„In “The Frenchmen,” Emily Eakin traces the rise and fall of postmodernist philosophy, and the surprising ways its influence lingers.
THE FRENCHMEN: Or, My Life in Theory, by Emily Eakin
When I arrived at the philosophy department of the University of Texas at Austin in September 1990, fresh out of undergrad, I learned at once that all the cool kids were postmodernists. Some were writing on Foucault, others on Sarah Kofman; the great Louis Mackey was lecturing on Derrida’s reading of Kierkegaard. I was completely lost. I’d been trained by traditional and, I now recognized, boring historians of philosophy, and I knew nothing about Paris in May of 1968, or the Yale School, or poststructuralism or even deconstruction, much less la différence. After a few befuddled years I dropped out and became a jeweler.
But I was an even worse businessman than I’d been a philosopher, so after seven years I came back. This time they would not catch me with my pants down. I spent the winter of 1999 and the spring and summer of 2000 reading the whole canon: Barthes and Derrida, Foucault and Lacan; the mighty Georges Bataille, grandfather of them all; Deleuze and Guattari; even Althusser, Lévi-Strauss and Paul de Man. These were all thinkers I’d long known I should have read and had been too frightened to, confident that I wouldn’t understand them. I mostly didn’t, even after months of trying, but I learned enough to pretend I did, and when I walked into the seminar rooms of Waggener Hall that September I had the whole arsenal — aporia, the floating signifier, the always-already — ready to hand.
Bad news for Clancy. You guessed it: Not even a decade later, the fashion had changed. As one of my friends at the time, now a professor at the University of Texas, told me: “It’s so sad that you showed up thinking we’d all still be reading Rorty. You should’ve gone to the English department.”
This arc — the late arrival, the years of dutiful catching up, the discovery that the bloom had faded while you were still doing the reading — is more or less the one Emily Eakin retraces (minus the jewelry) in “The Frenchmen,” her terrific debut book.
Like me, Eakin was an avid traditionalist caught off guard when she showed up to a postmodernist party in full swing. She arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, just when the theory wars were at their peak, and she quickly fell in with a circle of adherents who found in her a receptive audience. It didn’t hurt that Eakin came from an academic background and had already spent time in France trying and mostly failing to hang with the fashionable people. (She would return to France after Harvard to continue her studies at the École Normale, and saw Derrida lecture there.)
She was, she tells us, provincial, an innocent, earnest and dogmatic: a striving kid from the Protestant Midwest raised to keep her nose to the grindstone and her desires firmly in check, who was primed for intellectual adventures. She found French theory and, like the rest of us, she fell hard. For Eakin — now a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review — theory was everything the Midwest wasn’t: difficult, foreign, faintly dangerous, humming with an erotic and intellectual charge. Learning to speak it felt like swapping a body and a hometown for a system and a vocabulary, and vanishing, gratefully, into the life of the mind. “There was a libidinal rush at seeing reality, language, the human psyche, pried open and ripped apart,” she writes.
“The Frenchmen” is a marvelous book. It’s gossipy and personal and completely fascinating, which is exactly what you hope for with this particular bunch of thinkers. All of the stories you half remember about the French postmodernists are here told in careful, lively, playful detail. This is intellectual anthropology as it ought to be: cafe gossip with the footnotes left in. It makes you wish you could take a seminar from Eakin and makes you miss those glorious days in graduate school when you spent more time drinking beer and talking about philosophy than writing or even reading the stuff.
The period itself is a gold mine for a writer with Eakin’s talent for highly entertaining, occasionally salacious storytelling. The eight men she writes about (Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man, with a short detour into Claude Lévi-Strauss) were characters in a way that’s unusual among philosophers.
Althusser strangled his wife and was found too disturbed to stand trial. That story is familiar enough, but Eakin also reveals that at age 28, when he met his future wife, he had not yet kissed a woman. Foucault slept on a vibrating waterbed in a guest room on a visit to Claremont, Calif., after taking two abstemious sips of his first and perhaps only tequila sunrise, and split firewood with graduate students in the mountains above Bear Canyon. Lacan in his waning years would walk up to the chalkboard in the seminar room, draw a knot, and leave. Derrida, an early adopter of antidepressants, was thrown into a Prague jail on (planted) drug charges — later, the police official who orchestrated the frame-up was himself arrested for drug trafficking. De Man, Yale apostle of deconstruction, was given all kinds of outrageous favors and exemptions by the Harvard administration when he was a graduate student there. The discovery after his death that he had written antisemitic journalism for a collaborationist paper in occupied Belgium did more damage to theory’s standing than any rival argument ever managed.
Eight men: That is one small complaint I’d like to lodge. Some of the best thinkers of this period were women — Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, Monique Wittig, etc. — and though we can’t ask Eakin to write more than she already has in this thick book, perhaps we can hope for her follow-up volume: “The Frenchwomen.” The women have mostly outlived the men, which is a complication: Eakin sometimes plays rough, and corpses, in philosophy as elsewhere, are easier to dissect than witnesses.
“The Frenchmen” tells the story of Eakin’s infatuation with these Frenchmen and of the larger, stranger phenomenon it belonged to: how a handful of difficult, sometimes impenetrable midcentury philosophers, critics and one supremely theatrical psychoanalyst (Lacan) came to colonize the American mind, persuading a whole generation that words make the world rather than merely describing it, that meaning never holds still long enough to be pinned down, and that the self, reading the work, is itself just one more unstable text.
The book’s organizing joke is that these men who pronounced the author dead and biography a category error nonetheless led lives of pulpy, operatic incident. Eakin arranges them not by chronology but by theme (Murder, Madness, Words, Evasions) and lets the biographies carry the ideas, the lives doing the work that academic analysis won’t.
Some of my favorite scenes are the ones Eakin tells about herself, and we do wish for more of those. She mostly disappears after the first third of the book. As a piece of intellectual memoir, the book reads as though the Frenchmen were only a youthful crush for Eakin, though it’s clear that she continues to engage with their ideas; it would have been nice to see her trace the ways theory has influenced her as an accomplished intellectual in New York, an editor, a wife and mother.
Mature Eakin looking back on Eakin-in-progress is irresistible. She tells us wryly but also delightedly about her longing to be seduced by smart boys reading smarter books, and about the despair of getting a B on a Lacanian reading of “Lolita.” “What was the right way to do theory?” she plaintively asks. “How could I tell?” When she goes to Paris after Harvard and studies with Milan Kundera (yes, she’s been lucky in her education), she begins to recover from the painful enthusiasms of her love affair with theory at Harvard.
That winter, I had a fling with a floppy-haired physics Ph.D. student from Lyon whom I met in the cafeteria. We sat in the Luxembourg Gardens sipping whipped cream-topped cafés viennois from slender glass mugs and talked about jazz and poetry. “This is the place I needed to come to,” I wrote solemnly. “Where I am purged and begin anew.”
Many of her friends from her college days go on to intellectual fame, we learn, and she’s honest, often ruthless, about the snobbery, the hunger for glamour, the occasional fraudulence but also the hard work and intellectual rigor that she found in both the French postmodernists and her friends and professors at Harvard and the École Normale. The book is, among other things, a clinical and very funny study of intellectual desire: what exactly we want when we say we want ideas.
Eakin is mostly very good on the ideas of the postmodern theorists. She’s happy to hold our hands and walk us through the mirror stage, or biopower, or what Barthes meant by the death of the author, in just a paragraph or two. She never condescends or oversimplifies and, most impressively, she explains why the ideas mattered. This is no small feat: Whole journals have gone bust trying to make this notoriously recondite, and often deliberately refractory, material feel human.
Eakin has no interest in either canonizing the Frenchmen or canceling them. She is after something harder: how minds this idiosyncratic created ideas this contagious; and, perhaps more interestingly, what it says about the rest of us that we were so hungry to be converted. Eakin made me wonder: What might Derrida and Foucault say about us now, lost as we are in the mazes of Donald Trump, Instagram and ChatGPT?
That said, Eakin is more curious about the men than about their arguments, and that’s my other small complaint about the book. She does a wonderful job of explaining the famous quarrel between Foucault and Derrida over a few pages of Descartes. We learn that Derrida had been Foucault’s student; that the younger man’s assault on the master’s reading of the first “Meditation” was taken as a patricide; that after Foucault’s eventual counterattack the two did not speak for the better part of a decade before peace was restored. It’s a great story, well told, and Eakin takes the time to explain what they were fighting about. But many of the big ideas of the big minds in this big book are mentioned rather than scrutinized, which at times made me worry that, in Eakin’s telling, philosophy is little more than the intellectual fashion of the moment.
I mostly believe what Nietzsche insisted, that every philosophy is at bottom the confession of its author, an involuntary and unconscious memoir, and by that reckoning, Eakin’s method isn’t an omission but an honest approach to thinkers who insisted there was nothing behind the text. Still, the confession and the argument are not the same thing, and more than once I wanted her to stop undressing the man and undress the idea instead.
That she left me wanting more philosophy is, in the end, a backhanded sort of tribute, because nothing about the moment requires it of her. The Frenchmen won even as they vanished. Theory disappeared from the syllabus and dissolved into our collective consciousness and the internet (Baudrillard might ask if there’s a difference between the two).
The convictions that language is power, that truth is a story told by whoever holds the whip, that the self is a thing we assemble and revise: These are no longer scandalous theses but ambient assumptions, the shared property of activists, reactionaries, advertisers and H.R. departments. The culture wars Eakin follows down to the present are conducted, on every side, whether we know it or not, in a French accent.
I came to the Frenchmen too late, watched them die on schedule, and am still awaiting their resurrection. With a little luck Eakin’s book could be part of the overdue movement to return these exasperating but indispensable thinkers to intellectual credibility, and maybe even to our rapidly vanishing philosophy departments, which could certainly benefit from some of their former cool.
I read the book straight through, in a day and a half, sitting at a coffee shop in Lawrence, Kan. It really is a page-turner. Several times I got up wanting to pick a fight with someone about Foucault, which is, I suppose, its own little resurrection. And I know I’m just getting old and sentimental, but one thing in the book made me cry, which has never happened to me before while reading philosophy, and certainly not while reading a book about philosophers: the poem by Eakin’s daughter in the acknowledgments. That little poem, which every reader of the book should take the time to find in the back, brings the dead back into the room and reminds us that even theory had children.
THE FRENCHMEN: Or, My Life in Theory | By Emily Eakin | Penguin Press | 471 pp. | $35
Clancy Martin is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book “Staying Alive: What the Existentialists Taught Me.”“ [1]
1. How a Band of Difficult Thinkers Shaped One Author, and the World: Nonfiction. Clancy, Martin. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 21, 2026.
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