laurent binet the seventh function of language

Barthes has just been hit by a passing truck on Rue des Ecoles, after dining with the socialist presidential candidate François Mitterand a few weeks before the election. Detective Jacques Bayard is not familiar with the works of the influential literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes when he enters his hospital room on a Monday afternoon. And who can you trust when the idea of truth itself is at stake? In the world of intellectuals and politicians, everyone is a suspect. What they discover is a global conspiracy involving the President, murderous Bulgarians and a secret international debating society.

Police Captain Jacques Bayard and his reluctant accomplice Simon Herzog set off on a global chase that takes them from the corridors of power and academia to backstreet saunas and midnight rendezvous. History tells us it was an accident.īut what if it were an assassination? What if Barthes was carrying a document of unbelievable, global importance? That document was the key to 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. It’s February 1980 and he has just come from lunch with Francois Mitterrand, who is locked in a battle for the Presidency. Roland Barthes, one of the twentieth-century’s towering literary figures, is knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van.

Laurent binet the seventh function of language