The Seduction of the American Mind: Emily Eakin on Her Life in French Theory

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. When I was a graduate student many years ago back in the nineteen eighties at University of California in Berkeley, there was a rage for Frenchmen. French theorists, historians, linguists, Foucault, Michel Foucault in particular. I was in the political science department, so Foucault was very influential. I came over from England, so I didn't know any of this French stuff. And my friends in the literary department were endlessly talking about Jacques Derrida. I never quite understood what he was talking about. I'm not sure they did, but perhaps that made him all the more intriguing. There were many other influential French theorists at the time in political science. We used to talk about a French anti humanist Marxist called Louis Althusser, who murdered his wife, rather odd character altogether. These Frenchmen were enormously influential. And now we have a book on them, by my guest, Emily Eakin. Her book is called The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory. And like me, Emily was exposed in the eighties, as a student, not at Berkeley, but at Harvard to these Frenchmen. So, Emily, congratulations on this book.

00:01:49 Emily Eakin: Thank you so much.

00:01:51 Andrew Keen: I've actually been waiting for this book, not from you, but a book like this. I'm amazed. So is the best book seem the most obvious [as spoken]. I'm amazed that a book like this hasn't been written before. Tell me about your relationship with these Frenchmen. You begin the book on a very personal note.

00:02:09 Emily Eakin: Absolutely. So I too, like you, Andrew, was, deeply enmeshed in the milieu of the French philosophers, as improbable as it seems in the late eighties and early nineties. And I think I was primed to be seduced by these thinkers partly because I grew up in a family of Francophiles. My father is now a retired professor of American literature, but he was a Francophile. And every time he had a sabbatical, he would take the family to Europe. And we lived in Paris in the early seventies at what was really the sort of tail end of the structuralist wave. And one of my earliest memories is of my mother being very late to pick me up at the maternelle, the nursery school, because Claude Lévi-Strauss's lecture had run over. My parents were attending these lectures. Like all the intellectuals in Paris at the time, they were reading the structuralist books that they would buy at the structuralist bookstore on the Rue Claude Bernard. So I was just a little kid, but, that was the milieu. And, I think that theory had real attractions to me also because when I got to college, here I was, this middle class kid from a kind of middling, Midwestern public high school. I was from Bloomington, Indiana, and I was really aware of the inadequacies in my education, and theory seemed to offer this kind of shortcut. Theory said, it doesn't matter what you've read. It's how you read. And for a student like me who is studying literature, it was this sort of shortcut into this kind of cutting edge elite intellectual class. Sort of like the little black dress. That's how I think of it. You know, the cliche about the little black dress is that it looks expensive even if you buy it on sale off the rack at Macy's. And, theory was sort of the intellectual equivalent of the little black dress.

00:04:15 Andrew Keen: One word that was associated with all these Frenchmen, and you begin the book on this, is the word deconstruction. No one knew quite what it meant. Even the guy who invented it, didn't know what it meant or at least his definition didn't seem very clear. But what you also note at the beginning of the book, and you're a literary theorist, you studied literature. Now you work at the New York Times Book Review, so you're steeped in literature is that words matter. So, Emily, let me quote back a word that you just threw out there, seduce. There is a sexual element to all this, isn't there? And these guys knew it very clearly. They played with this idea of seduction. It was in some ways maybe this is a an inappropriate word, but it was at the heart of all this theory, seduction.

00:05:03 Emily Eakin: Absolutely. I've thought a lot about this. There's a novel by Lorrie Moore, the wonderful comic novelist, called, A Gate at the Stairs. And in that, she describes a young woman, not unlike me, a farm girl from the Midwest who goes to the big city to college, and she attends this literature lecture that's delivered by a young professor in jeans and a tie. And he's talking about masturbation of the comma in Henry James. Okay? That's a total kind of parodic description of the sort of excesses of theoretical lecturing, but it was the idea of a lecturer in jeans and a tie. She had never seen anyone so sexy, presenting this kind of material on stage. And I do think it was partly that the people who taught theory in colleges tended to skew young and attractive, and there was a kind of stylistic, code that went with theory. We wore black. I certainly went through a phase of wearing black. I even had sort of opera gloves that I would wear on my arms and hands.

00:06:15 Andrew Keen: You introduce yourself as a farm girl from the Midwest, Emily, but you don't strike me, certainly, at this point of resembling one. You live in Lower Manhattan. You work at the New York Times. You're quite glamorous. I'm not sure if you're wearing a little black dress. But did these Frenchmen were they your passport in a way from the Midwest from this, rather middle class background that you grew up in, suburban background? Although, as you know, your father was a professor of literature, so you he wasn't a bank manager. He wasn't an accountant. But were they your passport from, the suburbs to the bright lights of the city?

00:07:00 Emily Eakin: I think absolutely. Absolutely. Theory, you it's really hard to overestimate how cool theory was in the late eighties and early nineties. You know, English departments at Ivy League schools were sort of mired in traditional conventional forms of looking at literature, and here was this French import that was new, that offered this kind of specialized jargon that really kind of shook things up. You know, it plucked things out of the text as one scholar said that the text didn't even know it was saying. So it's sort of like having access to this hidden code. It was immensely powerful and immensely cool, and all the cool students were doing theory, and you wanted to be one of them.

00:07:50 Andrew Keen: Well, all the cool all the students who thought they were cool were doing theory. I mean, I'm not sure that was entirely true. It wasn't true at Berkeley, although maybe it was true at Harvard. You had a gallery of these Frenchmen, in the book. Some are better known than others. Of course, Foucault is the most cited scholar now in the world. Others like Derrida and Lacan are sort of notorious, almost mythical in their influence. Others like Althusser, Guattari, I don't even know Guattari is actually, are more obscure. Do you have a favorite Frenchman, a most influential Frenchman? I'm guessing in a way that, for you as a literature student, Derrida and Lacan were particularly influential.

00:08:38 Emily Eakin: You are correct. I think I do have a favorite, but I will tell you, writing this book, I found Lacan to be the most difficult to talk about, and he lingered and lingered. His life was just so rich and colorful. His work so difficult. It was hard to kill him off. And, funnily enough, I have a colleague at the New York Times who told me she had been assigned in her literature class a lecture by Lacan called The Purloined Letter, which is based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. So, the class went home, did the homework, read the lecture, came to class, and a few minutes into class, the professor said, you know, I'm going to cancel the class because I realized I don't really understand this lecture by Lacan. I can't teach it. And I wanna tell this story because I think it's in just indicative of the level of difficulty that we're talking about. Lacan was incredibly arcane and difficult, Derrida too. But and that's what makes their influence so improbable and extraordinary.

00:09:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You say it was hard to kill off. I mean, Lacan, of course, was a psychoanalyst, very steeped in Freudian theory or post Freudian theory. So the idea of you describing him as being hard to kill off, I'm sure you would have been rather amused with.

00:10:06 Emily Eakin: Yes. No doubt. No doubt. Yes. But, I mean, this the French philosophers were undertaking this sort of radical new look at the world and centralizing language and showing us just how much more complicated, powerful, insidious, and slippery language is. And, of course, they were doing this within language itself, which is one explanation for the difficulty of their work When you're sort of trying to talk about the pitfalls of language within language, you end up, coining a lot of neologisms. Their work is just riddled with arcane wordplay. And, of course, Andrew, that one of the big downsides besides just the barrier to entry is that because their work was so difficult to understand, it made it very easy to parody, and that's what we see we saw happening in the media among conservative pundits. So the public got a very distorted view of what these Frenchmen were actually saying.

00:11:10 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And you begin the book or you write in the book about that side of your Frenchmen. I mean, there is an element of and I'm speaking as an Englishman or ex Englishman, Emily, here. There is an element of the scam about some of this stuff. It seems to be not I and I want to talk more about Foucault later. I don't think as much about Foucault, but certainly people like Lacan and, and, and Derrida, Often, they were purposely obscure. And the more obscure they became, the more they claimed that they were being profound, and the more they influenced students who in their little black dresses. Is there some truth to that? I mean, in terms of writing this book, did you work through some of the pretensions of these guys? I mean, did they really need to use such arcane and confusing language?

00:12:09 Emily Eakin: I would agree with you that they were underedited. I'm an editor, and there is a lot of self indulgence in a lot of their writings. My book is not comprehensive and nor is it really, a book of theory. Of course, I do have to talk about their ideas. And what I wanted to do and what I found to be really quite valid was that for each philosopher, there is an important concept that was bold and original and really provoking and worth thinking about. And in the case of Lacan, I think the important idea that I want readers to take away that I took away from his work is this idea of the mirror stage, that our identities are formed in a process that of alienation and estrangement. So Lacan looked at child development, and what he posited was this idea that when we assume our identities in language, when we become an I, that process happens outside ourselves. The child recognizes himself in a mirror between the ages of, say, ten and eighteen months, and he sees a reflection and says, oh, that's me. But, of course, that reflection isn't me. It's both me and not me. Right? It's a sort of misrecognition, and this becomes a profound idea. And if readers can sort of grapple with that, I think that's a lot of Lacan that you can take away. That's the important concept.

00:13:42 Andrew Keen: If there's someone in the US who I can think of is the most unfriend writer who is very influential in the nineteen eighties, it's Francis Fukuyama and his theory of the end of history, which, of course, came out in 1989. But thinking out loud here, Emily, I wonder if there's a synergy between, Fukuyama's idea of the end of history and your Frenchmen's idea of perhaps the end of theory. In a way, they're all implying that they will see themselves at the end of the world on their beach. I mean, Foucault even thinks of himself in a sense as the last man. Where did all this stuff come from? One of the things, that I found interesting about your book that I hadn't really thought about was that all these guys, and they were all men, of course, and I know you deal with this in the book. They were reaction against the existentialists, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, who dominated French thought after the war. How did your Frenchmen grow out of existentialism, and what was it about the existentialist tradition that they were reacting against?

00:14:56 Emily Eakin: Exactly. That's exactly right, Andrew. So the existentialist posited essentially a humanist philosophy with human beings at the center as agents of history. It's us who changed the world. And this idea was so appealing after the war, after France's humiliation, suffering four years of Nazi occupation. And Sartre said, never were we more free than under the German occupation because we could think every accurate thought was an authentic gesture of resistance. What a heroic message. This was incredibly appealing, but as you see the post war decades progress, the world is not being changed by these individual actors. And eventually, the world is sort of carved up between these two superpowers, the USSR and the United States, and existentialism falls out of favor. Just about the time the Berlin Wall goes up in 1961, we see Althusser, who's kind of a leading mouthpiece of the new structuralist dispensation, kind of rout Sartre at a lecture at the École Normale, the elite school that they both attended. And you see the rise of this new philosophy that's obsessed with the idea of vast impersonal forces, basically system. It's not humans who control the events in the world. It's this sort of system, this structure. And at the center of this structure is language. And so you have all of them sort of falling into line, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, even Derrida for a while. He becomes a kind of critic of structuralism eventually, but that fascinated me, Andrew, this moment in the sixties where system replaces the self.

00:16:43 Andrew Keen: And what was it in particular? You've mentioned, Sartre, of course, who's, again, in my view, at least a rather absurd figure because he didn't join the resistance. He stayed in Paris during the, during the German occupation, and his history is quite questionable. In contrast to somebody like Camus, of course, who was remarkably heroic both in his intellectual and personal life, what was it about the existentialist that pissed off this generation? Was it the fact that they were hypocrites like Sartre or sometimes appeared like hypocrites or because Camus' humanism just wasn't real, wasn't found in anything? I mean, Camus was a resistance fighter, so he did show the value of the person.

00:17:34 Emily Eakin: Well, I think the personal just became increasingly suspect as sort of events overtook the world. They, you know, it was Claude Lévi-Strauss was really the first big French intellectual to mock Sartre and dismiss existentialism in his memoir, Tristes Tropiques, as shop girl metaphysics. The whole idea of this sort of human individual as a hero just came to seem absurd during the era of increasing globalization. What was the human doing? What were all the petitions that Sartre was signing doing to kind of solve wars in Algeria and Indochina? There was bloodshed. There was torture. Other intellectuals could see that this existentialism was basically a fraud. That's how it came to be seen.

00:18:23 Andrew Keen: Sartre, of course, flirted with Maoism, even sometimes with Stalinism or certainly with the Soviet Union. Your Frenchmen were particularly slippery when it came to politics, which made them so controversial, certainly in my political science department at Berkeley. Did these guys have a politics, or was that what their theory was all about? Post political or anti political or everything was political, so it's rather like water to fish. The word political didn't even mean anything to your French.

00:19:02 Emily Eakin: It's difficult to generalize, which I do in the book, of course. They were all very different people, and I would put Foucault, at one end of the spectrum as someone who temperamentally really was a philosopher. People say that he the bulk of his time looking back at his entire career was spent in a library. I think that's pretty evident if you read his books.

00:19:26 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, I was at Berkeley, I don't think Foucault was on campus at the time, but there were times where he was on campus and everyone got terribly excited. And, of course, there were people who had talked to Foucault and been in seminars with Foucault, so they were particularly, they were particularly fashionable. I'm not sure if they were all wearing little black dresses, but they felt like they were.

00:19:49 Emily Eakin: Right. Well, the male equivalent, of course, was the maybe post existentialist white turtleneck. There's a lot there are great photos of Foucault and his black jacket and his white turtleneck. You know, when he got to Berkeley, he found, you know, that the gay movement was so much more liberated than in France, and he got really into it.

00:20:08 Andrew Keen: I wonder if he made baldness fashionable, Emily. Seems like everyone now shows off their baldness. So Foucault was one of the first people, I think, to shave his head, shamelessly. Shamelessness.

00:20:19 Emily Eakin: He was very insecure about his looks. His hair started thinning in his thirties, and he then shaved it off and kind of had this transformation. He ditched the ties and the suit coats and became this kind of sixties mod guy. And by 1970, he was an activist. He really was in the streets with a megaphone going to protests, defending the marginal, prisoners, immigrants, workers. So he did have a whole career as an activist on the side. This—

00:20:52 Andrew Keen: And to be fair to Foucault, of course, he was in San Francisco at the beginning of the AIDS catastrophe. So it you one needs to take him, I think, as you know, his politics much more seriously than some of the other.

00:21:05 Emily Eakin: Absolutely. I think the others often felt pressure to be more political, but Derrida temperamentally was not a political person. Deconstruction did not lend itself to politics. As Stanley Fish, a brilliant scholar prone to kind of pithy distillations of this stuff says, you know, nothing follows from deconstruction. Deconstruction is about taking language apart and pointing out contradictions and omissions and sort of hidden subtexts. It doesn't lend itself to a political platform. It offers no foundation on which to stand. But Derrida was pressured to be political. It's hard to overemphasize just how kind of inherently leftist the world of Parisian intellectuals in which he came up was, especially at the École Normale. There's a wonderful scene in his biography. This is in the early fifties where the students in his cohort have learned that Stalin has died, and they're they hold a moment of silence in the courtyard and they shed tears, and they're trying to figure out how to send a condolence telegram to the Soviet Union. And all of this was a bit too much for Derrida.

00:22:16 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You could make a movie about that. Although some of your Frenchmen weren't even Frenchmen. Paul de Man, is a Belgian American that you include in your pantheon, if that's the right word. And he had associations with Nazism. So some of them were politically quite surprisingly controversial, weren't they?

00:22:35 Emily Eakin: Right. Paul de Man is an interesting case, and I think that the posthumous scandal of Paul de Man in which he was exposed as a collaborator who had an early chapter as a young man in Belgium writing for this pro German newspaper, including one explicitly anti Semitic article. That scandal, which was revealed after his death, really helped hasten, the demise of theory, its credibility in the United States. It was a big nail in the coffin.

00:23:08 Andrew Keen: And, of course, de Man brings to mind Heidegger, the German philosopher who also was enormously controversial. The other German thinker who seems to me, again, you know much more about this than me, but always seemed to me to lie behind what your Frenchmen is Nietzsche. These guys were deeply influenced, particularly, Foucault by Nietzsche and to some extent, Heidegger. Is that fair, Emily?

00:23:34 Emily Eakin: Absolutely. Absolutely. Foucault is a Nietzschean, and, he really took Nietzsche's ideas about the will to power and, I think, repackaged them in a way because he was he fancied himself a historian. We can debate whether he was a very good one.

00:23:50 Andrew Keen: But enormously influential one.

00:23:52 Emily Eakin: Enormously influential. His history was, to say the least, error ridden, but the ideas that emerged from it were so bold and original. I don't know if you'll agree with me, Andrew, but he really turned the way we understood power upside down. And so this idea that, in fact, as we progress from the regime where you have, spectacles of brutal physical torture as a form of punishment dictated by the king to a modern era that sort of hands off where discipline occurs under surveillance. Foucault argues this is not the progress that it seems. What appears to be a kind of humane direction in history is not. That surveillance, simply the gaze of the state on us, the population, enforces a kind of discipline and obedience in ways that are even more insidious because they're so invisible.

00:24:52 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I think, Foucault certainly foresaw the surveillance of the digital panopticon, his critique of Bentham and that kind of utilitarianism was enormously prescient. And I wrote in a couple of books in which I've used Foucault as an early critique of all the surveillance. And we'll come to that in a minute in terms of Foucault's long term influence. I'm interested also these are all men. Certainly, the Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Barthes, Althusser, de Man, all these fashionable women, literary theorists at Harvard, was there a degree, Emily, of unease, the fact that you were all, I take for granted, feminists or even perhaps postfeminists, and were falling for all these French men in their leather jackets and shaved heads?

00:25:53 Emily Eakin: Andrew, you know, I didn't really think about the gender imbalance that, in fact, most of the theorists I was exposed to as a student were men, until I wrote the book. And I began to see the terrible irony that this group of scholars, these thinkers, were undoing what they called the master narratives. Right? The that the idea that God, the state, there's some sort of omniscient authority, truth, reality. These concepts, these foundational concepts are really problematic and, that these were men undoing the master narratives, and I'm enthralled to them. It didn't occur to me how paradoxical that was. And, of course, I did think of myself as a feminist. I took French feminist theory classes. But the French feminists were also arguing with the men, and the sort of men were sort of dictating the rules of the game. And so, there are a lot of paradoxes in that situation.

00:26:53 Andrew Keen: How does de Beauvoir, of course, the most perhaps the most influential twentieth century feminist, certainly in France, who was, very close intellectually and otherwise to Sartre and very influential existentialist. How did she fit in here?

00:27:10 Emily Eakin: She seems to have been an exception. One, because of her extraordinary intellect. You know, she didn't get to go to the École Normale, the elite school that all the young men went to. Women weren't allowed. Simone Weil was an exception, but until 1985, women were not admitted to the École Normale. So she met Sartre when they were studying for basically the doctoral exam called the agrégation. And the jurors in that exam said that they had a very hard time deciding who was the better candidate, Sartre or Beauvoir. Inevitably, they gave Beauvoir the second place. Sartre got the top score. But it she was just intellectually indomitable, and you couldn't not respect her for her brain. And so she was able, I think, to sort of penetrate the sexist milieu.

00:28:01 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Pen you know, Derrida would have enjoyed that word. Emily, what about the American angle here? I mean, some people might say that America was an innocent here and that these French male theorists of one kind or other, some of whom were slippery than others. I mean, even Foucault is the most substantial as you notice. His, historical work is often rather dubious, although interesting. Was America, the ready victim in the eighties intellectually, literary theory departments at places like Berkeley and Harvard where you were, where I was? Were we waiting for our Frenchmen?

00:28:46 Emily Eakin: This is the question which really drove me, through the book to understand how these arcane French philosophers became so such heroes in American departments whose ideas spread through humanities departments like kudzu, the New York Times Magazine said. And what I found was that you had young scholars, some of whom had been through the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War, who had real skepticism of authority. And here was a set of thinkers who were saying, even what you do, which is looking at metaphors and poems, looking at, you know, themes and novels, you can apply the same skepticism that you have in your politics to language itself. And in fact, language is political. And so you have Edward Said reading Mansfield Park, a novel by Jane Austen, and exposing the hidden subtext around slavery since the Bertram family at the heart of that novel, their wealth comes from Jamaica [sic — Antigua in the novel] sugar plantations. So there was this idea that sort of deconstructing a novel to show its hidden politics, the oppressions lurking within it, was a political act. That was very exciting. I think it made scholars feel like their work really mattered. Change the discourse, change the world, you know, that kind of thing.

00:30:13 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Discourse was another word. I don't know if it still gets used in universities. It was the only word, the d word that ever got used. It's interesting you bring up Edward Said. His work on orientalism also influenced me. But I'm not sure that and I don't know enough about Said, but I'm not sure that Said was very influenced by your Frenchmen. Was he I mean, there were alternative traditions. There was the Anglo tradition. Said was very close to Christopher Hitchens for a long time. So it wasn't as if everyone in the eighties was reading Foucault and Derrida.

00:30:48 Emily Eakin: Well, I think Said was. I think say Said was critical of Foucault. He felt that his vision of power was just sort of relentlessly negative, and left no avenues few avenues for resistance, really. But, yes, I think Said, as a post colonial scholar, was absolutely someone immersed in that milieu, critical of some of the thought, but also appropriating where he thought was useful.

00:31:14 Andrew Keen: Do you think there's been any long term damage here? I mean, as you know, there was a whole generation of really smart people at top universities like Stanford and Berkeley, Harvard, who, immersed in your Frenchmen. I mean, you've gone on to bigger and better things at the New York Times. But a lot of people, did PhDs in this stuff and are now locked in small Midwestern universities teaching some of this stuff. I mean, is there damage to the after the love affair with your Frenchmen, Emily, intellectually, especially in America of the late twenties where there seems to be a kind of lack of intellectual direction, a sense of anxiety, another, apocalyptic kind of intellectual climate.

00:32:06 Emily Eakin: Well, look, I think that the, the typical accusation that gets leveled at the Frenchmen is that they are responsible for sort of the moral rot in America, that they imported relativism and nihilism, you know, discrediting of expertise, a mistrust of authority. We see that everywhere in our culture. How much of that is really their fault, is very debatable. I tend to go with someone like Michiko Kakutani, a former New York Times book critic who in her book The Death of Truth, talks about how dumbed down corollaries of the Frenchmen's thought are responsible for things like the rise of truthiness and alternative facts. And I think that's fair. You know, the Frenchmen, they didn't say truth doesn't exist. They didn't say all is permitted. They would have been appalled by the misinformation and conspiracy theories in our society. I think most of them were trying to be very, very rigorous about how they looked at language. And their message was really beware political claims masquerading as eternal truths. You know, be a skeptical consumer of signs, words, and images, but they didn't discredit authority. They didn't discredit expertise. Derrida said, you know, I never wrote about science. You know, they believed in facts, and they believed in the socially constructed nature of facts. That's a complicated position, but that was theirs.

00:33:42 Andrew Keen: If there's one word perhaps, Emily, that summarizes your Frenchmen, you've talked about deconstruction. But would it be postmodernism? I mean, that's the word that often its critics, maybe some of its supporters use. Does that word work, in terms of describing your Frenchmen?

00:34:03 Emily Eakin: I tried to avoid that word, Andrew. It probably does appear in my book somewhere because I think that word is so ubiquitous. It's lost any specific meaning. I don't really know how, useful it is. I try to really think and talk about the Frenchmen in more concrete ways, as members of a series of intellectual movements. First, structuralism and then some of them became poststructuralists, which literally meant critics of structuralism. All of that now is just called postmodern postmodernism, and I think it tends to be a derogatory term, an empty term. I'm not sure. What do you think it means?

00:34:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, I don't think anyone knows what any of this means as you know in the beginning of the book. I mean, no one, I mean, even Derrida couldn't define what deconstruction meant. Did you struggle to leave some of these people out? I mean, one of the ones that I like, and I like his work particularly on the United States is, Baudrillard. Did you do you involve him, or did some of them just get left out? I mean, there were an enormous amount of enormously creative and influential French thinkers, coming out of the nineteen sixties, weren't they?

00:35:21 Emily Eakin: It's true. It's extraordinary. My list is not comprehensive. I have eight major figures. And if you add Claude Lévi-Strauss, who really is the father of structuralism, And I talked about him at length. And if you add Sartre, who's also someone I discuss at length, that's 10, I think, 10 figures, and that was a lot. But Baudrillard makes a brief appearance in my book for a wonderful book he wrote called Forget Foucault, Oublier Foucault, in which he says, gosh, you know, Foucault has this sort of perfect vision of, how power works. And what makes him able to see its machinations, better than the rest of us is if he's somehow, outside the system. He's the one person who's excused from being sort of part of this system of domination and oppression. Doesn't that make it all a little suspect? Maybe his system isn't really the one that we're living in now. I mean, he sort of goaded Foucault, and it really annoyed Foucault. And Foucault used to go around saying, who is Baudrillard? You know? Forget Baudrillard.

00:36:28 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Although, I think you're in the Foucault camp. You wrote an excellent piece, last week for New York Times from AI to the deep state. Michel Foucault foresaw it all. I'm not sure if you wrote the headline. You're at the Times, so you probably could have nixed that headline. Do you really think that Foucault saw it all from AI to the deep state, this poststructuralist disappearance of the author that you write about? I mean, it did seem to get it. Although one could also argue, and I've argued this in some of my work that, the guy who invented the Internet and poststructuralism was the Argentine writer, Borges.

00:37:06 Emily Eakin: Well, that's interesting. Well, look. This is what I'll say. I find it really fascinating that the structuralist theory of language is very compatible with AI, generative language AIs. So when we started to see really sophisticated chatbots, the field of linguistics went into a tailspin in the United States because this is a field dominated, as you know, by Noam Chomsky, whose argument is that language is a uniquely human attribute, a sort of genetic endowment hardwired in our brains. And language generation requires that embodied experience. Language is a system of world reference. It refers to things out in the world. And this, of course, is not what generative language AI does. We have these robots producing sophisticated sentences interacting with us in logical and interesting ways. But the structuralists have a completely different theory of language as this impersonal system. It doesn't require a human being. Meaning is derived from the way words relate to one another, literally how they differentiate themselves from one another. It's really quite compatible with the discourse, the language spit out by these chatbots. And I'm starting to see in academia people writing about this. There's a great book by a scholar at NYU called Language Machines, Leif Weatherby. It's a new book, and he says, we need to return to a kind of structuralist theory of meaning generation to understand how language and computation in the algorithm of generative AI is working. So Foucault was part of that. Part Foucault wrote about, you know, the proliferation of authorless discourse being a possibility.

00:39:00 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, you quote at the end of your piece, a famous haunting image at the end of his philosophical work. I think The Order of Things in which he imagines humans on a beach, that the last human, and I'm quoting you like a you're quoting Foucault at the end of The Order of Things, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea disappearing. Liberals are responding to AI by throwing around the h word, humans, and humanism, and suggesting we have to return to humanism. But the post structuralist and if Foucault was around, would they ban the h word? Are we all becoming out to there [unclear], Emily, in the age of AI, of, of Claude and OpenAI? We all antihumanists. Is that unavoidable these days?

00:39:51 Emily Eakin: I don't think we're antihumanist, but I think that there's some, say, vindication in the idea that what we're seeing now is the kind of literal manifestation of the structuralist worldview, which is that there are there is anti unhuman, nonhuman, let's say, meaning production. And they believe that was the case even back then. A human is not needed really for cognition. You know, de Man talked about language as a machine, and here we have these language machines. Would they be appalled by the advent of AI? I think they most of them would be fascinated by it, which is not the same thing as saying that they wouldn't think that it needed regulation or that there were ethical parameters, because, of course, language, they point out, is always imbued with politics, even AI. Right? And we should be just as wary of AI language as a human discourse.

00:40:49 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I wonder, you mentioned politics. The when I was at Berkeley, my professor was an expert on Arendt. Arendt wasn't very much in, fashion back in the eighties. Now she's much more fashionable. Is, shall we say, the Arendtian political tradition, is that an alternative to your Frenchmen, or is it a first cousin?

00:41:15 Emily Eakin: Oh, gosh. That's probably a question you're better equipped to answer. I don't talk about Arendt in my book. I'm not surprised that she has so much currency right now given her views on, totalitarianism and fascism. She was much more overtly politically engaged.

00:41:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I don't suppose I mean, I don't remember her writing about all these characters. I mean, she was a little maybe she missed the your Frenchmen's bus a little bit because, of course, she declined in the seventies, and she was around in the fifties and sixties. But I wonder what her take would have been on, on your French.

00:41:50 Emily Eakin: I wonder too.

00:41:52 Andrew Keen: Maybe that's the subject of another book. Emily, congratulations. This is really a book that needed to be written, and you've written it, The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory by Emery by Emily Eakin. It's out today, and I think it's gonna become a sensation. Thank you so much.

00:42:10 Emily Eakin: Thank you, Andrew.