“I fucking love Foucault. I fuck with Foucault hard,” enthused Supriya Ganesh, star of The Pitt, in a recent interview with New York magazine. Ganesh, who uses she/they pronouns, never felt comfortable with rigid gender and sexuality labels, and Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume I showed her how these categories have in fact varied across cultures and through history: “I think this idea of defining sexuality is very new—or at least that’s the argument he’s making … it really illuminated a lot of that for me.”
Ganesh was unwittingly providing fresh evidence for the central argument of The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, which proposes that a small group of dead twentieth-century intellectuals are “crucial for understanding the world we inhabit today.” Written by Emily Eakin, a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review, The Frenchmen focuses on eight French or French-speaking theorists (Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man) who, she argues, “permanently alter[ed] how we think not only about bedrock philosophical ideas but about the role of language in shaping those beliefs and everything else.”
Eakin’s Frenchmen are an eclectic group, differing in interests, politics, and methods. Two were practicing psychoanalysts. Most were academics, working in fields including philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, history, and comparative literature. They wrote on topics as varied as schizophrenia, prison architecture, photography, Edgar Allan Poe, and (in Barthes’s case) their mom. What unites them, according to Eakin, is their emphasis on systems, as opposed to individuals, and their attention to the complex and contradictory ways that language operates. Instead of taking for granted (as the existentialists did) that people are autonomous free agents defined by their choices, they wrote about the ways people and texts are created and constrained by powerful yet unstable structures of knowledge and language—an idea that resonates in our era of inescapable algorithms and artificial intelligence. (“Chatbots frighten us,” Eakin writes, “to the degree that they make literal theory’s suggestion that thought does not require a human thinker.”)
“Deconstruction,” an analytical method developed by Derrida, came to define French theory and is at the heart of Eakin’s book. She defines it as “a style of reading” that “took apart” a text and left it in pieces, showing how it was undone by its own internal contradictions. A common deconstructive move is to show how the binary terms that a text’s argument depends on—for example, speech versus writing—are not actually opposed after all. In classic Derridean fashion, Eakin structures her book around an oft-repeated binary between “theory” and “real life” that she sees as ripe for deconstructing, contrasting the Frenchmen’s “stringent antihumanism” with their all-too-human lives; academic theory with real-world historical developments; and her own personal tendency toward hyperintellectualism with her desire for real-world experience.
For the young Eakin and her cohort, theory was more than a field of study—it was a radically innovative mode of thought enveloped in mystique and glamour, whose leading lights were treated like international celebrities and conducted themselves accordingly. At the same time, Eakin’s immersion in theory seemed to cut her off from everything else, including herself. This binary approach to intellectual history and memoir is elegant and symmetrical. But it also sometimes feels forced—like a straw man conjured up only to be toppled. Is it really necessary to think about a “life in theory” as an opposition on the verge of collapse? If theory is truly as illuminating as Eakin argues, there ought to be a less reductive, less formulaic way to bring it to life.
French theory found its way to the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, at a tumultuous time for American higher education. Baby boomers had arrived in college en masse, and campuses were roiled by protests against war, racism, and sexism—an environment conducive to new approaches to knowledge. Though French theorists were often trained in philosophy, in the United States their ideas found a welcoming home in literature departments, which were due for a shake-up. Cold War–era lit departments had often cultivated a soft nationalism, in which texts were valued for their democratic, humanistic, or Western ideals. The popular “New Criticism” approach to reading presumed that literary texts were unified and self-contained works of art, transcending their historical or political context. Literary education was often an exercise in appreciation and canon-consolidation: Students took classes on Major English Poets or The Great American Novel to learn how to properly revere literature as “major” or “great.”
Theory brought a welcome blast of iconoclastic energy to the reading process. No text was immune to structural analysis or deconstruction, no matter how supposedly great it was. No text was untainted by history and politics. At a time of increasing skepticism and cynicism, theory was appropriately disillusioned and disillusioning. And French theory’s roots in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics brought a new sense of rigor to the study of literature and culture just as the prestige of social sciences was soaring.
Eakin highlights concepts from French theory that seem prescient, even prophetic, in 2026, such as Foucault’s critique of “the panopticon,” an eighteenth-century prison design in which incarcerated people are constantly visible from a central watchtower and thus learn to proactively police themselves—a supposedly enlightened form of social control that creates a more coercive, internalized kind of domination. Today, as employers monitor our keystrokes to ensure peak productivity, and Palantir, Amazon, and ICE team up to track immigrants across databases, the panopticon is a strong contender for the defining metaphor for our age, reminding us of the sinister side of inescapable surveillance.
Eakin also persuasively suggests (following media scholar David Gunkel) that Barthes anticipates problems posed by AI-generated writing in his essay “The Death of the Author,” which argues that a text’s meaning resides in its readers’ interpretations, rather than in its author’s life or intentions. Barthes was frustrated with the limitations of traditional modes of reading that relied on parsing what the author meant; these approaches are obviously irrelevant to writing generated by machines, and given the infinite influences that shape any piece of writing and the variety of ways it can be interpreted, perhaps all texts—not just auto-generated ones—are best understood as a collective cultural creation, rather than as the sole intellectual property of one singular mind. And like Supriya Ganesh, Eakin celebrates French theory for laying the groundwork for contemporary attempts to rethink gender and sexuality beyond the binary.
At times, however, Eakin overstates her case. She sees French theory as a nearly universal cause or explanation for modern phenomena, from the multiplicity of fashion subcultures to the recognition of neurodivergence in schools. She views the Trump administration’s erasure of words like “equality” and “climate crisis” from government publications and websites as an instance of a “dawning awareness of language’s determinative unstable force” in the wake of theory—but it’s unclear why theory gives us more insight into this kind of state censorship than Orwell’s 1984. She sums up theory’s intellectual legacy as a set of core commandments: “Be skeptical. Be alert. Pay very close attention. Beware political claims posing as timeless truths.” While it’s difficult to argue with these admonitions, they are hardly unique to theory.
Even when she’s focusing on academia, Eakin tends to give the Frenchmen too much credit. She writes that French theory exposed “omissions regarding gender, race, or class,” without giving enough consideration to the homegrown student protest movements that led to the founding of African American and ethnic studies programs and established race and gender as worthy objects of study. She uses the terms “theory” and “French theory” almost interchangeably, largely ignoring the vast world and influence of theory beyond France, including the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School, the Combahee River Collective, and postcolonial theory. And her “Frenchmen” framing gives the erroneous impression that French theory was essentially an all-male endeavor. Aside from a brief parenthetical stating that her eight men were “arguably among the most influential in the United States and certainly the ones who figured most prominently in my education,” Eakin doesn’t explain why she decided to exclude theorists like Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva from her main lineup.
Though French theory wasn’t the whole story of American intellectual life in the late twentieth century, it was a significant one, and it managed to maintain its influence and mystique for decades, appealing to fresh generations of scholars. As a Harvard undergrad in the late 1980s, Eakin was fascinated by how some students used theory as a secret language (“It was their common currency, their secret code, their drug”). She speaks of herself as coming “under the Frenchmen’s spell,” and is explicit about theory’s erotic allure: “Theory was cool. Theory was French. Theory was also, strange though it might sound, sexy.” Her tone vacillates between light mockery of her youthful passion and a rapturous re-creation of it. Though Eakin is alive to the absurdities of her adolescent obsessions, she also evokes the magic of the past. The first pages of The Frenchmen make theory-infused lit students seem as irresistibly glamorous as classics majors in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.
During the fierce culture wars of the Reagan era and beyond, theory offered a sophisticated alternative to the stodgy traditionalism championed by bestselling academics Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon (1994). The Blooms (no relation) ironically helped to make theory a household word by blaming it in part for impending cultural collapse. By the 1980s and 1990s, theory had made the leap from academia to pop culture, and the term “academostar” was coined to describe its high-profile practitioners. Time magazine covered Foucault fandom with the headline “MICHEL FOUCAULT HAS A GROWING CULT.” Derrida even reached Hollywood: In 1997, Woody Allen made a movie called Deconstructing Harry.
Eakin captures the air of celebrity that hung around these figures, and the accompanying heightened sense of drama. In her telling, the Frenchmen are like a Real Housewives cast, hobnobbing with one another at parties, pursuing chaotic sex lives, and imbuing their sometimes arcane disagreements with a distinct sense of drama. “Two had children with women who were not their wives. A third was a bigamist,” she writes. “One was obsessed with knots. One swindled his friends and was sentenced to prison. One dabbled in S/M.… One killed himself by jumping out a window. One murdered his wife.” At various points, I found myself caught up in the intrigue, excitedly texting obscure tidbits to old grad school friends: “Did you know Paul de Man was Henry Kissinger’s French tutor?!” “Did you know that Avital Ronell had an affair with Derrida’s teenage son?!” “Did you know that during the Occupation Lacan was sleeping with a pregnant woman in the German sector and a pregnant woman in the French sector and he’d shuttle between them?!”
Lacan was my favorite character—seemingly a scammer for the ages. Among other things, he invented bite-size, under-10-minute therapy sessions, claiming these mini-sessions prompted psychological insights that longer sessions did not. Mini-sessions also conveniently meant he could see dozens of patients a day, and as a result he earned about a million dollars a year from his practice alone. But he was an amateur compared to Paul de Man, whom Eakin calls “a George Santos avant la lettre” and whom a colleague described as prone to “lying, evasion, fantasy, greed, possibly even theft.” This list doesn’t even include the most sordid parts of his past, which include the fact that, as a young man in Belgium, he wrote for a Nazi newspaper.
The scandalous news of de Man’s Nazi ties broke in 1987, after his death, and it was arguably the beginning of the end of the heyday of French theory. Critics seized on it as proof that deconstruction and moral relativism went hand in hand. It posed a question also raised by Eakin’s biographical approach to the Frenchmen: What is the relationship between a person’s life and their ideas? Though Eakin occasionally draws connections between the Frenchmen’s biographies and their thinking—speculating about how Barthes’s ill health or Derrida’s outsider status as an Algerian Jew affected their writing—most of the biographical material she shares is disconnected from the intellectual story she’s telling. It is life not as a key to theory, but life for its own sake.
I entered graduate school not long after Eakin left, and I witnessed the starstruck aura she describes, but I personally experienced French theory as more of an academic obligation than an erotic object. I went to hear Derrida speak when he came to campus because not going was unthinkable. I read various volumes of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality in more classes than I can count. And I attended the first day of an oversubscribed, standing-room-only seminar taught by one of Derrida’s former students. Avid grad students were sitting on the floor and lining the walls, hoping to be chosen to return the next week. I decided to switch to a less fashionable class where I knew I’d have a seat at the table.
I dutifully studied the theory that saturated my syllabi and found it more or less instructive. My grad school notes are full of panopticons, interpellation, deconstruction, and jouissance. I genuinely appreciated that the Frenchmen’s compulsive wordplay gave me a license to make terrible puns in the titles of my seminar papers. (Apologies to my past professors!) But the very things that charmed Eakin about French theory—that it was esoteric, exclusive, elite—were off-putting to me. When I ran across a disparaging reference to “mean, Derrida-quoting grad students” in Molly Crabapple’s latest book, I nodded in recognition.
The theory heads in my grad program struck me as obnoxious and condescending—and not in a sexy way. There was the very rich student who was rumored to organize his closet alphabetically by designer, and who liked to tell classmates that the “D&G” logo on his Dolce & Gabbana tank top stood for Deleuze and Guattari. He once publicly mocked me for participating in a protest against an anti-gay marriage organization because gay marriage was not heteronormative and should be banned! Then there was my glum, Eeyore-like classmate who complained about everything, including the injustice of having to read literature (as opposed to just theory) for his general exams. This was baffling to me: Why get a Ph.D. in English if all you wanted to read was philosophy?
Toward the end of the book, Eakin cites a conversation along similar lines as the catalyst for her decision to drop out of grad school and break up with the Frenchmen. When she asks a student in her program what field of literature she studies, the student laughs and replies, “I don’t read books. I just do theory.” If theory was a drug, this moment was Eakin’s bottoming out. She writes:
I felt something like panic wash through me.… Surely, theory needed an object, a relationship with something else—another text. It didn’t exist in a vacuum. I went home deeply agitated.… Theory had become a dangerous substance to me, too abstract, too all-consuming, too removed from everyday life—too removed from lived experience.
That summer, I went to work at The New Yorker as a fact-checker.
For Eakin, theory was too rarefied and out of touch. A job in legacy literary journalism was by comparison a bracing reality check.
Several decades later, The Frenchmen is Eakin’s attempt to bridge the gap between life and theory: to merge the theory head she once was with the journalist she now is. But despite her big, impassioned claims for theory’s explanatory power, Eakin the narrator seems oddly removed from the ideas she describes. She self-deprecatingly describes herself as a theory “survivor,” and sometimes seems to align herself with a skeptical reader who finds theory burdensome or abstruse.
If Eakin’s personal relationship to theory often feels apologetic or ambivalent, Jordan Alexander Stein’s Avidly Reads Theory makes a less detached, more wholehearted case for a “life in theory.” Like Eakin, Stein fell in love with theory in college, and like Eakin, he cops to some youthfully cringe excesses. (I don’t know which was more painful to read about: Eakin finding herself “so wracked by sobs I could hardly talk” after receiving critical comments on a Lacan-inspired paper she wrote her junior year, and noting in her diary that her adviser obliged her “with a fifty-minute phone call at 11 p.m.” to talk about it (!), or Stein spending literally years revising his seminar paper on Kant: “Kant threatened to be my Waterloo.”)
But Stein never has to disavow or detox from his love of theory, in part because for him and his friends, theory is always obviously connected to their real, embodied world. (Or should I say it was “always already” connected?) Eakin informs us that during her time as a student—despite the anti-apartheid encampment in Harvard Yard—“politics seemed to have gone dormant, its focus elsewhere.” Theory offered Eakin and her friends a kind of countercultural feeling in the absence of political commitments or action. For Stein, on the other hand, “theory” meant not just “the Frenchmen” but the much more diverse and capacious universe of postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory, and it translated directly into political speech, protest, and anger: “An education in feminist theory … gave us a means to refine our own senses of the ideas and politics we cared about.… [W]e contemplated it with raised fists and even more raised voices. We yelled. We fought. We seethed.” Instead of a youthful phase to leave behind, theory for Stein was a practical preparation for real life.
This promise of an everyday, real-world existence made possible and purposeful by anti-authoritarian ideas is arguably theory’s most important legacy for our time. Though it’s mostly absent from The Frenchmen, lately I’ve been catching glimpses of it elsewhere, from Stein’s account of his feminist awakening; to Joseph Osmundson’s new memoir, Spawning Season, and its searching reimagination of parenthood via queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz; to Supriya Ganesh’s Foucault-inspired celebration of her transformed sense of self. Unpretentious and urgent, testimonials like theirs show how still-radical cultural theory can continue to combat all the oppressive old orthodoxies about gender, sexuality, and power that keep endlessly reemerging in our daily lives like Whack-a-Mole, refusing to disappear or die.
