“Theory said, it doesn’t matter what you’ve read. It’s how you read.” — Emily Eakin on the seduction of the Frenchmen

When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the Eighties, there was a bewildering rage for Frenchmen. Foucault in history, Derrida in literature, Althusser in political philosophy, Lacan in psychology. Not that anybody could quite explain what any of them meant — which only made their ideas even more compelling. It was the seduction of the American mind, especially its elite campus version. Innocent times with forty years of hindsight.

Emily Eakin caught this Eighties fever for French theory at Harvard. Now an editor at the New York Times Book Review, Eakin has written The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory, which is both a confessional of her own seduction and a serious piece of intellectual history.

A self-described farm girl from Indiana — albeit one whose Francophile parents once left her waiting at a Paris nursery school because a Lévi-Strauss lecture went overtime — she fell for theory as the intellectual equivalent of a little black dress. It looked expensive, even off the rack, she confesses. For a middle-class Midwesterner, it seemed like a passport to Left-Bank sophistication. All you needed was the jargon, the black clothes and, in Eakin’s case, the opera gloves.

But her Frenchmen, Eakin warns, turned out to be a slippery bunch. Lacan was so difficult that professors cancelled their own classes rather than teach him. Althusser murdered his wife. Foucault’s histories were as much fiction as fact. Not even Derrida took Derrida seriously. These were the men undoing the “master narratives” while an enthralled generation of cross-legged young feminists in their little black dresses took notes.

And yet Eakin’s Frenchmen may have the last laugh. Their theory of language — an impersonal system requiring no human at its center — presciently describes today’s AI revolution. Foucault predicted that “man” would be erased like a face drawn in sand on the beach. Forty years on, that tide may be engulfing us all.

Five Takeaways

• The Little Black Dress of the Mind. Theory said it didn’t matter what you’d read, only how you read — the intellectual equivalent of the little black dress, looking expensive even off the rack. A passport from Bloomington, Indiana to the elite.

• System Replaces the Self. Sartre’s heroic existentialism was dismissed as “shop girl metaphysics,” and around the time the Berlin Wall went up, Althusser routed him at the École Normale. Vast impersonal forces, with language at the center.

• Difficult by Design. Professors cancelled classes rather than teach Lacan. Underedited and self-indulgent — but each Frenchman left one bold idea, and the difficulty made them easy for pundits to distort.

• Slippery Politics, Awkward Pasts. Foucault with a megaphone; Derrida, for whom tears for Stalin were a bit much; de Man’s collaborationist journalism — the nail in theory’s American coffin.

• The Frenchmen’s Revenge: AI. Chomsky’s linguistics in a tailspin, while the structuralists’ impersonal language system describes the chatbots rather well. Foucault’s face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea — the tide is called AI.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory: penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317335/the-frenchmen-by-emily-eakin

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: a rage for Frenchmen at Berkeley
00:02:09 A childhood among the structuralists
00:04:15 Seduction: theory’s sexual element
00:05:03 Lorrie Moore and the lecturer in jeans
00:06:15 A passport from the Midwest
00:07:50 A favorite Frenchman?
00:08:38 Lacan: too difficult to teach
00:10:06 Neologisms, parody, and distortion
00:11:10 The scam question: purposely obscure?
00:12:09 The mirror stage: what to take from Lacan
00:13:42 Out of existentialism
00:16:43 Shop girl metaphysics: what killed Sartre
00:18:23 Did the Frenchmen have a politics?
00:19:26 Foucault at Berkeley
00:20:19 Shaved heads and megaphones: Foucault the activist
00:21:05 Derrida: nothing follows from deconstruction
00:22:16 Tears for Stalin at the École Normale
00:22:35 Paul de Man: the nail in the coffin
00:23:08 Nietzsche behind it all
00:23:52 Turning power upside down
00:24:52 Men undoing the master narratives
00:26:53 De Beauvoir: the indomitable exception
00:28:01 Was America waiting for its Frenchmen?
00:30:13 Edward Said and Mansfield Park
00:31:14 The moral rot question
00:33:42 Postmodernism: an empty word?
00:34:48 Forget Foucault: Baudrillard’s goad
00:36:28 From AI to the deep state
00:37:06 Chomsky in a tailspin: structuralism and the chatbots
00:39:00 A face drawn in sand: the h word in the age of AI
00:40:49 Arendt: alternative or first cousin?
00:41:52 Thanks and goodbye