The Frenchmen
Or, My Life in Theory
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
“A marvelous book. It’s gossipy and personal and completely fascinating...cafe gossip with the footnotes left in.”— New York Times
“A superbly engrossing adventure of ideas...this will surely be my philosophy book of the year.” —Sarah Bakewell, New York Times bestselling author of Humanly Possible
From leading critic and essayist Emily Eakin, a stylish personal history of French theory and its unlikely domination of American culture
When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors. This was French theory, a set of recondite ideas that had taken American campuses by a storm during the preceding decades. In retrospect, the influence of these men and their writings seems both extraordinary and improbable. The Frenchmen argued that language is all-powerful, meaning unstable, and the self is an illusion. Their prose was brilliant, dazzling even, but often mystifyingly elaborate and highly abstract. Yet American students and scholars flocked to their books and lectures, intoxicated by a powerful new means of understanding—and perhaps even changing—the world. For Eakin, an unsophisticated graduate of a small-town Midwestern high school, theory was no mere intellectual exercise but a way of being—a heady shortcut to worldly glamour and wisdom.
The Frenchmen is the story of Eakin’s youthful love affair with French theory, alongside a wider examination of its rise and fall. Looking closely at Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and the French-speaking Belgian Paul de Man, Eakin untangles their famously difficult works with peerless, delightful clarity. What’s more, she brings to light the eccentric, scandalous—at times criminal!—lives of thinkers who themselves were often highly averse to biography, in a daringly original weave of storytelling and exegesis.
As she explores the magnetism of their work, Eakin illuminates not just the Frenchmen’s enduring legacy but some of today’s deepest political, social, and intellectual arguments. She neither rejects nor flatters the Frenchmen’s ideas but instead reveals how they indelibly changed our understanding of power, truth, and identity. Eakin shows how, for better or worse, the Frenchmen continue to shape and unsettle our lives today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times Book Review editor Eakin's masterful debut blends a coming-of-consciousness memoir with an engrossing portrait of the tumultuous (and often intertwined) lives of French theorists. Eakin bookends the account by charting her arc from a theory-hungry undergrad to a working journalist, but the meat of the narrative explores the messy lives of the leading lights of French critical theory—a discipline that became popular in American universities in the 1970s—including Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and their lovers, students, and enemies. Organizing the proceedings by theme, including "Murder," "Madness," and "Words," Eakin adeptly guides readers through structuralism, post-structuralism, and the decline of French theory. Along the way, she discusses how Althusser moved from mad philosopher to murderer, Foucault dropped LSD in Death Valley, and Derrida was locked up for drug trafficking in Prague. Her precise profiles flesh out these intellectual giants, who are typically obscured by the weight of their words and density of their texts. Though the early sections can feel like a maze of names and dates, once readers get their bearings, Eakin makes her obsession with these thinkers contagious. It's a rigorous, entertaining ode to intellectual curiosity.
