Language

The overriding theme of the entire novel, and the reason that the seventh language is so desirable and dangerous, is that real power, the power to mobilize, govern, and enrich, resides in language. The seventh function of language allows the speaker to turn their utterance into reality, which is to say, it gives them the ability to shape the world. Throughout the course of the novel, the reader witnesses characters using rhetoric to enter the U.S. without a visa, convince a hitman to spare the life of his target and kill his boss, and take political control of the entire nation of France. The novel connects this idea of the linguistic turn to a specific trend in French theory in the 1980s and '90s. It is notable that Michel Foucault, a recurring character in the novel, abandoned his interest in linguistic power to think...