The Frenchmen

Or, My Life in Theory

De: Emily Eakin

From leading critic and essayist Emily Eakin, a stylish and sophisticated personal history of French theory, from its birth in France to its unlikely domination on America culture

When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell immediately under the spell of French theory, an eclectic body of critical and philosophical texts written by a handful of middle-aged Frenchmen, whose obscure ideas were taking American campuses by storm. In retrospect, the passion the Frenchmen aroused among a generation of Americans, including Eakin, seems as improbable as it was extraordinary – their worldview was predicated on a sweeping vision of language as all-powerful and human agency as an illusion, and their writing, brilliant as it was, was barely accessible – and in some cases downright impenetrable. And yet, American students and scholars flocked in droves to their books and lectures, liberated by this new way of understanding – perhaps even changing – the world. And in many respects, they were right: the Frenchmen challenged some of our most fundamental assumptions, from our beliefs about power, truth, and the individual, to reality itself.

THE FRENCHMEN is Eakin’s personal account of her youthful love affair with French theory, told alongside a greater examination of the origins of theory itself and American culture’s fixation. For a young woman raised in a Protestant ethic of hard work, self-improvement, and sexual sublimation, the attraction was obvious. Theory was cool. Theory was French. And theory was sexy. No mere intellectual exercise, but a way of being. Emily felt like she’d escaped her body and become pure mind, that she’d left her smalltown high school far behind and entered a rarified stratum.

In this tale rich not just in ideas but human drama, Eakin looks closely at these men – specifically Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man – and deciphers what made them think the way they did. She examines the oftentimes absurd and tortured biographies of this decorated group of thinkers who were themselves so averse to biography. More personally, Eakin tries to pinpoint what it was about herself at that age that allowed her to come under theory’s sway and, for a time, nearly lose herself within it. What emerges from Eakin’s intimate, witty, and wise reckoning is that theory – while having faded from view – remains crucial for understanding our world today.