The Frenchmen Or, My Life in Theory
By Emily Eakin
Penguin
ISBN: ‎ 978-0698183261
471pp.

Emily Eakin’s masterful study of French theory and its leading theorists, The Frenchmen Or, My Life in Theory, picks up the story from the existentialist movement mapped out earlier in Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café. It updates it to the high tide of French theory, through its structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructionist craze in the United States of the 1970s and 1980s.

Two motivations seem to lie behind the genesis of the book — one, to endow the highly abstract French theory with the lived experiences and diverse biographies of the theorists themselves; and two, to re-examine her previous life inside — and now life outside — French theory.

Eakin believes French philosophers are better known for their ideas and much less by their lives and lived experiences. She is keen to remedy this by re-embodying French theory with the lives and lived experiences of the theorists themselves, which also blended into their theories. Thus, she adds a human dimension to the essentially anti-human thrust of French theory.

The result is a fascinating intellectual and biographical tour guide of the eight French theorists who pioneered, advanced and popularised French theory. Eakin offers a fascinating portrait of the male theorists, who were influenced by the larger political and social forces of their times and how, in turn, they influenced other political and intellectual movements.

How did a group of notoriously difficult-to-read French philosophers become intellectual rock stars on American campuses? A former insider revisits the ideas and personalities that shaped her student years — and her eventual disillusionment with French theory

Eakin not only charts the lives and ideas of French theorists but also provides helpful historical context. While the advent of fascism and Nazism and the disillusionment in the aftermath of the Second World War are accounted for, the appeal of the earlier existentialist theory and movement, the failure of the 1968 student uprisings in Europe and the Vietnam War in the US are seen as contributing factors in the meteoric career of French theory in terms of its structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructionist phases.

The Frenchmen treated in the book constitute a who’s who of the French structuralist and post-structuralist movements, ranging from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes to Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Félix Guattari, Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze. Earlier, existentialist philosophers also have cameo roles in the book, from Edmund Husserl to Jean-Paul Sartre, as a tribute to Sarah Bakewell’s book, which is acclaimed as a direct inspiration for this work.

The line-up of theorists marshalled in the book were once friends, pupils or teachers of each other before they fell apart over theoretical differences. For example, Derrida’s takedown of Foucault’s, Lévi-Strauss’ and Lacan’s books soured these relationships to the extent that Foucault and Derrida never spoke to each other for a long time after Derrida’s criticism of Madness and Civilisation appeared in print. They often branched out from different intellectual and philosophical roots — Althusser from Marxism, Lacan from psychoanalysis etc.

Eakin is a meticulous recorder, decoder and re-populariser of the French philosophers who were known to be impenetrable and abstruse to general readers (The New York Times titled Derrida’s obituary as ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74’, which was agitated against by literary scholars of the French theory immediately after its publication). She succeeds admirably well in explaining the challenges in reading Derrida, who excelled at picking apart texts and deconstructing them — as he termed his method.

The overarching framework that shaped structuralists and other theorists was language which, in their view, perpetually recreates itself, rendering its meaning inherently unstable and subject to multiple readings and deconstructions. As someone reared in the shadow of French theory — her academic parents were its avid trackers and followers — Eakin is best placed to document its rise and fall from both her biographical and larger US academic and politico-cultural lenses.

This is a narrative of tales within tales, and one of the tales is Eakin’s own long love affair with French theory during her university days. In so many ways, she is a theory insider and was once wholly embedded within its US beltway extension, before decamping for the world of literary journalism at The New York Times via The New Yorker.

Looked at another way, this is also an account of her falling out of love with the French. Despite Eakin’s love affair with French theory souring late in the day, she retains affection and respect for the role French theorists played in expanding the conversation on race and gender and enhancing our understanding of the world we inhabit today.

She is also wonderfully good at tracking backlash against French theory from an army of conservative intellectuals in the US, including the academic Allan Bloom and the tech oligarch Peter Thiel. This backlash has been piggybacked on by politicians and right-wing elements of the media and cultural industry, from President Reagan downwards. President Trump 2.0 caps that long-simmering retaliatory pushback.

In another sense, it is as much a book about her intellectual journey as it is about the intellectual fashion of the US university system, which aided the unprecedented popularity of French theory on its campuses. As Eiken makes clear, French theory was invented by the US and incubated in US literature departments; philosophy departments did not engage with French theory in as big a way as did the literature departments.

The most celebrated import of French theory was Paul de Man, a Belgian-origin professor of French in the US, who was exposed as a fraud by some quarters, after his shameful past as a Nazi collaborator in his younger days in Belgium was exposed by literary journalists after his death. Not only was his past murky, but de Man also falsified his academic trail to get admission to Yale, and sailed through the US academic hoops with a skill and rapidity unheard of before. The fact that he forged a strong bond with Derrida helped him gain a name and recognition as the permanent US outpost of fashionable French theory.

Besides being a guide to the lineaments of French theory, the book is also a group biography of its thought leaders. It adds to the burgeoning genre of intellectual history through group biographies of the leading lights of the intellectual movements. Andrea Wulf’s brilliant book on the German philosophers associated with the Romantic Movement, titled Magnificent Rebels, is one of the most recent notable additions.

The reviewer is the author of Thinkers,
Dreamers and Doers, which came out in 2022

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 18th, 2026