The Academics Who Caught Fire

Separating facts from lies, and real thoughts from fabrications, can seem more difficult than ever: Words and images are easily faked, and some writers at every stage—students, academics, novelists—are letting machines do the work for them. The author may as well be dead. Ubiquitous cameras are eroding human privacy, creating the sense that we live in a panopticon. And across many popular platforms, information is often shorn of context, if not outright false.

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The fact that I feed my kids and pay my rent as a novelist and teacher likely intensifies the queasiness I feel at these developments. Yet my profession also helps me understand that the idea of society coming apart might be the oldest story in the world. In the second half of the previous century, a group of mostly French theorists made this kind of instability their main subject. Systems built by humans were overpowering our ability to make choices, they explained. Society and language, the scaffolding on which our reality was built, were made up and farcical.

I read these guys—mostly guys, often grouped together as structuralists and post-structuralists—in college, and they baffled and entranced me. After a mediocre high-school education spent checking boxes, the thrill of thinking, of elbowing my way through something hard and complicated, felt like coming to life. Trudging doggedly through these difficult, abstruse ideas—roughly 67 percent of which I felt sure I didn’t understand—made the world feel sharper, different. Twenty years later, looking back on their (not inaccurate) cultural diagnoses generates a complicated feeling: I’m reminded of that seductive sensation of stretching one’s brain, even as I hear speculation that artificial intelligence might one day make thinking obsolete.

The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory

By Eakin, Emily

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No book better captures this paradox than The Frenchmen, Emily Eakin’s new book about her encounters with post-structuralist ideas. Eakin entered college as an aspiring academic, but went on to spend her adult life in journalism (she is an editor at The New York Times). Yet despite her experience in two unstable fields, and her focus on thinkers who proclaimed, among other things, “the death of the author,” her book is filled with life. Every page contains evidence of deep research, an eye for telling details, and the pleasure that can comes from sprawling, sometimes consternating thought.

The Frenchmen opens as a sort of intellectual bildungsroman: At Harvard in the late 1980s—and especially in the classrooms to which Eakin gravitated as an undergraduate—French theory was the rage. It seemedboth exclusive and rebellious. The protests of the ’60s seemed to be a distant memory, Ronald Reagan was president, and large portions of the population were quietly ignoring the thousands of deaths caused by AIDS. “In an era of complacency and self-satisfaction,” she writes, “theory was a symbol, however small, of intellectual nonconformism, a badge, like a pink mohawk, that marked you as a member of the counterculture, different from—and critical of—the docile horde.” Like so many college kids before her, Eakin, the child of two English-Ph.D. holders from Indiana, came to campusfeelingineffectual and small. The spirit of the times only amplified thatimpression, but the sheer force and seeming certainty of these fashionable thinkersgave her a sense of power.

Before long, Eakin comes to the titular French writers: Jacques Lacan (1901–81), Roland Barthes (1915–80), Louis Althusser (1918–90), Paul de Man (1919–83), Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), Michel Foucault (1926–84), Félix Guattari (1930–92), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). I gave you the dates of their lives because, in Eakin’s telling, they really matter. Having led the reader into their ideas through her own experience, she illustrates how impossible it is to separate any individual thinker’s theories or discoveries from the time in which they lived. This seems obvious, maybe, but in fact it contradicts these philosophers’ core belief in the irrelevance of biography. And to the extent that our lives often feel disembodied today—so much time spent staring at screens—Eakin’s approach is not just a refreshing way of explaining ideas, but also a reminder to readers that we are physical beings first.

One of the primary tenets of most of the Frenchmen was that facts and meaning were difficult to pin down. There was only the text, over which the writer had little control. Even the self was ultimately an unstable text. “Within the structuralist framework,” Eakin explains, “an author was held to be of little account, a ‘fiction’ perpetrated by the ‘linguistic system,’ so it was easy to ignore the philosopher” and instead “focus exclusively on his words.” Eakin’s goal is the opposite: “to re-embody these men—to recover the hidden human element beneath their often stringent antihumanism.”

In carefully parsing not only these men’s arguments but also their lives, Eakin is able to seduce us with their ideas. And by whipping back and forth between theory and life, documenting spats among the players, and jumbling timelines, she lets readers glimpse the twisty paths these ideas followed, the historical currents that accelerated their spread, and the way they still thrum through our lives.

We spend the early chapters with the adolescent Eakin, for whom theory’s appeal was as much aesthetic—scarves and cigarettes, jeans with neckties—as it was intellectual. Eakin spent weeks imagining herself performing as Nadja, the wanton and elusive love interest from André Breton’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be,” she writes. “I was hung up on something more basic: what it meant to be. I lacked confidence and, more to the point, skepticism. I didn’t know how to take theory in small doses.” This infatuation seemed to acquire the quality of an addiction. “Theory made thinking feel like doing. There was a rigor and beauty to it, an athletic strenuousness.”

A combination of theoretical gloss, intellectual memoir, and group biography, The Frenchmen is never wholly any of the three, and this is both its great strength and the reason that it sometimes loses hold of itself. From Eakin’s early college days, readers move through various philosophies without the confusion and doubling back that reading the actual works frequently entails. We start with Sartre, Marx, and Freud, who give way to Althusser and Lacan. Nearly all of the structuralists thought Sartre’s emphasis on individual agency was absurd in the face of Vietnam, inequality, and the Cold War. People had no power after all; their unconscious, shaped by systems and structures, was actually in charge.

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Such a smooth summary inevitably sacrifices complexity. My own descriptions have already shortchanged everyone I’ve mentioned. But Eakin doesn’t mean to untangle every theory, only to find “the hidden human element” that unites and explains the movement. Over and over, she knocks these philosophers’ experiences up against their thinking, lets us see these men move (sometimes awkwardly, sometimes dashingly) through time and space, and helps us understand how their theories reflected their lives.

How, for instance, does your understanding of Foucault’s theory of power—that society is a trap constructed to discipline and punish—change when you know that he was told by his headmaster that he had to fix his homosexuality if he wanted to stay at school? What might Derrida’s famous notion of différance—that words and signs mean something only in relation to other words and signs—have to do with the fact that he was a French Algerian Jew, expelled from primary school because of his ethnicity? Sartre and Althusser, each fixated on the limits of freedom, had both been prisoners of war and struggled to reintegrate into civilian life. Both Deleuze and Barthes were not admitted to L’École Normale, which was considered one of the best schools in Paris, for different reasons; each went on to defy academic orthodoxy.

Foucault was hospitalized after a suicide attempt; then he dropped acid in Death Valley. Althusser was diagnosed as bipolar, endured shock treatment, and eventually strangled his wife. Derrida was arrested (erroneously) for drug trafficking in Prague; Barthes was struck and killed by a laundry van. Nearly all the Frenchmen were fast drivers and sharp dressers. None of this made them structuralists or post-structuralists, but all of it is fairly extraordinary.

Watching these details accrue leads to conclusions that undermine the doctrines of the Frenchmen: How could biography not be important? And also, how much more fascinating does it make these ideas? Unstable or not, the author is most certainly a text worth talking about. Instead of ideas bestowed by gods, these iconoclastic theories come to look like intellectual insurrections with both global and highly proximate causes. The eruptions of the 20th century, refracted through idiosyncratic, brilliant, sometimes troubled men, engendered new ways of thinking about freedom, collectivity, social control, and artistic creation. In Eakin’s account, you begin to see the alchemy through which these notions caught fire and spread.

By the time Derrida died, in 2004, the fever of post-structuralism had long broken in the universities—and in Eakin’s mind. In the end, close reading didn’t lead to revolution. The students supposedly radicalized by Marxist theory and its descendants did not slow down the global march toward free markets and political triangulation. In the late ’80s, De Man was revealed to have been a Nazi apologist with a secret family stashed in Europe. Eakin, for her part, dropped out of her Ph.D. program and went on to work at the academic magazine Lingua Franca; she was there when the outlet published an article by the NYU professor Alan Sokal, who revealed that he had duped a journal into publishing a hoax that mocked literary theory. The death knell of the Frenchmen had been rung before the end of the 20th century.

When Eakin, by 2004 already at the Times, was asked to read the paper’s prepared obituary for Derrida, she realized how thoroughly these once-vaunted men had been struck down. She laments the article’s “tone of condescension,” its emphasis on how “unintelligible” theory is: “The Times’s Derrida was a caricature I recognized, and it seemed pointless, maybe even pretentious, to object.” Eakin now seems to regret her failure to ask for changes to the obituary, but she mentions extenuating circumstances that most anyone could understand. She was on maternity leave, and she was unsure what difference she could make. I also got the sense that she was deep inside a bureaucratic system whose rules she had learned to accept. But she wonders, years later, if she wrote off theory too easily—or too early. Maybe it seemed dead only because its influence was so diffuse. Its ideas were nowhere—and in evidence everywhere.

Today, when the slipperiness of truth, the ubiquity of surveillance, and the pervasive politics of identity are all self-evident, an intellectual history of deconstruction seems less like a dip into the past than a sharper lens through which to view our present. Eakin’s skill in distilling and then weaving these ideas together within a biographical context not only gives them new life; it also supports her argument that these lives are essential to the work. The Frenchmen immerses the reader in the thinking and feeling of the world that came before it, and it explains, through one particular writer’s experience, the world we live in now.