There's a French word, frisson, that expresses something for which we don't quite have a single word in English. Thrill, excitement, shiver, tingle: none of the common translations fully deliver the French sense of being captured, fascinated, by the presence of something—as in the medical sense of the word, the involuntary contraction of the skin in goosebumps that causes the hair on our arms to stand on end.
We need that word frisson, I think, to describe the strange excitement of the French-dominated academic world in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There was a thrill to theorizing at the time: a goosebumpy tingle felt by all who saw the postmodern moment happen—by all who thought they understood the linguistic turn in philosophy and literary criticism, by all who thought they got it.
Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man and Jean-François Lyotard, Umberto Eco and Hélène Cixous: These were more than writers scribbling their books and droning their lectures. They were signifiers in their own right and symbols of the bubbling excitement of postmodern theory. They were names with which to conjure.
Somewhere in the 40 years since, that witches' cauldron boiled itself dry and melted into slag. These days, high French postmodernist theory is just a few rusty fragments in a bed of cold ashes. It did its revolutionary work of breaking down modern confidence in the old categories of knowledge, but it failed to provide any substitute. And revolutions that tear down without rebuilding tend to fade away unmourned and unremembered. Who speaks of Paul de Man anymore? Who deploys the name of Lyotard as a token in the great game of thought? Who still uses the word Lacan as shorthand for the promise of escape from Freud's modernism in psychiatry? The frisson has died away, and the thrill is long gone.
The French novelist Laurent Binet remembers when all that stuff was young and tender. His latest, The Seventh Function of Language, is a comic murder mystery populated by all the academic stars of the day, from the young Bernard-Henri Lévy to Noam Chomsky. There’s even an appearance by the fictional Morris Zapp, the slippery American professor (modeled after Stanley Fish) who starred in David Lodge’s 1984 send-up of academia, Small World. The Seventh Function of Language, in fact, is replete with fictional elements. Only in Binet's fractured history did Jacques Derrida die in 1980, savaged by wild dogs set on him by the British analytic philosopher John Searle.
But The Seventh Function of Language begins with a true event: the 1980 death of the literary critic Roland Barthes after being run down by a laundry truck on the streets of Paris. As it happens, Barthes had just left a lunch with François Mitterrand, the Socialist running against the more conservative president of France, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. And in Binet's telling, Barthes had with him a document that everyone wants to get their hands on. The Bulgarian secret service, for instance—and shouldn't we be suspicious that a Bulgarian was driving the laundry truck? The unsubtle hand of the KGB might be behind Barthes's death. But so might Mitterand. Or Giscard d’Estaing.
For that matter, so might any of the postmodern theorists who populate the book, for the document apparently concerned the possibility of a seventh function for language, beyond the six hypothesized by semiotics. And this seventh function seems to be the use of language for magic: the spell-binding that could capture, in a frisson, the obedience of the listener.
Seeking an answer is Binet's detective, the police superintendent Jacques Bayard—a Charles de Gaulle-style conservative who despises the "filthy little lefties" he interviews in search of explanation for Barthes's death. He uses as his sidekick, his Dr. Watson or Archie Goodwin, a young academic named Simon Herzog to help him make sense of the postmodernists' writing.
Together, the two dash in a screwball romp through the intellectual scene of the day. They travel to Italy to see Umberto Eco (and almost get blown up in the 1980 bombing of the train station in Bologna). They fly to America to interview the professors meeting at Cornell, the great American center of postmodern literary criticism. Michel Foucault explains the history of sex while having sex in a gay bathhouse. The detective pair even find a kind of Fight Club, where postmodernists beat up one another in defense of their theories.
Binet is not always gentle to the real-life figures he renders as fictional characters. Bernard-Henri Lévy comes across as a status-climbing toad in the book. Jacques Lacan is opaque even in ordinary conversation. Jacques Derrida seems to deserve being turned into a dogs' dinner.
But if The Seventh Function of Language can be unkind in the particular, it nonetheless casts a loving light on its subjects in general. Looking back to 1980, Binet finds a world he asks readers to see as intellectually alive—a world in which ideas matter and thinkers hold themselves in high esteem. The Seventh Function of Language is set, after all, in a universe in which politicians, spy agencies, and police bureaus are all desperately seeking the insights of hip philosophers and celebrated literary theorists.
That's the failure of the book, enjoyable as it is for those old enough to remember when the names of French intellectuals shone like bright new pennies. The parody of Morris Zapp was sharply pointed, back in the 1980s, when David Lodge was writing his comic novels. But now? More than 30 years on? The attempt to parody that generation of postmodern academics must begin with nostalgia, and nostalgia is the graveyard where parody goes to die.
Laurent Binet wrote a strange, brilliant book in 2010 called HHhH—and it certainly contained postmodern-influenced elements in its narrative voice as it circled around the 1942 death of the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. With The Seventh Function of Language, his second novel, he uses those same postmodern techniques of narration to tell the story of postmodernism. Why should we be surprised that the result is less satisfying? It's fun to read a story of a snake swallowing its own tail. But no more than fun.