The Men Who Made Theory French
Picture an innocent: a corn-fed girl from a landlocked American suburb who loves more than anything to read. She heads east for college, eager to slough off her upbringing, and on arrival she drifts toward the literature department, or maybe art history. She signs up for a 200-level course with a promising but bewildering name—something with “and/as” in the title, perhaps—and welcomes the difficulty it suggests, difficulty being what she came for. But still she’s unprepared for what’s coming, because it is the nineteen-eighties, or the nineties, or the two-thousands, and, as one supercilious male classmate is all too eager to tell her, everything she’s ever thought about art and reading is wrong. The author is dead, at best an author function. Meaning is contingent, words not to be trusted. A book is not a book but a text, and every text is at bottom a proof of the inefficacy of language. Enlightenment rationality was a fiction; only deconstruction remains. Our poor, befuddled heroine! She is not in Indiana anymore.
This scene—of a young American woman’s first encounter with French theory, the body of thought otherwise known as structuralism and post-structuralism—has by now been fictionalized several times over. In realist novels by members of what the critic Nicholas Dames called the “theory generation,” our heroine rarely takes kindly to theory. She may be distraught by it, like Katie Armstrong in Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty,” who listens mutely as her classmates “interrogate” a Rembrandt etching so moving it made her cry. She may be stunned by it, like Tassie Keltjin in Lorrie Moore’s “A Gate at the Stairs,” who blinks like a cave dweller blinded by sunlight when her professor speaks “thrillingly of Henry James’s masturbation of the comma.” Or she may follow along but object to theory’s obscurities, like Madeleine Hanna in Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot.” What she never does, though, is fall for theory. Full immersion is reserved for less sympathetic characters. Rich kids in Doc Martens, nihilists with shaved eyebrows, the know-it-all daughters of East Coast academics: these are the types who pledge their fidelity to theory by spouting its abstruse terminology, often to comic effect. “Considering how Thurston’s always going on about how much he worships language, you’d think he wouldn’t parrot so much jargon,” Madeleine quips in “The Marriage Plot.” “He used the word phallus three times today.”
The cross-examination of an art work as if it were a political enemy; the hauteur of the student who “gets” the reading and the bafflement of the one who does not; the jargon, the outfits, the aura of cultishness—it’s all familiar to former students of theory. And if these novelists seem suspicious toward theory, it’s hard to begrudge them too much, given the way that theory was taught in American classrooms. As the sociologist Michèle Lamont wrote in 1987, “American undergraduate students in literary criticism currently discuss the logocentrism of the philosophical tradition without having read a single classic of philosophy.” By the late two-thousands, when I was in college, it was worse: literature students hardly knew what those classics of philosophy were. That did not stop us from reading the way theory trained us to, reaching beyond the surface meaning of a text to “unmask” its repressed Other. Nor did it stop us from feeling as if we were not merely reading but doing something—maybe even something political.
It was an exciting illusion. We were writing term papers, not upsetting the world order with our Althusserian readings of Jane Austen. But theory itself—was that an illusion? Were those of us who felt changed by it, who used the word “phallus” three times in seminar to the annoyance of our classmates, deluding ourselves when we saw in Lacan’s tortured syntax and Foucault’s forceful style a new way of comprehending the world? Was theory—as critics on the right and the left contended—kind of bullshit?
Emily Eakin’s “The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory” (Penguin Press) argues persuasively that it wasn’t. Eakin is a senior editor at the Times Book Review (and previously an editor at this magazine) who, like her fictional counterparts, hails from the Midwest. Unlike them, she fell hard for theory. As a sophomore at Harvard—not the hottest hotbed of deconstruction in the Ivy League (that would be Yale) but close—she became a literature concentrator, as theory students were known. Soon, she was copying passages from Derrida into her journal. “Theory was cool,” Eakin recalls. “Theory was French. Theory was also, strange though it might sound, sexy. . . . There was a libidinal rush at seeing reality, language, the human psyche, pried open and ripped apart.”
At last, representation for the theory-pilled girl! Part memoir, part biography, part philosophy primer, “The Frenchmen” interleaves Eakin’s bildungsroman with careful close readings and details of her subjects’ lives. Lacan, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, and de Man are all present as mononymic embodiments of their thought. But they are also present as themselves—as Jacques, Louis, Roland, Michel, Gilles, Félix, Jacques, and Paul. (This last one is not technically a Frenchman, Eakin concedes, “but a French-speaking Belgian who taught in the French department at Yale.”) Along the way, Eakin introduces their intellectual forefathers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and, at the edges, even some women: Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Luce Irigaray. For those of us who learned to see French theorists as stars in a void, as discrete but brilliant points of light, reading “The Frenchmen” feels like being handed a map of the constellations. All sorts of hitherto obscured connections are illuminated.
Theory emerged from the hothouse intellectual climate of postwar Paris. In the fifties, the dominant philosophical movement in France was existentialism, which, with its humanist ethos and its emphasis on the freely choosing individual, offered a generation shattered by the Second World War a way to talk about meaning in a world rendered meaningless by its horrors. But, to a nascent cohort of French philosophers, existentialism was increasingly passé—a naïve relic of “Descartes and the Enlightenment, of an obsolete, romantic past,” Eakin writes. (In Lévi-Strauss’s 1955 memoir, “Tristes Tropiques,” he called existentialism “a sort of shop-girl metaphysics.”) By the media-saturated, technologically advancing sixties, it seemed that systems, not individuals, were the forces governing reality.
Where existentialists saw man condemned to freedom, the so-called structuralists saw man constrained by an “impersonal regime of the system and the subject,” Eakin writes. Some of these systems were political and social, like the state and the family. Some were conceptual, like “madness” and “reason.” The elemental structure that determined all the others was language. Knowledge was not possible without language, the structuralists argued; everything we knew about the world was filtered through language’s scrim and shaped by its architecture. A precise understanding of structure required a scientific understanding of language, and for that structuralist philosophers turned to linguistics.
Eakin writes that her aim in “The Frenchmen” was to “re-embody” the theorists, “to recover the hidden human element beneath their often stringent antihumanism.” The human element proves useful to her reconstruction of how theory came to be. Former theory students may recall learning the basics of structural linguistics as first proposed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure: that every sign—a word that points to an object in the world—is made up of two components, the sound-image of the word as spoken or written (the signifier) and the mental concept to which it refers (the signified). They may recall that there is no inherent bond between signifier and signified, that their linkage is a matter of convention, and that signifier and signified are meaningful only in relation to each other and to the system as a whole. But they may not recall why they learned this, or know how linguistics became essential to theory to begin with.
As Eakin’s biographical narrative reveals, it came down to chance encounters. The first was in 1942, when Lévi-Strauss was living in New York. He was searching for a method that would help him systematize the vast corpus of ethnographic literature he’d found in the New York Public Library when he was introduced to the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson gave the anthropologist a crash course in linguistics, and Lévi-Strauss, Eakin writes, was “dazzled.” Saussure’s argument that language was not a referential system but a relational one rhymed with his hunch that human social organization was determined not by biological imperatives but by unconscious relational structures. “Although they belong to another order of reality,” he went on to say, “kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena.” They, too, operated according to a universal logic that could be decoded and mapped.
In 1949, Lévi-Strauss met the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan at a dinner party and soon introduced him to Jakobson. Saussure’s theories were a revelation for Lacan, too; he would later work a “lexicon of grids, rules, signifiers, and signs” into his popular lectures at Sainte-Anne Hospital, in Paris. Freud had grounded his theories of sexuality and the psyche in biology. Lacan revised psychoanalysis by rooting it in linguistics, claiming that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who attended Lacan’s lectures, saw what Lacan was doing for Freud—boiling his writings down to their first principles—and hoped to do the same for Marx.
Althusser’s embrace of Lacan partly inspired his reading of Marx as the first scientist of history. As the philosophy caïman (essentially an undergraduate adviser) at the École Normale Supérieure—arguably France’s most prestigious institution of higher education—Althusser also exposed generations of students to Lacan’s thought by inviting him to move his lectures from Sainte-Anne to the École Normale in 1964. Traces of psychoanalysis can be detected in Althusser’s arguments that “ideology is acting on us and through us all the time,” as Eakin puts it, “even inside our heads, within our unconscious.” Michel Foucault, who was Althusser’s student at the École Normale, also linked repression within to repression without, turning his attention to the normalizing forces of the state: faceless institutions such as asylums and prisons.
Post-structuralism—theory’s second wave—alternately challenged and deepened the structuralist tendency. Roland Barthes’s early work was modelled on Lévi-Strauss’s, but by the sixties Barthes had abandoned the taxonomies of structuralism for the pleasures of open-ended interpretive possibility. Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s “Anti-Oedipus,” from 1972, rejected the static “daddy-mommy-me” triangle of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and argued that the unconscious was a site of exuberant creativity. Jacques Derrida, a student of Althusser and Foucault, developed deconstruction, a technique of “textual unravelment” which he used to reveal inconsistencies and gaps in the structuralists’ work. In 1966, Derrida attended a Johns Hopkins conference often cited as theory’s American début. There, he met and befriended Paul de Man, who would become deconstruction’s second most influential practitioner.
Though Eakin’s account of this intellectual lineage is impressively lucid, it is not always chronological, and its episodes can be hard to situate in time. The book’s short chapters have the feeling of notecards shuffled in search of an optimal sequence. Readers will find themselves introduced to the publication of Derrida’s “Of Grammatology” on three separate occasions. Yet one would be hard pressed to identify an order, or a structure, better suited to Eakin’s project, which tasks itself with explaining the work of no fewer than eight famously difficult thinkers while maintaining narrative cohesion.
Besides, for the gift of biographical detail, all is forgiven. Some readers will be familiar with the headlines of the Frenchmen’s life stories, which are often depressing. De Man was a bigamist, a con man, and a Nazi collaborator. Althusser strangled his wife, in what appears to have been a dissociative psychotic episode. Barthes died after being hit by a laundry van. Foucault, who frequented San Francisco’s leather bars, was rumored to have knowingly caught or transmitted H.I.V. at a bathhouse.
But Eakin’s reëmbodiment project also yields lesser-known facts, prosaic delights that Barthes might call “punctums.” Lacan was a “dandy and a seducer,” a lavish dresser scared of aging who held a “special interest” in mirrors all his life. Describing his wardrobe, Eakin writes, “He wore a shirt the color of cotton candy, a velvet-and-silk striped jacket, a black mink coat.” (Together or separately? Alas, Eakin doesn’t specify.) Deleuze also dressed sharp—his wife worked for Balmain—and he kept his fingernails unusually long. Foucault had a white Jaguar that he loved to drive fast. Lacan—another speed demon—once terrified the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s wife with his driving. In 1958, Sartre wrote “the initial script (ultimately abandoned) for a John Huston biopic about Freud.” While in grad school, de Man was the private French tutor to a young Henry Kissinger.
Eakin’s biographical approach allows her to draw connections that a more straightforward intellectual history might not. Take the influence of Lacan, which she maps across the lives of at least ten of his contemporaries. Five of his fellow-Frenchmen attended Lacan’s lectures at Sainte-Anne or at the École Normale, and two saw him for analysis—Barthes briefly and Guattari for years. (“For an additional fee,” Eakin writes, “Lacan sometimes allowed Guattari to drive him home, explaining that the experience was ‘part of the analysis.’ ”) After an injection of mescaline in 1935 left him with persistent visions of crabs, Sartre sought treatment with Lacan, then an unknown thirty-four-year-old in his first year of private practice. They concluded that his problem was a “fear of becoming alone,” Sartre later remembered, and the crabs went away on their own.
This approach also calls attention to the centrality of institutions in the Frenchmen’s personal lives—the prisons, asylums, hospitals, and schools that shaped them. Both Sartre and Althusser were prisoners of war in the forties, and both found their time in confinement salutary. The anxiety Sartre felt upon his return to Paris after his imprisonment provided the existential insight that freedom is in fact terrifying. Althusser likewise seemed to prefer the regimented life of the camp. It was there that he was introduced to Marxism, by another P.O.W., and the revelation of it changed him forever.
In less happy times, Althusser, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was institutionalized at Sainte-Anne. After one bout of depression, he received an alarming twenty-four electroshock treatments. Foucault was taken to Sainte-Anne by his father for an evaluation after a suicide attempt during his second year at the École Normale. Later, he brought his psychology students there to observe patients.
Guattari spent time in hospitals as a student and an analyst. Barthes had tuberculosis and “spent most of World War II in sanatoriums,” where, Eakin writes, “he was subjected to therapies that sound nearly as terrible as his illness.” Quoting Barthes’s biographer Tiphaine Samoyault, Eakin describes a three-month “reclining cure” that required Barthes to “lie at an angle to the horizontal for eighteen hours out of twenty-four, his lower limbs raised above the level of his thorax and his head, which made it difficult even to read.” Deleuze, another TB patient, had a lung removed in 1968.
But perhaps no institution loomed larger for the Frenchmen than school, where they spent much of their lives. Nearly all of them recalled their admissions and certification exams, known as the concours and the agrégation, as formative and terrifying ordeals. Derrida failed the concours twice before getting into the École Normale; Deleuze never passed, attending the Sorbonne instead. Lévi-Strauss spent hours before his agrégation violently ill from a drug a family friend gave him for his nerves. (“Morphine? Cocaine?” Eakin writes. “He never knew what, exactly.”) It’s a suggestive fact that Barthes, the most buoyant of the bunch, was functionally barred from attending the École Normale, owing to his TB. Perhaps the reclining cure, however unpleasant, was still less punishing than the École.
Eakin describes Derrida’s two years as a boarding student in a preparatory class for the concours as a nightmarish blend of prison, school, and sanitarium, replete with gray uniforms, barracks-like dorms, cold showers, and small, disgusting rations. According to his biographer Benoît Peeters, Derrida was “on the verge of succumbing” to madness there. But by then his most traumatic memory of school had already occurred: in 1942, at twelve years old, Derrida, who grew up in Algeria, was expelled from his school for being Jewish, and wasn’t allowed to return until after Algiers was liberated by the Allies. “The wound was of another order,” Derrida said, “and it never healed.”
These institutional experiences left their mark on the Frenchmen’s work. Eakin finds traces of them in Althusser’s repeated insistence that, as she puts it, “human subjects are not in charge of their actions or even their thoughts.” They’re visible in Foucault’s writing on the normalizing function of institutions, and in Deleuze and Guattari’s on schizophrenia. And they’re visible, she suggests, in Derrida’s preoccupation with binary pairs, such as inside/outside or center/margin, and in the attention he paid to their non-privileged terms.
They also suggest one reason for theory’s enduring appeal to college students: like many of the Frenchmen, most of them have never not been in school. The forces of normalization, containment, repression, and evaluation are constants in their lives. As far as they are aware—as far as they’ve experienced—there really is no outside. The picture presented by theory reflects the world that they know.
After college, Eakin got a master’s in comparative literature at the École Normale and started a Ph.D. program in English, but she dropped out partway through. She had “overdosed on theory,” she writes, and fled academia for journalism. In May, 1996, shortly after she joined the staff of Lingua Franca, a little magazine about academic life, it published a bombshell story by a physics professor at N.Y.U. named Alan Sokal. Sokal had submitted a satirical paper larded with jargon to the philosophy journal Social Text, which it accepted. When he revealed the prank, which became known as the Sokal hoax, critics of theory were giddy. The episode seemed to crystallize a broader turn away from theory, a growing consensus that it was pure chicanery.
Derrida, the last of the surviving Frenchmen, died, of pancreatic cancer, in 2004. Eakin was working at the Times, and an editor at the foreign desk asked her to look over Derrida’s obituary before it went to press. It struck her as a caricature of deconstruction, but “it seemed pointless, maybe even pretentious, to object,” Eakin recalls. She told the editor the obit was fine, and the paper ran it as it was, under the headline “JACQUES DERRIDA, ABSTRUSE THEORIST, DIES IN PARIS AT 74.” The resulting public outrage—more than three hundred prominent scholars and artists signed a letter in protest—felt like a sign that she had tipped too far in the direction of anti-intellectualism.
It’s tempting to read “The Frenchmen” as atonement for her betrayal—as penance for letting “ABSTRUSE THEORIST DIES” be Derrida’s epitaph in the paper of record. But the book is also a reconciliation longer in the making, an attempt by Eakin to broker peace between the theory of her youth and her adult profession. Inevitably, her efforts to translate theory into the language of journalism have their weak points. (“It’s the nature of simplification to be simple,” says the eyebrowless Thurston, in “The Marriage Plot.”) But her fidelity to the ideas is admirable, and the effort behind her patient explanations of, say, Derrida’s différance is moving. Theory may not have taught Eakin to live with ease, but it did teach her “a new way to think,” and its critical lessons have endured: “Be skeptical. Be alert. Pay very close attention. Beware political claims posing as timeless truths. Notice arguments that seem to boil down to this versus that, us versus them—neat binaries in which one term is championed at the expense of the other.”
And yet, because all bildungsromans must culminate in adulthood, Eakin’s move away from the specialized jargon of theory and toward journalistic plainspokenness is framed as a sign of her maturity. The cliché grates a bit. Must we think and write more like children in order to become adults? The book’s appeals to reader-friendliness can feel pandering: the bite-size chapters with their punchy titles (“At the Bathhouse,” “Sartre Gets a Drubbing”); the moral-of-the-story insertions about theory’s relevance to the Trump era; the high-level explanation of “de Man’s reading of Derrida’s reading of Rousseau” that ends with “Whew!”
Then again, a little hand-holding isn’t unwelcome. Even the Frenchmen didn’t always understand one another’s work. “I always had the impression” that, to followers of Lacan, “ ‘understand’ meant something different from what it meant to me,” Lévi-Strauss admitted. “I’d have had to read everything five or six times.” After receiving one of Derrida’s student papers, Althusser, his professor, said, “I can’t grade this, it’s too difficult, too obscure for the agrégation.” He gave it to Foucault, who was then an assistant professor teaching courses at the École. “Well,” Foucault said. “It’s either an F or an A+.” The final grade is lost to history. ♦