From The New York Review of Books ,
issue dated July 19, 2018 —
"The only useful thing about The Seventh Function of Language
is the idea that one would need some magical means to persuade
through language, some secret spell. Useful, because perfectly
ridiculous. The spell, we know, exists . . . ."
— "Imagining the Real," by Wyatt Mason
Some nineteenth-century thoughts along these lines:
See also Declarations.