In the late 1980s, an eighteen-year-old Harvard sophomore named Emily Eakin fell under a spell. The spell was cast by a handful of French writers whose books were, by any ordinary measure, nearly unreadable: dense, self-referential, and often resistant to plain statement. Yet over the previous two decades these thinkers had quietly transformed large swaths of American academic life. Eakin’s first book, The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, sets out to explain how that happened. Her book is less an introductory course in “French theory” than the story of a brilliant, vain, endlessly quarrelsome intellectual family that spent forty years alternately worshipping and trying to destroy its own members, and of the author’s own youthful infatuation with the dense theories which they formulated.
Eakin, now a senior editor at the New York Times Book Review, writes with a journalist’s eye for scene, personality, and scandal. The book opens with a chapter titled “Derrida’s Pipe” and is organized thematically rather than chronologically, with sections such as “Murder,” “Madness,” and “Words.” That proves to be exactly the right approach, because with this cast of characters the ideas and the egos are inseparable. When it comes to theory (or “Theory”), then like every rebellion, these thinkers required a king to overthrow, and for postwar French thought that king was Jean-Paul Sartre. According to that blockbuster philosopher and his discipline of Existentialism, human beings are not born with a predetermined essence or purpose. Instead, we create ourselves through our choices and must take responsibility for the lives we make. In Sartre’s famous formulation, we are “condemned to be free.” By the 1950s Sartre had become more than a philosopher; he was France’s foremost public intellectual, capable of drawing crowds wherever he appeared. Which made him the obvious target. When structuralists rebelled against him, they weren’t attacking an obscure academic but the closest thing France had to a national conscience.Meanwhile, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss supplied the intellectual method that fuelled the rebellion. He argued that beneath the bewildering diversity of myths, rituals, and kinship systems lay common underlying patterns. Different cultures looked different on the surface, but their underlying structures operated according to the same principles. This would be the insight that would dominate what came to be called “Structuralism,” and then its “post” variety as well. Levi-Strauss’
work drew heavily on the earlier Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who argued that words do not inherently possess meaning. Instead, a word acquires meaning only through its relationship to other words within a language. Structuralism extended this insight beyond language itself. Rather than asking what a myth, ritual, or institution meant, structuralists asked what larger system is that makes that meaning possible in the first place. Nearly every major thinker in Eakin’s book borrowed this method before eventually turning it against someone they had once admired.
Inspired by Structuralism, the therapist Jacques Lacan transplanted these theories into psychoanalysis. Lacan argued that the unconscious is structured like a language and that our sense of self is not innate but gradually assembled through language, symbols, and desire. He was also, by virtually every account Eakin uncovers, an impossible human being. The psychoanalyst drove recklessly, treated stop signs as optional, and conducted patient sessions that could last five minutes or fifty, depending entirely on his mood. These increasingly eccentric methods led to Lacan’s expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1963, which with characteristic narcissism he likened to Spinoza’s excommunication from a seventeenth-century synagogue. Having embraced his status as an intellectual heretic, Lacan promptly founded his own institution, the École Freudienne de Paris. One of the book’s most satisfying ironies comes through one of Lacan’s own disciples. The theorist Félix Guattari underwent psychoanalytic training with Lacan starting in 1962 before later joining forces with Gilles Deleuze to write Anti-Oedipus, perhaps the most devastating critique of psychoanalysis ever produced by one of its own former insiders.
If Lacan was fascinated by madness, then Louis Althusser lived it. Intermittently institutionalized, Althusser nonetheless had the wherewithal to adapt structuralism to Marxism. His central insight was that ideology operates less through overt propaganda than by shaping the very way individuals understand themselves. Althusser coined the influential concept of “interpellation:” that is the understanding that ideology “hails” us, assigning us social identities that we unconsciously accept simply by responding. For a time, he became one of the world’s leading Marxist theorists, teaching generations of students at the elite École Normale Supérieure. Then tragedy overtook theory. Long plagued by severe mental illness, Althusser strangled his wife, Hélène, in 1980. Declared mentally unfit to stand trial, he later wrote a memoir portraying himself largely as another victim of the catastrophe. In his final years, Althusser reportedly wandered Paris introducing himself to strangers who had never heard of him.
Michel Foucault, perhaps the most widely read figure in the group, argued that power and knowledge are inseparable. What societies define as madness, criminality, or normality are not simply objective facts waiting to be discovered. They are categories created and enforced by institutions—prisons, hospitals, schools, asylums—that shape human behaviour through constant observation, classification, and discipline rather than overt coercion. His 1961 masterpiece, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, made him internationally famous. It also made him vulnerable.
In 1963 a young Jacques Derrida invited Foucault to attend a lecture, only to spend the hour dismantling Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes and arguing that his account of madness and reason rested on a fundamental philosophical mistake. Foucault was furious. The two men barely spoke for roughly a decade. When Foucault finally replied in print, in the famous appendix “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” added to the 1972 edition of Madness and Civilization, the exchange had become one of the defining intellectual feuds of twentieth-century philosophy. Eakin stages the quarrel as an intellectual prize fight, moving from a chapter called “Derrida Throws a Punch” to another, nineteen pages later, titled “Foucault Strikes Back.”
Foucault’s politics receive equally balanced treatment. He enthusiastically welcomed the early Iranian Revolution, only to watch events move in a direction few of its Western admirers anticipated. Later, in a very different setting, he immersed himself in San Francisco’s leather-bar scene and famously took LSD in Death Valley, describing the experience as one of profound philosophical significance, even while Eakin discusses the rumours that have long proliferated of Foucault possibly knowingly spreading the AIDS which ultimately killed him.
The only one among the theorists who can match Foucault in terms of reputation is Derrida. Born into a Sephardic Jewish family in French Algeria, Derrida always regarded himself as something of an outsider within French intellectual life. He became famous for developing deconstruction, a method of close reading that exposes the hidden assumptions and hierarchies embedded in texts. Deconstruction asks readers to notice how arguments privilege one concept over another—reason over emotion, speech over writing, presence over absence—while presenting those preferences as natural or inevitable. It proved to be a method capable of interrogating virtually anything, including the work of Derrida’s closest colleagues. Unsurprisingly, he accumulated an extraordinary number of enemies, most famously Foucault. Eakin is equally unsparing about Derrida’s personal life. She portrays him as an accomplished serial seducer whose affairs damaged several important relationships, including with a son born to a longtime companion whom he scarcely saw after infancy, only unexpectedly encountering him years later on a commercial flight.
Yet If The Frenchmen has a genuine hero, it is Roland Barthes.
Barthes took structuralist analysis beyond philosophy departments and applied it to everyday life. Advertisements, professional wrestling, fashion, even steak and frites became systems of signs revealing hidden cultural assumptions. His famous essay “The Death of the Author” argued that a text’s meaning is not fixed by its creator’s intentions but continually recreated by readers themselves. Unlike almost everyone else in Eakin’s story, Barthes seems largely uninterested in public intellectual blood sport. He simply kept producing original work, and people genuinely liked him—a rarity among this famously combative circle.
The strangest partnership which Eakin examines is that of Giles Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze was a philosopher steeped in the history of philosophy while Guattari was a practicing psychoanalyst, political activist, and veteran of Lacan’s circle. Together they produced some of the era’s most original books, especially Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Their central claim reversed one of psychoanalysis’ deepest assumptions. Whereas Freud and Lacan largely understood desire as arising from lack—from something forever missing that we endlessly pursue—Deleuze and Guattari argued that desire is fundamentally productive. Rather than expressing absence, desire actively creates relationships, institutions, and new forms of life. They also rejected psychoanalysis’ tendency to interpret nearly every problem through the lens of family relationships. Anti-Oedipus reads at times like an outright declaration of war against the psychoanalytic establishment, written by one of its former insiders. Their enduring metaphor was the “rhizome”: a root system spreading outward in multiple directions without a single trunk or centre. It became one of the most influential images in contemporary philosophy for thinking about knowledge, politics, and culture as decentralized networks rather than rigid hierarchies.
The book’s most devastating chapter belongs to Paul de Man, the Belgian literary critic who became the leading American exponent of deconstruction at Yale. Admired as a brilliant, enigmatic scholar, he seemed almost untouchable. Then, after his death in 1983, researchers uncovered articles he had written for a Nazi-controlled Belgian newspaper during the Second World War, including one unmistakably antisemitic essay. Even more damaging, they discovered he had spent decades concealing not only that history but also a Belgian conviction, entered in absentia, for fraud, forgery, and embezzlement—the real reason he had fled to the United States. For a movement devoted to exposing hidden assumptions and concealed histories, the revelation seemed almost unbearably ironic.
What elevates The Frenchmen beyond a straightforward intellectual history is Eakin’s insistence on showing these thinkers as flawed, ambitious human beings. Lacan breaks with Freud and is expelled from the psychoanalytic establishment. Althusser and Foucault build reputations partly by displacing Sartre. Derrida publicly dismantles Foucault, beginning a feud that lasts a decade. Guattari studied under Lacan before helping write the book that attacks Lacanian psychoanalysis at its foundations. The irony delights Eakin. A movement devoted to dismantling authority repeatedly recreated its own intellectual monarchies—only for each generation’s brightest disciples to overthrow the masters who had trained them.
Eakin’s larger point is that French theory never really disappeared. It simply escaped the university. Few people today read Derrida or Foucault for pleasure, but many have absorbed their assumptions without realizing where they came from.
Consider how we now read politics and the media. We are encouraged to ask not just whether a statement is true, but whose interests it serves, what assumptions it hides, what voices it excludes, and what power structures it reinforces. We have become instinctively suspicious of language that presents itself as neutral or “common sense.” We look for the ideology beneath the slogan, the hierarchy beneath the definition, the hidden bias behind supposedly objective categories. That habit of reading owes an enormous debt to thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and their contemporaries.
The influence extends well beyond politics. Literary criticism, history, anthropology, sociology, film studies, architecture, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural criticism all bear the imprint of French theory. Even debates over identity, representation, privilege, and the social construction of race, gender, sexuality, and normality are conducted in a vocabulary these thinkers helped create, even when their names never appear.
Of course, their legacy remains deeply contested. Admirers credit them with exposing invisible forms of power and forcing us to question inherited assumptions that many people had accepted uncritically. Critics argue that their relentless skepticism undermined confidence in objective truth, encouraged intellectual obscurity, and helped produce a culture in which every claim is treated as merely another expression of power or perspective. Whether one regards that inheritance as liberation or as a source of today’s polarization depends largely on one’s politics and philosophy.
Eakin wisely refuses to referee that debate. Her achievement is something more enjoyable. The Frenchmen earns the description its reviewers keep reaching for: gossipy, rigorous, and genuinely entertaining. For anyone curious how a circle of difficult philosophers in postwar Paris came to reshape the way generations of people read literature, interpret politics, and think about power, language, and identity, she has written an engaging and surprisingly accessible guide, revealing that behind some of the twentieth century’s most intimidating books stood an extraordinary cast of brilliant, eccentric, ambitious, and frequently impossible human beings whose rivalries were every bit as fascinating as their ideas.
