(2017-08-24) Who Killed Roland Barthes Maybe Umberto Eco Has A Clue

Who killed Roland Barthes? Maybe Umberto Eco has a clue. On Feb. 25, 1980 the celebrated French literary critic Roland Barthes was struck by a laundry van while crossing the street in Paris, later dying of his injuries... What if Barthes — an authority on semiology, the study of signs and symbols — had discovered a linguistic secret of immense power, one for which people would kill? The pioneering structuralist Roman Jakobson had famously promulgated six functions to language, but he hinted at the possible existence of a seventh, one in which words acquired the persuasive force of incantations or magic spells (magick).

Laurent Binet — a professor of French literature in Paris — has produced an intellectual thriller that will be catnip to serious readers. ISBN:978-0374261566

Realizing that he is out of his element, Bayard recruits help from a young academic named Simon Herzog, who not only understands words such as “normative,” but can also employ semiology to make amazing Sherlock Holmes-like deductions.

Before long, this Cornell section zeros in on an intense controversy between Searle and Derrida (based on fact).

The quest to identify Barthes’s murderer and discover the seventh function of language eventually takes Bayard and Herzog to an international conference at Cornell University

Eventually, through a lead given by literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov, our two investigators make their way to Bologna, home of Eco, then merely a professor of semiology (though already thinking about what will become “The Name of the Rose”). There they learn more about a shadowy, centuries-old organization, a kind of intellectual version of “Fight Club,” at which people from all walks of life debate philosophical questions.

His opening sentence proclaims that “Life is not a novel”