“Existentialism was increasingly passé—a naïve relic of ‘Descartes and the Enlightenment’”…

The Men Who Made Theory French 

...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... 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/03/the-frenchmen-emily-eakin-book-review#rid=9385c9fa-074d-4b1d-a0b4-36fe6bc3a75c&q=dayna+tortorici