![]() ![]() Our hardboiled hero is superintendent Jacques Bayard, who is bewildered by the luminaries of the left that make up his suspects-including Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler-even as their antic discourse regarding everything from James Bond to LSD (which Foucault tries during a disastrous bondage club visit) make the novel a charming roman à clef like no other. 25, 1985, before being fatally struck by a van becomes grounds for a grand conspiracy. And so the fact that Barthes had just had lunch with François Mitterrand-the man who would become the president of France-on Feb. Barthes was the father of semiotics, “a science that studies the life of signs within society,” and this novel is alive with the potential signifiers lurking behind language. ![]() ![]() Binet, author of the Prix Goncourt–winning HHhH, ups the metafictional ante with The Seventh Function of Language, which draws a detective story out of the true details surrounding the death of French philosopher Roland Barthes. ![]()
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