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Or, My Life in Theory
by Emily Eakin
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.
"A spry intellectual history neatly blends with a memoir of studying modern literary theory...Eakin writes with admirable clarity of ideas, such as the 'always already,' the aporia, and the interpellation, and she mixes her understanding of such theories with nicely juicy bits of gossip...A fine account of the onetime primacy of French critical theory and its place in real life." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Masterful ... an engrossing portrait ... Eakin makes her obsession with these thinkers contagious." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A superbly engrossing adventure of ideas, tracing the lives and rivalries of thinkers who were anti-humanist in their theories, but all-too-human in their personalities. I loved Emily Eakin's wry account of her own youthful intoxication with these writers, and of her disentanglement from them — even while she reassesses what they might still have to offer in these strange times. This will surely be my philosophy book of the year." —Sarah Bakewell, New York Times bestselling author of Humanly Possible
"Rich, absorbing, seductive, The Frenchmen is an intellectual history that doesn't leave out the body. Eakin's own coming-of-age animates her masterful portrait of ideas that changed the world and the singularly eccentric figures whose lives were almost as remarkable as their thoughts. I loved this book." —Ayad Akhtar, playwright and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Homeland Elegies
This information about The Frenchmen was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Emily Eakin is a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review. Her profiles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books Daily, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. She has a degree in literature from Harvard College and graduate degrees from Columbia University and the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris. She lives with her husband and two children in New York City.
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