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In 1994, while a graduate student in literary studies at Columbia University, Emily Eakin met another student in her program at a party on the Upper West Side. She asked the woman which authors or literary period she concentrated on, and her classmate laughed. “Oh, I don’t read books,” she replied. “I just do theory.”
For anyone who wasn’t in or near academia during the 1980s and ’90s, this statement probably sounds nonsensical. For anyone who was, it’s all too redolent of a time when many American scholars wrote and spoke in a manner outsiders found incomprehensible. Eakin—who bailed on her Ph.D. in part because of conversations like the one described above, becoming a journalist and, currently, an editor at the New York Times Book Review—has written an account of that time and her own sojourn in the realms of structuralist and poststructuralist thought. The result, The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, is an exquisite blend of gossip, memoir, and philosophy, of recondite ideas explained with admirable lucidity, as well as a chronicle of human folly. And, despite her eventual disillusionment with theory, Eakin persuasively argues that what once seemed to be the most esoteric of intellectual pursuits has in fact had a profound effect on American culture.
The major figures in structuralist and poststructuralist theory were all French, or French-adjacent. (One of the most influential, Jacques Derrida, was an Algerian-born Sephardic Jew, and felt himself to be “a little black and very Arab Jew” in the eyes of the French.) As Eakin acknowledges, for Americans some of the mystique of theory sprang from its Frenchness, and from the enviable status of intellectuals in France, where philosophers could become famous and, if fashionable enough, even considered sexy. (She quotes a friend’s observation that “the French were philosophers because it got them laid. We Americans never understood the erotic frisson associated with being a philosopher in France.”)
Eakin begins with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existentialist philosophy, with its belief in a heroic individual constructing his own meaningful life, the structuralists rejected in favor of the idea that culture, specifically language itself, constituted a system of meanings in which all human beings are embedded and from which we cannot escape. The structuralists and their heirs were shaped by continental philosophers—Heidegger, Nietzsche, Husserl—and by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as by Freud and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Many of them had connections to the Surrealists and such transgressive literary figures as Georges Bataille. Several of the influential figures in this group started out as psychoanalysts, most notably Jacques Lacan, whose patients—from Eakin’s description of his high-handed and eccentric therapeutic practices—one can’t help but pity.
Speaking of Freud, The Frenchmen offers an account of the development of these philosophies that’s positively Oedipal or, more precisely, very much resonant with the “anxiety of influence” narrative articulated by the late Yale professor Harold Bloom (who, in his salad days, also dabbled in theory). Over and over in this story, a brilliant upstart—Louis Althusser, Lacan, Michel Foucault, Derrida, Paul de Man—makes his reputation by standing up at some public event and brutally dismantling the theories of the reigning philosophe, a man he has previously claimed to admire and even revere. One of Eakin’s chapters is titled “Sartre Gets a Drubbing,” and she likens the intellectual public feud between Foucault and Derrida to “a match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, or Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal: riveting—and too closely fought to judge the rightful winner.”
To any American peripheral to the enclaves of theory—and to quite a few inside them—such dramas were subdued if not downright invisible. “Theory” appeared to be a daunting edifice of impenetrable words tended by acolytes who insisted that it was revelatory and even revolutionary. You might, through hours of strenuous study, feel that you’d gotten a grip on some segment of it, only to have that understanding slip away without the constant application of concentration. The professors who mastered it became “stars,” or what Eakin calls “academostars,” typically youngish and clad in glamorously edgy clothing, who were fought over by department heads and consequently paid extravagant salaries.
The pioneers in the field, however, always seemed a bit remote, referred to only by their last names, their often very messy personal lives considered a matter beneath the notice of the truly thoughtful. Much of the entertainment offered by The Frenchmen comes from the tea Eakin spills on men who were once presented as disembodied monuments. In life, they were narcissistic, imperious, and histrionic—that is, they were very French.
“Arrogance was the keynote of his character,” Lacan’s biographer, a member of his inner circle, told Eakin. He drove like a maniac, considered the traffic laws inapplicable to one such as himself, and once pitched a fit when his son insisted upon halting for a stop sign. Althusser was in and out of mental hospitals, strangled his long-suffering wife to death, and then wrote a self-pitying memoir in which he is depicted as a victim. When his acclaim had faded, he would walk the streets of Paris, shouting, “I am the great Althusser!” at passersby. Foucault was publicly closeted and adopted the radical-chic Maoist ideology of his longtime partner, at one point embarrassing himself by praising the Iranian Revolution as “perhaps the first great insurrection against the planetary system, the most mad and most modern form of revolt.” Like so many of these men, Derrida was, as Eakin puts it, “a skilled seducer,” whose affairs alienated his children, one of whom (fathered with a longtime girlfriend) he saw just once after the child’s birth, when the boy and Derrida unwittingly took the same flight. Among them, only Roland Barthes comes across as remotely appealing, although there is something touching about Foucault’s joyous late-life discovery of San Francisco’s leather bars and the acid trip he took in Death Valley under the guidance of two young fans.
These men typically commanded almost cultish followings whose devotion seemed particularly ironic given that their philosophies, like so much of French intellectual culture, were obsessed with criticizing authority. Eakin depicts her student self as dutifully struggling to deploy poststructuralist analysis in a series of academic papers, with only middling success. By the time theory achieved its vogue in the U.S., it had become a phenomenon of literary and social studies. (“With rare exceptions,” Eakin writes, “American philosophy departments wanted nothing to do with” Lacan.) Yet, with several of her college friends, she became increasingly bothered by the way that reading highly abstract works of interpretation had supplanted actually reading the literary texts themselves. Theory seemed unassailably ascendant in the academy, even when it came under attack from conservative critics, who confused it with the only somewhat related advocacy for “multiculturalism.” Yet if theory turned out to be little more than a fleeting intellectual fashion, it would leave its acolytes with little to show for their scholarship.
This is, in fact, what happened. Eakin frames the posthumous scandals of Paul de Man, a prominent Belgian deconstructionist at Yale, as a cornerstone event in theory’s decline. A classic example of an “academostar,” de Man was handsome and enigmatic—a brilliant “Apollo,” as Bloom once described him to a friend. After his death in 1983, a Belgian researcher discovered that de Man had written a column for a Nazi-affiliated newspaper during the war, including one undeniably antisemitic piece. Later, a biographer documented de Man’s long history of lying about his credentials and other elements of his past, including a Belgian conviction in absentia for fraud, forgery, and embezzlement—the reason de Man had fled across the Atlantic in the first place.
If The Frenchmen has a flaw, it’s Eakin’s decision to adopt “an approach that is less linear than thematic,” requiring her to “circle back to major events or key encounters.” But because so much of this story is closely entwined with history—most importantly the Second World War and the French student-led revolts of the late ’60s—this nonchronological account can occasionally be challenging to follow. In one small example, Eakin’s own susceptibility to intellectual Francophilia becomes more understandable after the reader learns that her parents, academics themselves, spent a sabbatical in Paris in the early 1970s, where they were electrified by Barthes’ S/Z and attended Lévi-Strauss’ lectures once a week. Yet Eakin waits to reveal this until halfway through the book, when the reader would’ve benefited from the knowledge early on.
While Eakin provides an excellent primer on the key structuralist and poststructuralist ideas through The Frenchmen, it’s tempting in the end to view the whole enterprise as a bit absurd, a sort of elaborate mirage that ultimately went poof. But as the American academic Stanley Fish put it to the New York Times in 1994, “Deconstruction is dead in the same way that Freudianism is dead. It is everywhere.” Eakin argues that theory’s way of scrutinizing the world of words that swarms all around us has sunk in and, furthermore, for the good. It showed us how to identify dog whistles and other rhetorical sleights of hand. “It taught us,” Eakin writes, “a new way to think. Be skeptical. Be alert. Pay very close attention. Beware political claims posing as timeless truths. Notice arguments that seem to boil down to this versus that, us versus them—neat binaries in which one term is championed at the expense of the other.”
I finished The Frenchmen wishing that some of these guys, however maddening, were around to weigh in on the alternate reality that is the internet, a realm of signs, symbols, and words that has, for some of us, almost supplanted the physical world itself. I suspect they’d feel right at home, until they started taking the place apart.
