he is purported to have considered but then left out of his book (is this true? Historically? It is irrelevant to the book.). The seventh function of language, as described by Jakobson, works out to be a kind of magic spell that makes people behave the way you want. People are murdered over the macguffin. Later, Phillippe Sollers relies on a falsified version of the text to win a debate and reading it is such a glorious mess. Ultimately, the seventh function is used for political ends, too. Incidentally, Binet offers some consideration of totalitarian countries emerging from their relationship to linguistic theories:”Rhetoric can truly blossom only in a democracy, because it requires a venue for debate that, by definition, neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship can offer” (127). Throughout the debate, there is some consideration of whether speech is valuable and a historical tracing of how “Speeches were no longer expected to be effective, simply beautiful. Political issues were replaced by purely aesthetic issues. In other words, rhetoric became poetic” (127). So, then, what does language do? (Incidentally, J. L. Austin, author of How to Do Things With Words, makes an appearance).

Running parallel to the power of language is Simon’s introspection. Throughout the book, he suspects himself of being a character in a novel. When he is almost crushed by crumbling architecture, he considers that his author will have to be trickier in defeating him. At one point, Simon hears about Morris Zapp’s theory that life should not be considered with literature because it “does not function in the same way” (234). He is told that “life is transparent, literature opaque” (234), which Simon suggests is debatable. He notes that “Life is an open system, literature a closed system. Life is made of things, literature of words. Life is what it seems to be: when you are afraid of flying, it is a question of fear. [...] But in Hamlet, even the most stupid critic realizes that it is not about a man who wants to kill his uncle—it is about something else” (234). The relationship between reality and fiction is well-worth thinking about.

Further to that point, our own identities are subject to question. Are we authored by someone else? In addition, there’s a section that questions where our identities come from and where our words are from. He asks, “when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking? How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of preexisting words?” (252). The ways we formulate our identities are so influenced by “external forces: our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic ‘tics’ so precious that they form our identity, the speeches we are constantly bombarded with in every possible and imaginable form” (252). He then goes on to talk about how we note phrases emerging from our loved ones’ mouths that are clearly appropriated from elsewhere “as if he were the source of those thoughts rather than a sponge for them, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone, as if he were not simply the medium through which a newspaper’s prerecorded voice repeated the words of a politician who himself had read them in a book whose author, and so on…” (252). We become, essentially, citations.

I’m not even close to articulating how entertaining and thoughtful this book is. It’s a perfect blend of so-called high-brow and low-brow entertainment. I had the good fortune to read, essentially, 200 pages of this book in (almost) one sitting. As a result, the book was deeply satisfying. It felt like an intimate experience with central characters and had an ending worthy of literary classic. Not to spoil too much, but it offers multiple possibilities—again, language is never singular.

At times like this, I feel like the quality of my reviews is in direct contradiction to my enjoyment of the book. There are so many wonderful turns in the plot, thoughtful philosophical discussions, humorous incongruities between history and fiction, and … well, it’s just a good book.

If only I had the seventh function of language at my disposal, this review would compel you to read Laurent Binet’s book. If I just say “do it” would that work? “Do it.”