The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory

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 over 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 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--perhaps even of changing--the world. For Emily, 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, F lix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and the French-speaking Belgian Paul de Man, Eakin untangles their famously difficult work with peerless, delightful clarity. What's more, she brings to light the eccentric, scandalous--even at times criminal --lives of thinkers who were themselves 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.