“Theory said, it doesn’t matter what you’ve read. It’s how you read.” — Emily Eakin on the seduction of the Frenchmen

When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the Eighties, there was a bewildering rage for Frenchmen. Foucault in history, Derrida in literature, Althusser in political philosophy, Lacan in psychology. Not that anybody could quite explain what any of them meant — which only made their ideas even more compelling. It was the seduction of the American mind, especially its elite campus version. Innocent times with forty years of hindsight.

Emily Eakin caught this Eighties fever for French theory at Harvard. Now an editor at the New York Times Book Review, Eakin has written The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory, which is both a confessional of her own seduction and a serious piece of intellectual history.

A self-described farm girl from Indiana — albeit one whose Francophile parents once left her waiting at a Paris nursery school because a Lévi-Strauss lecture went overtime — she fell for theory as the intellectual equivalent of a little black dress. It looked expensive, even off the rack, she confesses. For a middle-class Midwesterner, it seemed like a passport to Left-Bank sophistication. All you needed was the jargon, the black clothes and, in Eakin’s case, the opera gloves.

But her Frenchmen, Eakin warns, turned out to be a slippery bunch. Lacan was so difficult that professors cancelled their own classes rather than teach him. Althusser murdered his wife. Foucault’s histories were as much fiction as fact. Not even Derrida took Derrida seriously. These were the men undoing the “master narratives” while an enthralled generation of cross-legged young feminists in their little black dresses took notes.

And yet Eakin’s Frenchmen may have the last laugh. Their theory of language — an impersonal system requiring no human at its center — presciently describes today’s AI revolution. Foucault predicted that “man” would be erased like a face drawn in sand on the beach. Forty years on, that tide may be engulfing us all.

Five Takeaways

•       The Little Black Dress of the Mind. Eakin grew up in a family of Francophiles — one of her earliest memories is her mother arriving late to the Paris maternelle because Claude Lévi-Strauss’s lecture had run over — and arrived at Harvard as a middle-class kid from a middling Midwestern high school, painfully aware of the gaps in her education. Theory offered the shortcut: it didn’t matter what you’d read, only how you read. The cliché about the little black dress is that it looks expensive even bought on sale off the rack at Macy’s, and theory, Eakin says, was its intellectual equivalent. It was also, frankly, sexy — young professors in jeans lecturing on the masturbation of the comma in Henry James, as Lorrie Moore’s barely-parodic parody had it, and students dressed in black. Eakin went as far as the opera gloves.

•       System Replaces the Self. After the war, Sartre’s existentialism made every accurate thought an authentic act of resistance — a heroic message for a France humiliated by four years of Nazi occupation. But the postwar world was not being changed by individual actors, and Lévi-Strauss dismissed the whole business in Tristes Tropiques as “shop girl metaphysics.” Around the time the Berlin Wall went up, Althusser routed Sartre at the École Normale, and a new philosophy took hold, obsessed with vast impersonal forces: not humans controlling events but a structure — with language at its center. The moment that fascinated Eakin is that sixties moment when system replaced the self.

•       Difficult by Design — and Easy to Distort. A colleague of Eakin’s at the Times was once assigned Lacan’s lecture on The Purloined Letter; a few minutes into class, the professor cancelled it, admitting he didn’t understand the text he had assigned. That is the level of difficulty in question. Underedited and self-indulgent, Eakin the editor concedes — but each Frenchman left behind one bold idea worth the struggle, like Lacan’s mirror stage, in which identity is formed outside ourselves in an act of misrecognition. The difficulty carried a price: it made the work easy to parody, and conservative pundits handed the public a distorted picture. The Frenchmen never said truth doesn’t exist, Eakin insists. Their message was to beware political claims masquerading as eternal truths.

•       Slippery Politics, Awkward Pasts. Foucault, insecure about his thinning hair, shaved his head, ditched the suits, and by 1970 was in the streets with a megaphone defending prisoners, immigrants, and workers — and he was in San Francisco at the start of the AIDS catastrophe, which is reason to take his politics seriously. Derrida was temperamentally otherwise: nothing follows from deconstruction, as Stanley Fish put it, and the moment of silence his classmates held for Stalin at the École Normale was a bit much for him. The posthumous exposure of de Man’s collaborationist journalism hastened theory’s American demise. And there was the paradox Eakin only saw while writing the book: men undoing the master narratives, and a generation of feminists — herself included — enthralled to them. De Beauvoir was the indomitable exception, awarded second place in the agrégation by jurors who could barely decide between her and Sartre.

•       The Frenchmen’s Revenge: AI. When the chatbots got good, American linguistics went into a tailspin: Chomsky’s account of language as a uniquely human, embodied endowment cannot explain a machine producing sophisticated sentences. The structuralists’ theory — language as an impersonal system in which meaning derives from how words differ from one another — describes generative AI rather well, and scholars such as NYU’s Leif Weatherby are now calling for a structuralist revival to understand it. De Man called language a machine; Foucault wrote of the proliferation of authorless discourse; Eakin’s recent New York Times essay argues Foucault foresaw everything from AI to the deep state. The Frenchmen, she thinks, would be fascinated rather than appalled — and would remind us to be just as wary of AI’s language as of anyone else’s.

About the Guest

Emily Eakin is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. She has worked as a senior editor at The New Yorker, an ideas reporter for The New York Times, a fashion features writer at Vogue, and a deputy editor of Lingua Franca. Her features, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. A Harvard graduate with graduate degrees from Columbia and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, she lives in New York City. Her first book is The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory (Penguin Press, July 2026).

References:

•       The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin (Penguin Press, July 2...