The Seventh Function of Language Summary
Laurent Binet

The Seventh Function of Language Overview

Laurent Binet's novel The Seventh Function of Language is a dizzying, intellectual murder mystery. It follows two investigators—French police superintendent Jacques Bayard and the young, left-wing college lecturer that he conscripted named Simon Herzog—as they investigate the death of the critic Roland Barthes and search for a lost manuscript by linguist Roman Jakobson about the seventh function of language. The narrator is never named, but often makes meta-textual remarks about what they do or do not know. The novel engages with themes of power, politics, semiotics, philosophy of language, and the power of the spoken word.