The 7th Function of Language by Laurent Binet  {Reviewed by THOMAS} Popular culture rightly feels threatened by structuralist criticism, but it has only its own existing weapons (and not the weapon of theory) with which to respond and its understanding of the threat posed upon it is necessarily vague. When Roland Barthes was killed by a laundry van when crossing the road in 1980, his afterlife was up for grabs.* Could this incident be an opportunity to strike back at semiotics through its most vulnerable aspect, the semioticians? What if these philosophers were made to behave in a book, now that they no longer exist in the world, as cartoon caricatures of philosophers? How about introducing a detective, an ordinary fictional detective, resembling or not resembling, who knows, a real detective, who begins to discover that Barthes was killed as part of a high-level international intrigue for the sake of some papers he had written on the seventh function of language, its capacity, when correctly loaded, to irresistibly persuade whoever it is pointed at (useful, at a popular-cultural level). Of course, a detective, like a semiotician, is on a trail of clues and signs, the difference being that a detective believes that behind the signs lies a single story whereas the semiotician knows that interpretation will never exhaust the sign. Which approach is more useful? Which is more true? The more this popular-cultural detective corrals within the limits of his investigations the philosophers who are for him the stand-ins for their philosophy, the more he lays himself open to interpretation from beyond those limits. The satiriser becomes the satirical representation of a satiriser, perhaps for the very objects of his satire. Theory thus ducks the long arm of the law, but this too comes at a cost, the loosening of the bond between the signifier and the signified. Ouch. Structuralist criticism rightly feels threatened by post-structuralist criticism, but it has only its own existing weapons with which to respond and its understanding of the threat posed upon it is necessarily vague. * Barthes was implicated in the death of the author in 1967 but was released without charge as the body was never found. Although this was a cold case by 1980, the possibility of his death being a revenge killing warrants further examination.