The Frenchmen

Or, My Life in Theory

De: Emily Eakin

Narrado por: Emily Eakin

“A superbly engrossing adventure of ideas...this will surely be my philosophy book of the year.” —Sarah Bakewell, New York Times bestselling author of Humanly Possible

From leading critic and essayist Emily Eakin, a stylish personal history of French theory and its unlikely domination of American culture

When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors. This was French theory, a set of recondite ideas that had taken American campuses by a storm during the preceding decades. In retrospect, the influence of these men and their writings seems both extraordinary and improbable. The Frenchmen argued that language is all-powerful, meaning unstable, and the self is an illusion. Their prose was brilliant, dazzling even, but often mystifyingly elaborate and highly abstract. Yet American students and scholars flocked to their books and lectures, intoxicated by a powerful new means of understanding—and perhaps even changing—the world. For Eakin, an unsophisticated graduate of a small-town Midwestern high school, theory was no mere intellectual exercise but a way of being—a heady shortcut to worldly glamour and wisdom.

The Frenchmen is the story of Eakin’s youthful love affair with French theory, alongside a wider examination of its rise and fall. Looking closely at Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and the French-speaking Belgian Paul de Man, Eakin untangles their famously difficult works with peerless, delightful clarity. What’s more, she brings to light the eccentric, scandalous—at times criminal!—lives of thinkers who themselves were often highly averse to biography, in a daringly original weave of storytelling and exegesis.

As she explores the magnetism of their work, Eakin illuminates not just the Frenchmen’s enduring legacy but some of today’s deepest political, social, and intellectual arguments. She neither rejects nor flatters the Frenchmen’s ideas but instead reveals how they indelibly changed our understanding of power, truth, and identity. Eakin shows how, for better or worse, the Frenchmen continue to shape and unsettle our lives today.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“A superbly engrossing adventure of ideas, tracing the lives and rivalries of thinkers who were anti-humanist in their theories, but all-too-human in their personalities. I loved Emily Eakin's wry account of her own youthful intoxication with these writers, and of her disentanglement from them — even while she reassesses what they might still have to offer in these strange times. This will surely be my philosophy book of the year.” —Sarah Bakewell, New York Times bestselling author of Humanly Possible

“Rich, absorbing, seductive, The Frenchmen is an intellectual history that doesn't leave out the body. Eakin's own coming-of-age animates her masterful portrait of ideas that changed the world and the singularly eccentric figures whose lives were almost as remarkable as their thoughts. I loved this book.” —Ayad Akhtar, playwright and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Homeland Elegies

“Who knew theory could be so much fun? Deliciously gossipy yet super-smart, The Frenchmen illuminates the eccentric lives behind the philosophies that blew a whole generation's mind on both sides of the Atlantic. Emily Eakin's sparkling prose lets us relive the thrill of their intellectual chase—and shows why it still matters. Refusing to settle for easy judgments, this immensely enjoyable book reveals the making of a new world of thought, where philosophy overflows into politics, sex, and art.” —Clare Carlisle, author of Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard

“Eakin delivers exactly what we want: a panoramic and intellectually wised-up chronicle of the High Theory with which France seduced America, plus all the High Drama behind it: rivalries, takedowns, political ructions, betrayals, drugs, madness, uxoricide, fraud (not all of it intellectual), and jouissance (not all of it sexual). It's an opera of ideas, and an absurdly entertaining one.” —Jim Holt, bestselling author of Why Does the World Exist?