The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory

by Emily Eakin

“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.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, France, History, Criticism

492 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 21, 2026

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Appropriately enough, this dispenses with genre conventions in a form of postmodern playfulness as it shifts from memoir of Eakin's college days when she rather over-earnestly embraced literary theory, to biographical information on e.g. Lacan, Barthes, Foucault etc., to a light-touch exploration of some of their ideas. It also makes a good hand of explaining how theory moved on from existentialism and its essentially optimistic humanist view of the individual with agency, to something more abstract in the concern with a linguistic 'symbolic order', to use the Lacanian term.

Eakin fell out of love with theory and dropped out of her PhD programme for journalism, something she thought at the time more concrete and concerned with 'real life'. So it's rather heart-warming to see her come back to trace the impact of theory, however much it has been lambasted by conservative critics, in our world, both negatively and positively:

If we can control language, the thinking goes, we can better control people. Witness the efforts by the Trump administration to scrub hundreds of words - including "bias", "climate crisis", "equality", "females", "mental health", and "multicultural" from government documents and websites; to remove books from federally controlled libraries; to monitor the presentation of American history in Smithsonian museums and on public monuments; and to silence dissent on campuses by cutting off federal funds and arresting and deporting students.

The sanctioning and expurgation of language, as George Orwell understood, is key to furthering authoritarian agendas.

More positively, 'the more fluid our language, the more capacious and less confined our self-definitions, our bodies, our imaginations - and, eventually, the more tolerant our social order [which is] apparently intuitive to Generation Z'.

Anyone looking for a reader-friendly introduction to French literary and cultural theory for themselves or to add to student reading lists could do a lot worse than this.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genre is dead. Sure Adorno controlled all the music after the war but it was the French who took away our common sense, one tenured turtleneck at a time. This loving brick is a hybrid: it’s a memoir about the author and her daring dash into continental theory. She’s from less than a hundred miles from here and I strongly suspect that we’re about the same age. That’s the end of the comparisons other than I’d read many of the philosophical texts cited here as well as most of the principal biographies she’s mines for anecdotes.

The Frenchmen isn’t just an intellectual history of postwar thought but an exploration of the relationships between the figures, their wary support, their petulance and their shared legacy. LaRouche was too busy blaming the Frankfurt School to see that Discipline and Punish was the future. I enjoyed the endeavor though at this moment I can’t say I’m thrilled to immediately run with those wolves, well maybe Bataille. And remember Nick Land told us that Derrida is not a werewolf.

Goodreads continues to flutter with bugs. I attempted to post on a number other reviews today, many several times. One of the points I think interesting is how both Bataille and Barthes originally aspired to be historians whereas Derrida and Foucault fancied literary careers. I was also troubled that Eakins termed Cixous as a feminist, nothing more.

[Wyatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed the hell out of this. For a hard-to-categorize memoir/journey through the (often sordid) lives and minds of French theorists written by an Ivy League-educated journalist, this book somehow never feels pretentious. Eakin pokes fun at her theory-loving younger self and doesn’t hesitate to point out the plentiful contradictions and self-indulgences of the men she writes about. She does a fabulous job of making complex concepts feel accessible. I like how she dips into contemporary literature & criticism to show how tendrils of the Frenchmen’s ideas are still wrapped around so much of our culture.

[Philip Reari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite enough meat on the bones to flesh out a book on these characters, of whom one is left feeling are deeply disturbed and alienated men having survived a very trying period of history. "Theory" is so hard to make accessible, that in a way it gets lost in the story here. I was most intrigued by Derrida and could've used more focus on his.

[CharlesS · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I were to give this book a quick description, I’d say: Truly the best of times AND the worst of times, since this is both the most infuriating and yet most engaging of cultural histories I have read to date. Hence my rating of 3 stars out of 5 splits the difference of the extremes I experienced while reading this. Three narrative lines run through Eakin’s study, some more detailed than others:

-- autobiographical: this is the least interesting overall since Eakin’s ultimately frustrating experience with French theory as an undergrad and then at the start of a grad program she never finished seems to be her claim to have special insight about this very complicated sequence of sociohistorical events. In fact, she’s not entirely wrong: some of her experiences do yield the occasional insight about certain protagonists, but all in all, “My Life in Theory”, the book’s subtitle, could be read at least two ways (add a comma after Life), quite appropriate given the types of textual analysis she discusses.

-- sociocultural and biographical about the field of “French theory” that developed post World War II, and Eakin forthrightly leans on an array of secondary sources, notably biographies written about the key protagonists. She usually relates the history and sociocultural events of the era rather well but relies on fewer sources in certain instances (e.g. about the Vincennes University circumstances) than she might.

-- critical/analytical: To her credit, she provides some quite remarkable reading of primary sources for many of the protagonists, clearly depending on her own affinity for the particular protagonist in question. She is particularly insightful about Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, as well as the grand finale regarding Paul de Man. She does rather well at times with Sartre, Barthes, Lacan and Althusser, particularly relating certain aspects of their thought. But to omit the importance of Barthes Essais critiques, the bridge text into the 1960s, as well as the polemic with Raymond Picard that thrust Barthes truly into the limelight, is a gaping hole. And Althusser seems to some extent to be Eakin’s sensational whipping boy given the various peculiarities of his personal life. As for Deleuze and Guattari, one wonders why she included them at all; perhaps their absence would have been too obvious. Unfortunately, she limits the discussion solely to Anti-Oedipus, that she describes as appearing today as a “utopian curio”, despite also inspiring significant research into fascism, Trump and the contemporary manosphere – we need more “curios” like that!

What drags this study down is her incessant need to indulge in relating every tidbit of gossip she possibly can, as if her editors were standing over shoulder with some kind ratio-based guide for writing a summer hit – for every serious, well-presented examination of texts, provide at least two (if not more) juicy bits. One glaring example of this sensational staging is the book’s organization: Part I, Murder! Part II, Madness! Part III, the not so sensational: Words (given the verbosity of everyone described here, this could be the book’s title, if only Sartre hadn’t already used it); and Part IV, the just confusing: Evasions, as if she was at a loss how to tie things up with her biggest, admittedly very juicy bit, de Man’s life as a scam artist. Some of the gossip is just plain stupid, like the chapter title as “Derrida’s Pipe,” only for the latter object to serve as the object of fairly lame peepee anecdote. And it turns out that for “Madness”, one does not need to search far in this crowd given all the depression that seems to afflict almost everyone (Barthes and Deleuze seem to have been happy exceptions... until they weren't, of course). Lacan is truly the clown of madness, the ringleader of the psychoanalytical circus, but before he becomes “Lacan” (that is, the rather ridiculous, pompous individual in charge of his very own School), he really had a very interesting life and, in fact, earned his stripes to become the cultural figure that he did.

The mere fact of having lived in France on several occasions and even to have held a one-year posting to the Ecole Normale Superieure hardly qualifies Eakin to pronounce judgements about French cultural history in the breezy way she does. Her familiarity is often based on a somewhat approximate, often limited research dive into the various subjects. Regarding the appeal of French theory, Eakin draws the facile parallel between theory 's "grand totalizing ambitions " and the appeal of Marxism to Parisian intellectuals of the post WW II era (41-42). Everything starts with Sartre, whose star is dimming by the early 60s (ch 5), so here come the contenders: Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, Louis Althusser in Marxist studies, then Lacan, Foucault, Barthes (although to Barthes's credit, he seems to have just worked hard without really attempting to challenge anyone), followed by Derrida, the D&G necessary afterthought, and concluding with de Man and the seemingly foreordained demise of the “theory" field. At one point (p 52), she tells the reader she has read much “structuralist philosophy”, apparently unaware that such an entity doesn’t exist. And the title for chapter 41, “Country Joe Foucault”, is perfect for a section on evasions – the title’s meaning escapes me entirely.

And yet… My wife and I have separate reading interests, but on occasion, we exchange texts that we think the other person will like, and I have shared this one, despite how many times I wanted to throw the book across the room. Eakin has clearly devoted serious effort to getting as much of this sociocultural history correct as possible, and if she continually slings slime, at least she provides references, something that we’re coming to expect less and less these days. It’s a shame, however, that she couldn’t manage to travel to France to do some research in and on the locus in quo, perhaps consult an archive or two, and/or conduct an interview or two. She has let the biographers consulted for the book do all that serious work, and with The Frenchmen, we have the second-hand remnants of the thrill of that theory feeling once experienced by Eakin, now available through her extensive, sometimes wistful, sometimes bitter critical reminiscence.

PS. I call BS on the promotion this book is getting in the New York Times -- she works there, and so, as a perk of employment, it would seem, an article on her book appeared in the Book Review (2 Aug 2026) and then, one week later (9 Aug 2026), surprise, surprise, it appears again in the Book Review's Editor's Choice -- and she's one of these editors!! The book has enough merits to make its own way; too bad that's not in the cards. But this at least provides an insight into NYT journalism circa 2026.

[Tree · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book starts off with a promising premise but collapses under its own weight, and the author’s attempt at creating her own work of post Modern…whatever, fails.

For me, the most egregious element of the book is not the endless digressions, biographies and unnecessary facts, but her glossing over and ignoring completely the sexual abuse of young boys by some of the philosophers written about.
The author loses all intellectual and moral authority when she spends entire chapters detailing the mental illnesses and sexual perversions of these men, even providing in-depth details of the murder of women, yet tepidly states that sexually abusing children in colonial outposts was not as unacceptable in those days as it is now. She also outright ignores what Sartre was up to yet provides endless other facts about him. So it’s not the lack of knowledge or even space in the book that prevents her from getting into this topic.
Possibly then, this book is nothing but an overheated attempt to avoid this terrible fact about men we have been told were geniuses.

[Alexa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. I was feeling #sadaf for like a week and i think it was bc I was in a reading slump and wasn’t feeling challenged enough at work bc as soon as I started reading this I went back to being my chipper self!

I got drawn into theory last year. My thesis advisor told me he was a “theory head” in college. When he sent me a few readings on postmodernism I fell down the rabbit hole and decided that I actually knew nothing all of these years and was only now reaching my academic potential. I felt both the smartest and dumbest I ever have at the same time and ended up writing a thesis where I analyzed two paintings from a postmodern feminist lens (EYE ROLL!). I felt the only way to be a real intellectual was to utilize critical theory. It was grueling. I now do think I was being a little silly but in the moment I was so engrossed. I don’t even think I agree or understand much of the theory in this book anyway (against all odds I still choose to be an optimist lol) and so I really appreciated how this broke it all down and mixed in a fascinating and fun memoir.

My only complaint is that I wish there was wayyyy more memoir! I DEF got lost in the theoretical sauce. It is not that the book is inaccessible. But the sheer volume of information and ideas from each character tested my reading comprehension.

[Hibou le Literature Supporter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, this is the book I've been waiting for (since I graduated university, having taken 2 courses in literary theory). Eakin weaves a perfect blend of theory, philosophy, biography, history, and memoir. She does not hold back on the theory which pleased me, covering the concepts of Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuz, Gattari and (technically, Belgian as she points out) de Man, and throwing in non-Frenchmen like Husserl and Freud. There's scandal and gossip too. Eakin's voice is equal parts intellectual, cynical, humorous. If you're curious about structuralism or poststructuralism or once loved the 'onion-peeling' insights of Walter Benjamin or the socio-technological doomsday predictions of Herbert Marcuse, pick this up. Yes, Emily, I remember every philosopher's first name!

[Desirae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always considered myself something of a Francophile, so it was probably inevitable that The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory would appeal to me. I took several years of French in school, have always been fascinated by French culture and intellectual life, and have encountered many of the names that populate Emily Eakin’s book along the way. Some of this material, therefore, felt wonderfully familiar. Other parts made me realize just how much I had managed to miss. Eakin’s book is an ambitious combination of memoir, intellectual history, biography, and philosophy primer, following the strange and often dazzling trajectory of French theory from its nineteenth-century intellectual ancestors through the explosive events of May 1968 and into its transformation of American academia and contemporary political thought.

At its heart, The Frenchmen is about an unlikely group of thinkers—Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Paul de Man—and the ideas that made them academic celebrities. Eakin is interested not simply in what they thought but in how those ideas developed, collided, migrated across the Atlantic, and eventually became part of the intellectual furniture of modern life. She also has a great deal of fun reminding us that these supposedly austere intellectual giants were, in fact, spectacularly messy human beings. Murder, madness, drugs, affairs, political betrayals, eccentricities and professional feuds appear alongside discussions of language, subjectivity, Marxism, psychoanalysis and power.

The intellectual genealogy is particularly fascinating. Eakin begins much further back than the usual postwar story, tracing a French philosophical tradition concerned with the nature of freedom, reason, society and the individual. The nineteenth century provides important groundwork through figures such as Marx and Nietzsche, while the twentieth century brings existentialism, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre, into the foreground. Sartre's insistence on individual freedom and responsibility becomes an important point of contrast for the structuralists and post-structuralists who follow.

And then comes 1968.

The May 1968 protests are essential to understanding the intellectual atmosphere Eakin describes. The student uprisings and general strikes were not merely political disturbances; they represented a profound rejection of established authority, institutions and inherited social structures. The French theorists were products of this tumultuous postwar environment, even when their relationships to Marxism and revolutionary politics were complicated or contradictory. Eakin shows how the disappointments of World War II, the Cold War, decolonization and the upheavals of the 1960s created the conditions for an intellectual movement determined to question virtually every supposedly stable category.

This is where structuralism and post-structuralism enter the story. Structuralism shifted attention away from the supposedly autonomous individual and toward the systems—particularly language—that shape our experience. Post-structuralism then began pulling apart those systems as well. Derrida's deconstruction questioned the stability of meaning; Barthes challenged the authority of the author; Foucault examined the relationship between knowledge and power; Lacan reinterpreted psychoanalysis through language and structuralism; and Deleuze and Guattari developed their own wonderfully strange philosophical vocabulary for thinking about desire, identity and social organization.

What I particularly enjoyed is that Eakin does not treat these philosophers as marble busts. She is interested in the people behind the theories, and sometimes the people are considerably more entertaining than the theories. There is something deliciously ironic about theorists who questioned the stability of identity, authorship and biography having lives so full of dramatic biography. Eakin makes this contradiction one of the book's running jokes. Her organization by themes such as “Murder,” “Madness,” “Words,” and “Evasions” allows her to connect ideas that might otherwise seem impossibly abstract.

The American portion of the story is equally important. Eakin herself encountered French theory at Harvard in the late 1980s, when Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and their colleagues had become almost glamorous figures within American academia. Theory offered students an intoxicating sense that they had discovered the secret machinery underneath ordinary reality. Language was not neutral. Truth was not necessarily stable. The self might not be the coherent thing we imagined it to be. Institutions produced knowledge while simultaneously exercising power. Suddenly, reading literature was not simply about interpreting stories; it was about interrogating the structures that made interpretation possible in the first place.

I recognized some of this from my own exposure to French language and culture, although I would be lying if I said I understood every philosophical turn. This is advanced theory, and The Frenchmen is not necessarily a casual-reader book. Eakin makes an admirable effort to translate difficult concepts into understandable language, but there are still moments when I felt as though I needed to stop, reread a paragraph and stare thoughtfully into the middle distance. That is not necessarily a criticism. Some ideas simply refuse to be consumed quickly.

What makes the book accessible, however, is Eakin herself. Her personal journey provides a human thread through all of this intellectual density. She moves from fascinated student to journalist, reconsidering the intellectual movement that once captivated her. Rather than simply declaring French theory ridiculous or obsolete, she asks what remains valuable about it. Her answer is essentially the habit of questioning: questioning authority, language, received wisdom and claims that present themselves as timeless truths.

And that feels surprisingly relevant now. The Frenchmen may have been writing in a very different political and cultural environment, but their suspicion of supposedly objective truths, their examination of power and their insistence that language shapes reality have hardly disappeared. In fact, many of the debates surrounding identity, politics, media and culture still carry unmistakable traces of their influence.

Ultimately, The Frenchmen is both an intellectual history and a love letter to being intellectually obsessed. I appreciated that Eakin neither worships these thinkers nor dismisses them. She understands their flaws, their absurdities and sometimes their appalling behavior, while still recognizing the extraordinary power of their ideas. For someone like me, who has always had a soft spot for France and who enjoys wandering into the more complicated corners of philosophy, this was a particularly enjoyable read.

It is dense, occasionally bewildering and sometimes wonderfully ridiculous. But beneath all the theory is a rather simple proposition: learning to question the world changes the way you see it. Eakin's great achievement is making that process feel not only important, but genuinely fun.

[Jeroen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about eight French (well one was Belgian) male thinkers: Derrida, Althusser, Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, Lacan and De Man. It is about their ideas and their personal lives, and their popularity in the US 'literary concentration' departments.

Philosophy is prone to hypes and fads, and this book shows this fad for 'theory' in an engaging way. It gives a good sense of the enthusiasm back then, even though now in hindsight it seems incredible that these hard to understand, sometimes intentionally obscure, thinkers were so popular.

It is refreshing to show these thinkers in their failings by discussing their personal lives, although of course this comes at the cost of attention for their ideas.

[Lincoln Day · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not entirely certain what the prospective audience for this book is. It is not academic enough for academics but also too academic for a lay audience. Biographical but not purely. Intellectual history but not exclusively. Personal but not to the extent of a memoir.

That is not to say that it is not an enjoyable read. It is well written, but I did not get as much out of it as I hoped. The personal parts are the best, but they are not fully integrated within the text. It would be much more interesting, I think, if it were structured around her interactions with theory rather than chronologically and thematically. When she talks about her interactions with texts or prominent theorists, she excels, but the survey of all their thoughts and works seems largely superfluous, given the abundance of paper dedicated to the history of French thought in the 20th century already published.

Perhaps it would be more enjoyable if you didn't already know much about their work, but I would wager that the personal aspects would also resonate less with such a reader. It is in a weird middle ground.

[Blitzkrieg Through My TBR]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/bo...

[Brandon Ouellette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed the style (ironically (?) somewhat postmodern itself with its shifting timelines and genre bending), paired with some pretty good analysis of French theory. I’d have liked more of that, but the gossip is mostly quite dishy so I can forgive it!

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read blending academic memoir and history of recent French philosophy and philosophers.

This was a great idea for a unique piece of nonfiction, and the author does an admirable job of lightly blending personal history and her own academic exploits with the basics of French philosophy.

I’ll note that this mostly discusses more recent French philosophy (let’s say roughly the last 150 years). I was a little disappointed by this, as earlier French philosophy is more to my interest (Descartes is barely mentioned), but that’s a taste issue rather than a critique of the text.

Interestingly, as is directly mentioned in the book, we typically separate philosophy from biography, such that a philosopher’s personal history is irrelevant to their work. Here the author mentions that tenet and then ignores it, which makes for a more original and, I think, more relatable and digestible view of the type of scholarship that is often hard to parse for non-academics.

Structuralism and Post-Structuralism are particularly thorny, and because that’s mostly what’s being discussed here, I love that the author found a way to make it a touch more comprehensible. Her decision to again ignore the separation of philosophy and biography regarding her own experiences was also helpful, grounding some pretty abstract content in a way that we rarely see in philosophical writing, often deliberately.

I checked out a bit at the points of the book that delve into politics (I agree with the author in this regard on most of her positions, I’m just burnt out and didn’t need that in this context), but otherwise this is infinitely more readable than, quite frankly, pretty much anything else I’ve come across that deals directly with the academics of Philosophy.

*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*

[William Tam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a unique, lively, and thoughtful book. Ms. Eakin makes it clear from the start that she wants to delve into the thinkers who produced the ideas of French literary theory as people "with bodies", and also her own interaction with these ideas as a person with a body. The best parts of this book are the stories of the human relationships between these thinkers, and similarly her accounts of how she reacted to and was affected by her college era journey through "Theory."

The vignettes she includes of her "Life in Theory" are terrific, recounting in parallel with the ideas she's explaining her experiences trying on personae and mindsets based on those ideas she was diving through during her time in college and grad school. The seeking and experimenting mind she portrays is a partial intellectual autobiography, true to her project of personalizing and bringing depth to the thinkers she is discussing. The book only slows down in the chapters where she doesn't include those personal reactions.

The ideas of the thinkers she's reacting to -- or at least what I learned of them from this book -- aren't particularly impressive in my opinion. Yes, close reading of text -- the core of 'deconstruction' -- can be worthwhile. I studied philosophy in college, and the process of poring over the writing of various deep thinkers was formative of the ideas I'm still working through. Diagramming the personae structures in Poe's stories (and I love Poe's stories), not so much.

Similarly, the ideas of challenging the assumptions of core truths, the existence of complex sexuality, etc. were even present in the ancient Greeks and thinkers since (there were tidbits of originality of course -- Levi-Strauss's theory on the social origins of incest prohibition, among others).

The story she tells of the thinkers themselves as persons, and their arguments and relationships as persons, is considerably more interesting. I found the story worthwhile! How structuralism, post-structuralism, etc. was developed via _people_ who thought ideas and argued those thoughts and had personal grievances and affections that influenced those ideas and arguments -- this is a great illustration of how ideas are developed.

My motivation for engaging with the book is somewhat personal, and I think that is appropriate to the personalist theme Ms. Eakin is presenting.

I'd noticed Ms. Eakin's excellent book reviews in the NY Times over the last few years and recognized the name; Emily and I were in the same graduating class at our public high school in Indiana. We were (slightly) acquainted with each other back then (though never since graduation), with friends in common and part of the same peer group of faculty kids in a town dominated by the huge Indiana University campus and community. Her story in the book of our mutual friend Suzy (RIP) and her brother bringing punk rock to our school after their year in Geneva was exactly as revelatory as she described it.

My personal interest in the book was intellectual as well. I'd encountered "Theory", Derrida, Foucault, et al in the early 90s via "Comp Lit" students who seemed kind of silly from my high horse of "real" Philosophy, but given time I thought I might want to explore some of the work. 30 years and a career in technology later the opportunity to read a survey of the more prominent thinkers appealed to me.

The importance of the personal in the development of the ideas that we think is, I believe, Ms. Eakin's thesis. And as I read the book, my personal engagement illustrated that thesis to me. The commonalities of biography were incidental to my interest once I got past the initial chapter, however. I think anyone who has deeply engaged with and been affected by ideas will find something to engage with in this book.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory (2026) by Emily Eakin is an enjoyable read about the history of French ‘Theory’ and the author’s time studying it. Eakin is a senior editor at the New York Times Book Review and has been an editor and writer at The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Eakin writes about her time in college at Harvard in the late 1980s and 1990s when the ideas of French Theory were the fashion in English departments in the United States. She interleaves this with a history of French Theory. Theory starts after Existentialism fades in the late 1950s and early 1960s. First the structural Marxist Louis Althusser sought to reinterpret Marx and also to take down Sartre, which he did. The Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan took Freud and added his own insights and also became obsessed with language. Then the philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida took madness, text and everything else to pieces. In the US Paul de Man popularised these ideas and also added to them. These are just some of the figures covered in the book.

Eakin first found Theory fascinating and she put it to use and deconstructed literature with its methods. However, she finally found it to be lacking. She dropped out of a PhD program in English to become a journalist. There her knowledge of these thinkers made her an ideal person to report on the Sokal Affair where a physicist made up an article for a Theory journal about physics to make fun of the concepts of theory.

The book is a fast, popularised history of the ideas of theory. It also has a lot on the incredible lives of the major players. This includes collaboration with Nazis, one killing his wife and then writing a book about it, sympathising and possibly engaging in paedophilia and more. Almost all of the thinkers come off poorly.

Interestingly Eakin believes the ideas still have real merit. She believes that ultimately we have to engage with the limitations of language. This may be true, but why the ideas of the Frenchmen are to be preferred over Wittgenstein’s ideas on language is not described in the book. Eakin also acknowledges that theory has probably led to a dramatic decline in people studying English. I have had a number of friends over the years who described abandoning English study and turning to History and other subjects because theory was so off putting. The book doesn’t connect intersectionality and identity politics to Theory much, which is surprising. Foucault’s ideas about power and language clearly had a substantial impact.

Ironically, for a book about notoriously difficult writers, it’s a pleasure to read. Eakin writes well, knows her subject in depth and has put effort into making the book enjoyable.

The Frenchmen is well worth a read for anyone with a passing interest in how and why French writers and philosophers were so in vogue in the 1980s and 1990s.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was studying literature in college, we were just hearing the early rumblings of Theory. It was already the rage in English departments, but in my little isolated pocket of Russian literature we didn't yet have to pay attention to it. That all changed a few years later. By the time Elif Batuman was studying Russian literature as she recounts in "The Possessed,"she had to have a Theory angle in all of her projects for them to be taken seriously. I hated this stuff. I thought (as I still do) that Lacan was a fraud and that Derrida was incomprehensible, so when I began to become more aware of Theory a few years later, I decided that I had dodged a bullet by going to law school. If I had stayed on track and got a PhD in Russian literature, I would probably have been scorned and relegated to a non-tenured position in an obscure college. But maybe not because as I have been exposed to more Theory over time and as it has become embedded in nearly all writing about writing, I have gotten over my revulsion and have come to see that it actually has real value.

Still my head spins when I read about Ms. Eakin's personal journey with Theory. She fell for it instantly. It made her feel smart and cutting edge (She probably really was both). And the personalities and feuds of the leading exponents of Theory were certainly fascinating. But how could so many smart people like Ms. Eakin fall so hard for something that has so much obvious nonsense in it? Why didn't they just pick out the gems and shovel the rest of it onto the manure pile where it belonged? That part is still a mystery to me.

In the end of her personal odyssey, Ms. Eakin stops being a Theory fangirl, quits her PhD program and goes into journalism. She talks about the "death" of Theory, and the damaged personal reputations of several of the leading Theorists. But in the end she is left with a grudging respect for Theory and its lasting contribution to both scholarship and how we think about our world and society, so she ends up in much the same place that I do, though she took a different route.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I am a Francophile who spent most of the eighties and nineties selling academic and scholarly books in the humanities to a university audience, I watched the rise of French theory very closely. I read some of the books, and engaged in conversation with customers about it all. I eavesdropped on even more, and was often amused to hear young scholars try to come to terms with this, even as what they were saying seemed to undermine the very professions they had chosen. If Emily Eakin had studied in Ann Arbor, I would have made a lot of money selling her Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Althusser, de Man, Barthes and the rest.

This is an intellectual autobiography of a smart young scholar trying to come to terms with what became the dominant attack on the literary canon, the explanation of the hidden biases and presumptions in literature, the relationship between language and power. She does a good, sometimes even an in-depth summation of these difficult ideas, and interprets the often impenetrable prose of these thinkers in very lucid ways. In a turn that none of these thinkers would approve of, she provides biographical details of their often troubled and troubling lives and the relationship of those lives to the ideas that shaped them. Perhaps I wish she had done more about her own abandonment of her academic career, her fatigue with theory, and her turn to journalism. That might be for another book that picks up where this one left off.

I could pick out any number of sentences that show Eakin's ability to summarize this thought. Here's one of many I marked -- "The whole point of theory was to subsume the particular into the general, into insights about the laws of language and the process of meaning creation." Simple, but exact. Useful!

All of this thinking seems to have mostly disappeared now, but it lingers below the surface. It had something to do with the rapid decline of academic study of the humanities, certainly, but Eakin is more than willing to applaud theory's lingering influence on political and cultural discourse.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is going to be on the shelf for anyone who is curious about why American students in the 80s and 90s were mad for literary theory. The capsule summaries of the various theorists are good, given their compactness, and Eakin plausibly interweaves biographical detail, which hooked me for Althusser, Barthes, Derrida; but I'm afraid the detail was a bit boring for De Man and Foucault (maybe because I'd read those key biographies earlier). Not much here on Deleuze and Guattari. Also, I'm afraid, Lacan comes across as a mad man and generally horrible person. Some of the best writing here is autobiographical as Eakin thinks over what she loved and lost. If anything, that side of the story is too brief. There are also moments that think about current events in light of the texts: This seemed pretty weak, as the present moment seems to exceed the worst that Foucault and others traced out.

Maybe her next one will be The Frenchwomen. You get bits of Beauvoir, Kristeva and Cixous, but only as supporting (dissenting?) characters.

Eakin was an undergrad at Harvard when I was a grad student and I knew and/or taught some of her friends mentioned in the acknowledgements. My experience was much like hers: Intense reading of the French theorists, and then disillusionment. One thing that is interesting to me is that for someone a notch younger than me, it is striking that she stuck it out with high theory as long as she did. My memory of the late 80s/early 90s was that most of my cohort in graduate school had shifted to other ways of thinking with literature: Chiefly through raw historical research, but also through theory more grounded in sociology (feminism, area studies, anthropology . . . Lyotard, Bourdieu, Latour).

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very readable and engaging book on some of the big figures in deconstructionism including Derrida and Lacan. I found the parts about the author provided a good way in for the general reader but the book still did go into quite a bit of depth on some of the theories.

One thing I really appreciated about the book was that the author provided a good amount of historical context as well as autobiographical context of the philosophers and thinkers in question. But she also did go into some detail on the philosophy. As she herself points out, philosophers are often treated as just minds in isolation from both their historical contexts and their own lives, though this makes little sense. So it was admirable that she took a different approach in her own book and really tried to show how the philosophers were interacting with each other and providing foils to each other as well as how they were the product of their times.

There was an interesting tension throughout the book in the way that Eakin both seems to take deconstructionism seriously for some of its merits and interesting points as well as serious influence on the world we live in now, and in how she saw her own college obsession with deconstructionists as somewhat overeager to please/impress, and a juvenile phase in her life. Both can be true, and it's a good feature of the book that there isn't a simple message to be had from it, but rather that ideas and people can be worthwhile without being absolutely good.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book and even found in it a few things I did not know. With a few exceptions - mainly Foucault - I am not a big fan of French Theory and its massive American import. The author is very well informed, was totally immersed into Theory most of her life, and eventually turned against it - at least in part. I liked how she followed the work and lives of these 8 French men by chronologically presenting the main topics and their influences on each other. Her turn against Theory is reflected here by mainly presenting some very personal and unsavory details about these 8 French guys - like their suicide attempts, affairs, sexual kinks, rivalries and dislikes of each other, obsessions, encounters with madness, criminal pasts, acts of cowardice and silliness, and so on. It is also interesting to recognize the roots of the entire French Theory in a handful of German thinkers (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger), how the American universities embraced the French Theory like a religion and approached these guys like gods, and how eventually the American conservative politics (Reagan, Bush, and Trump) opposed and partially defeated/dismantled it. I did not know anything about Paul de Man before this book and the author convinced me to read Roland Barthes.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went through undergraduate and graduate school from time to time enjoying structuralism. Roland Barthes’ Mythologies was blessedly edible and S/Z was weird and cool—though I can’t say I understood it. Those deconstructionist, well, they were a different matter. In graduate school I received an A- on a paper combining Mrs Dalloway and Discipline and Punish, and on Derrida’s take on Artaud. I’ve no idea what I wrote but it was an arduous task.
Which is why I love this book. Eakin has spent many years as a journalist, so she’s willing to simplify for simpletons like me. Most importantly, she loves her subject matter despite the years she suffered trying to master it. After being confused for years, I feel like I really understand what Judith Butler’s trying to say as she destabilizes the traditional norms of gender. I also loved the way Eakins shows how the ideas behind deconstruction are easily abused by both the political left and right as they ride the wave in the unstable linguistic territory between the signifier and signified. This is an excellent guide for those who are curious about these ideas but perplexed.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was in graduate school and pretty much in love with theory in the 80’s myself, so I was eager to read this book about a fellow … sufferer? traveler?

Eakin is a wonderful writer, so clear and concise. It has been a very long time since I read some of these people. I had not read, by a long shot, even most of the works she mentions, so I can tell you that she really does introduce and explain quite a lot!

She begins with existentialism in France after the war, and then the rise of structuralism, and, lastly, deconstruction. Eakin talks about the theorists in ways that make us feel we have met them, have heard their lectures, have watched their failures and understood their flaws. It is quite a feat.

The book will not be for everybody, but if you have ever wondered about the power of language, about the ways that our conversations today seem split into tribes, this is a good way to help think about how we got here.

[Miguel · Rating 3 out of 5]

je suis fatigue

Felt both frustrated and informed after reading it. Eakins provides a deep history of these French thinkers trying her best as anyone can to elucidate what amounted to a half century of pure clap-trap promulgated by a menagerie of antisemites, sociopaths, wife killers, child molesters, philanderers, narcissists, and utter bores of outsized egos and endless empty sentences. But frustrated that she seemed to defer any of this for what has proved to be if not the backbone, then a strong undergirding of what passes for a large swathe of the humanities in US Universities. It's as if she can give you all the back story and knows what a flawed base this all became, but can't quite look at it through a sunk-cost lens because she spent so much time mired in this flotsam, like still pining for that abusive old flame.

[Land Of Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Frenchmen by Emily Eakin is an interesting mix of memoir and intellectual history. The book explains the ideas of famous French thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes in a way that is easier to understand than you might expect. Eakin also shares her own experiences studying these ideas, which makes the book feel more personal and engaging.
One of the best parts of the book is how it connects complex theories to the lives of the people who created them. While some sections can still be a little challenging, the writing is clear and enjoyable.
Overall, this is a thoughtful and accessible book for anyone curious about philosophy, literature, or the history of ideas. I would give it 4 out of 5 stars.

[Hein Matthew Hattie Hein Hey Books! · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun, smart, slickly written. This book follows three tracks:

1. A mostly chronological summary of the lives and works of the biggest French post structuralists;

2. A mostly chronological history of their influence in American academia and culture;

3. A mostly chronological biography of the author, as she falls under their sway as a precocious high schooler, through grad school, then abandons them as through leaving a cult.

I found her summaries to be dramatic and gripping and about as fair as a summary of a character like Derrida can be. They reminded me of what I found both thrilling and frustrating in Theory. It’s a pretty easy read, and one of my favorite books of the year. Highly recommended.

[Mark Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superlative recite of French post-WWII théorie, focusing on half a dozen of the big names, along with many other adjacent theorists. Part overview of concepts, part biography, part memoir, all parts equally fascinating. Favorite factoid: Al Franken once asked Michel Foucault who he thought would win the World Series. 🤣 Eakin uses historical and biographical details to inform understanding of the writings of these influential thinkers. Only Roland Barthes comes off as a “good guy.” The rest were all “problematic” in one way or the other. Great book. I would have been happy to read another two or three hundred pages.

[Isabella · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

I thought this was a very entertaining foray into some of the foundational personalities and ideas of French Theory.

Admittedly, I was not very familiar with most of the authors or their works prior to reading this. As such, I cannot say whether the author did a good job encapsulating the central points and messages of their bodies of work. However, she did explain concepts throughout the book in enough detail for me, as a novice, to grasp the points she was saying these thinkers stood for. Mostly, I appreciated the gossipy nature with which she told these stories, weaving their ideas with critiques and anecdotes of who these thinkers were as people.

[Thaths · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in my 20's when I was a grad student in a STEM disciple one of my Marxist friends used to send me long snail mail letters about his getting into Derrida. He tried explaining Derrida's philosophy to me a few times - but it all flew way over my head. After reading this book I am slightly more enlightened.

Eakin plaits her memoir of college and first jobs and her encounters with Theory, with biographical sketches of the (primarily) French Philosophers who were luminaries of the field, and an attempt at describing their philosophies.

[Rasmus Salén · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timely work for me personally, and a reminder that what Americans call 'French theory' can seduce its students into a realm far detached from reality. In that sense, this reflective non-fiction is both an autobiography of being a lit student in the 80s, when theory was at its peak in the US, and an entertaining introductory overview of figures like Sartre, Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. Definitely treats and has researched some better than others, but doesn't hurt the overall narrative.