The Case for Sticking With French Theory

As a student, Emily Eakin was fascinated by Derrida, Foucault and their peers, but found them incompatible with the real world. Did she give up too soon?

“I fucking love Foucault. I fuck with Foucault hard,” enthused Supriya Ganesh, star of The Pitt, in a recent interview with New York magazine. Ganesh, who uses she/they pronouns, never felt comfortable with rigid gender and sexuality labels, and Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume I showed her how these categories have in fact varied across cultures and through history: “I think this idea of defining sexuality is very new—or at least that’s the argument he’s making … it really illuminated a lot of that for me.”

Ganesh was unwittingly providing fresh evidence for the central argument of The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, which proposes that a small group of dead twentieth-century intellectuals are “crucial for understanding the world we inhabit today.” Written by Emily Eakin, a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review, The Frenchmen focuses on eight French or French-speaking theorists (Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man) who, she argues, “permanently alter[ed] how we think not only about bedrock philosophical ideas but about the role of language in shaping those beliefs and everything else.”

Eakin’s Frenchmen are an eclectic group, differing in interests, politics, and methods. Two were practicing psychoanalysts. Most were academics, working in fields including philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, history, and comparative literature. They wrote on topics as varied as schizophrenia, prison architecture, photography, Edgar Allan Poe, and (in Barthes’s case) their mom. What unites them, according to Eakin, is their emphasis on systems, as opposed to individuals, and their attention to the complex and contradictory ways that language operates. Instead of taking for granted (as the existentialists did) that people are autonomous free agents defined by their choices, they wrote about the ways people and texts are created and constrained by powerful yet unstable structures of knowledge and language—an idea that resonates in our era of inescapable algorithms and artificial intelligence. (“Chatbots frighten us,” Eakin writes, “to the degree that they make literal theory’s suggestion that thought does not require a human thinker.”)

“Deconstruction,” an analytical method developed by Derrida, came to define French theory and is at the heart of Eakin’s book. She defines it as “a style of reading” that “took apart” a text and left it in pieces, showing how it was undone by its own internal contradictions. A common deconstructive move is to show how the binary terms that a text’s argument depends on—for example, speech versus writing—are not actually opposed after all. In classic Derridean fashion, Eakin structures her book around an oft-repeated binary between “theory” and “real life” that she sees as ripe for deconstructing, contrasting the Frenchmen’s “stringent antihumanism” with their all-too-human lives; academic theory with real-world historical developments; and her own personal tendency toward hyperintellectualism with her desire for real-world experience.

For the young Eakin and her cohort, theory was more than a field of study—it was a radically innovative mode of thought enveloped in mystique and glamour, whose leading lights were treated like international celebrities and conducted themselves accordingly. At the same time, Eakin’s immersion in theory seemed to cut her off from everything else, including herself. This binary approach to intellectual history and memoir is elegant and symmetrical. But it also sometimes feels forced—like a straw man conjured up only to be toppled. Is it really necessary to think about a “life in theory” as an opposition on the verge of collapse? If theory is truly as illuminating as Eakin argues, there ought to be a less reductive, less formulaic way to bring it to life.

French theory found its way to the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, at a tumultuous time for American higher education. Baby boomers had arrived in college en masse, and campuses were roiled by protests against war, racism, and sexism—an environment conducive to new approaches to knowledge. Though French theorists were often trained in philosophy, in the United States their ideas found a welcoming home in literature departments, which were due for a shake-up. Cold War–era lit departments had often cultivated a soft nationalism, in which texts were valued for their democratic, humanistic, or Western ideals. The popular “New Criticism” approach to reading presumed that literary texts were unified and self-contained works of art, transcending their historical or political context. Literary education was often an exercise in appreciation and ­canon-consolidation: Students took classes on Major English Poets or The Great American Novel to learn how to properly revere literature as........

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