Reviewed by Daniel Barbiero
The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory
by Emily Eakin
Penguin Random House
July 2026, 496 pp, ISBN–9781594206320
After World War II, New York overtook Paris as the art capital of the world. In compensation Paris became a capital of advanced thought, as intellectual trends originating there crossed the Atlantic to exert a hold over American cultural life. In the immediate postwar period it was Sartre’s existentialism; forty years later, the doctrines of a different set of French philosophers, literary critics, psychoanalysts, and others came to dominate the humanities departments of American universities as well as other places where culture was made and debated. Indeed, the 1980s were the years when these doctrines—often just called by the generic name of “theory”—seemed to represent an exciting new way of doing philosophy, reading literature, and analyzing culture. As an undergraduate during those heady years Emily Eakin was caught up in the excitement. Her The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory, part memoir and part history of ideas, is a lively look back at that time when critical theories largely imported from France seemed poised to make a clean sweep of American intellectual life.
Despite its singular label “theory” was an essentially heterogeneous tissue of thought woven of multiple strands. Its major components were Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, which exposed the roots of the Western metaphysical tradition to minute rhetorical analysis; Michel Foucault’s theory of the ubiquitous and coercive presence of discourses propagated by social institutions, which served as hidden power structures pervading all aspects of human relations; Jacques Lacan’s heretical neo-Freudianism; Louis Althusser’s structuralist rereading of Marx; Roland Barthes’ mythology of signs and announcement of the death of the author; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s radically anti-hierarchical “schizoanalysis” and advocacy for the primacy of difference over the purportedly repressive and homogenizing forces of sameness. There were other contributors, namely the postmodern theorists Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, as well as several non-Frenchmen including the American Paul de Man, originally a Belgian francophone, but Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes, and the team of Deleuze and Guattari arguably were the central figures in the development of French theory, as they are in Eakin’s book as well.
Notwithstanding the significant differences dividing them—and Eakin relates anecdotes of the feuds and jealousies, both intellectual and otherwise, among theory’s leading figures, as well as their alliances—what these intellectuals shared was a basic anti-humanism based on the belief that language, and consequently the various discursive formations it gives rise to, is a system that precedes and transcends the intentions of its users and shapes their perceptions of the world around them. Put crudely, people are products of discourse; they don’t speak language so much as language speaks them. This basic belief was an outgrowth of structuralism, the hybrid of linguistics and anthropology that supplanted Sartre’s existentialism as the leading trend among the French intellectual avant-garde. From this initial denial of free human agency the thinkers behind theory went on to unmask and debunk—to seek out and discredit what they claimed was the repressed and repressive reality beneath the bland appearances we ordinarily take at face value. With their novel conceptual vocabularies and sometimes maddeningly convoluted lines of argument, they represented a contemporary extension of the tradition of what Paul Ricouer called the school of suspicion, whose roots reach back to the 19th century and the work of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.
Although French theory gained its greatest visibility in America during the 1980s, it had begun a slow drip into the bloodstream of American intellectual life as early as the mid-1960s. The watershed event was the 1966 international conference “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” held under the auspices of Johns Hopkins University. The conference brought Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, and others to Baltimore and was notable especially for Derrida’s presentation “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” which is generally regarded as the founding event of the post-structuralism that would play such a key role in the ascendancy of theory. The conference not only introduced post-structuralism, it built a bridge between American and French academics, one which would see substantial two-way traffic in coming years.
By the 1970s, French theory began to gain increased visibility through its dissemination in semi-official academic publications put together—in the beginning, often only as mimeographed sheets composed on a shoestring—by young professors in French departments. These publications, which included such subsequently well-known titles as SubStance, Diacritics, and Glyph, were soon joined by non-academic journals associated with the political left as well as alternative publications tied into avant-garde art networks and the punk rock underground. It was also in the 1970s that the unstable and ultimately temporary constellation of de Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller came together at Yale, making that university what François Cusset, in his classic history of the Americanization of French theory, described as “the official temple of [deconstruction’s] American cult.” The groundwork had been laid for French theory’s rise to dominance in the next decade, not only in university departments of literature, but in the art world and in new academic fields such as semiotics and cultural studies, which it had helped to establish.
Why was French theory so appealing to Americans? When it debuted here in the 1960s, the then-dominant school of literary interpretation, the New Criticism, seemed to have run its course. Existentialism and Zen Buddhism, which had been adopted by the nascent counter culture of the 1950s, had also begun to lose their cachet. In addition, the expansion of access to post-secondary education had led to the influx of a large, new generation of students and young academics from non-elite backgrounds who were hospitable to the kinds of radical critiques French theory had on offer. In the 1980s, French theory’s tendency toward debunking and unmasking, and its elevation of difference over assimilation, lent itself to the identity politics then coming to the forefront in the worlds of the university, the arts, and alternative culture generally. The critical stances it afforded, which promised to provide sophisticated intellectual means for subverting the dominant culture and its existing hierarchies, proved particularly appealing to many young people in and out of academia. Emily Eakin was one of them.
In a way, Eakin was primed for theory. She came from an academic family—her mother had a PhD in English literature and her father was a professor of English at Indiana University who took his family with him on sabbaticals to Paris and Athens. In a foreshadowing of his daughter’s subsequent experience, during his Paris sabbatical in 1972 he was “converted” to structuralism, to which he adhered for a limited time. Eakin herself spent time in France in a program for high school students just before beginning her freshman year at Harvard. Despite this background, she seems to have had something of an intellectual inferiority complex. She felt like a provincial midwesterner and was searching for something more. She thought she found it in theory, which was at the apex of its influence in academia when she entered Harvard in the mid- to late-1980s.
For Eakin and many other “intellectually insecure Americans” like her, theory was—to use a word then in fashion—seductive. In contrast to what she describes as her “middle class Hoosier normality,” theory was something “cool” and “sexy,” and offered her “authentic membership in intellectual circles.” Her journal entries from her time in college, which she quotes liberally and disarmingly, are illuminating in showing us a picture of an earnest student conscientiously attempting to earn this membership by mastering the intricacies of its rituals and dogmas. And they were intricate. In fact a large part of French theory’s attraction was its intimidating complexity and lofty cerebrality. But as Eakin shows, the various ideas that fell under the rubric of “theory” were the products of choices made by distinctive individuals acting within the given circumstances of their personal situations. Over the course of the story she tells of French theory’s development in the wake of the existentialist humanism it displaced, she humanizes these anti-humanists.
And they were indeed human, all too human. Among the figures whose lives and thought Eakin explores are the manic-depressive Althusser, whose structuralist Marxism came to prominence for a few years in the early to mid 1960s but who ended up institutionalized after having strangled his wife; Lacan, the fastidiously turned-out, flamboyantly unorthodox psychoanalyst with roots in Surrealism and a liking for Joyce-like wordplay and quasi-scientific formulas; Foucault, who was obsessed with madness, suicide, sadomasochistic sex, and psychedelic drugs; de Man, an insightful reader but a duplicitous character whose life was a tangle of lies meant to hide, among other misdeeds, wartime collaboration and non-existent academic credentials; and Derrida, whose deconstruction stood structuralism on its head by theorizing language as an inherently unstable vehicle of meaning shot through with aporias.
Of all the major figures whose stories Eakin tells, Derrida stands out as primus inter pares. This isn’t surprising, since his close, deconstructive readings of Husserl, Freud, Plato, and others in the Western philosophical canon, inseparable from his rococo literary style and serpentine—critics might say sophistical—argumentation, came to epitomize what Eakin acknowledges to be theory’s “grandest insights and worst excesses.” When the backlash against theory inevitably arrived during the late 1980s and 1990s, Derrida’s work served as the lightning rod for criticism from skeptics such as the linguist Noam Chomsky (who called deconstruction “gibberish”), the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson, and the American philosopher John Searle as well as from less learned quarters. Nevertheless, he was a serious philosopher whose critique of the Western metaphysical tradition was substantive and has established itself as a permanent part of that tradition. Like it or not no one writing about ontology after Derrida can avoid engaging with him, whether implicitly or explicitly.
And as with Derrida, so with theory in general. It may have started out as a university-based cult, but as Eakin concludes, it became a permanent part of the culture, no longer noticed “because it is everywhere.” She argues that particularly in this age of all-pervasive media its vision of language as formative of our way of being-in-the-world has qualified the hold that discourses have on us and consequently has facilitated a generally pervasive disbelief in totalizing metanarratives and in the rigid conceptual either/ors undergirding them. Whether we know it or not, we are all theorists now.
As for Eakin herself, she eventually dropped out of a PhD program at Columbia after having become disillusioned with theory and its hold over her, and became a journalist. Her old life gives her an insider’s understanding of theory, while her current life gives her the ability to write about it in accessible terms for the general reader. No surprise, then, that The Frenchmen tells a fascinating story, and tells it well.
About the reviewer: Daniel Barbiero is a Washington, DC area writer focusing on the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work. His essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, London Grip, and elsewhere. He is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press); his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press). Website: https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.