The Frenchmen

“Emily Eakin’s The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory argues persuasively … 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… . 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.” —Dayna Tortorici, The New Yorker

“The Frenchmen is a marvelous book. It’s gossipy and personal and completely fascinating, which is exactly what you hope for with this particular bunch of thinkers. All of the stories you half remember about the French postmodernists are here told in careful, lively, playful detail. This is intellectual anthropology as it ought to be: cafe gossip with the footnotes left in. It makes you wish you could take a seminar from Eakin and makes you miss those glorious days in graduate school when you spent more time drinking beer and talking about philosophy than writing or even reading the stuff.” —New York Times

“The Frenchmen, Emily Eakin’s new book about her encounters with post-structuralist ideas… . is filled with life. Every page contains evidence of deep research, an eye for telling details, and the pleasure that can comes from sprawling, sometimes consternating thought… . And to the extent that our lives often feel disembodied today—so much time spent staring at screens—Eakin’s approach is not just a refreshing way of explaining ideas, but also a reminder to readers that we are physical beings first… . In carefully parsing not only these men’s arguments but also their lives, Eakin is able to seduce us with their ideas… she lets readers glimpse the twisty paths these ideas followed, the historical currents that accelerated their spread, and the way they still thrum through our lives… . Eakin’s skill in distilling and then weaving these ideas together within a biographical context not only gives them new life; it also supports her argument that these lives are essential to the work. The Frenchmen immerses the reader in the thinking and feeling of the world that came before it, and it explains, through one particular writer’s experience, the world we live in now.” —The Atlantic

“An exquisite blend of gossip, memoir, and philosophy, of recondite ideas explained with admirable lucidity, as well as a chronicle of human folly. And, despite her eventual disillusionment with theory, Eakin persuasively argues that what once seemed to be the most esoteric of intellectual pursuits has in fact had a profound effect on American culture.” —Slate

“An entertaining hybrid of autobiography and intellectual history, it is outstanding not just for its lucid expositions of challenging ideas but for conveying viscerally what the encounter with them felt like in the early years of their stateside reception.” —Compact

“A spry intellectual history neatly blends with a memoir of studying modern literary theory… Eakin writes with admirable clarity of ideas, such as the ‘always already,’ the aporia, and the interpellation, and she mixes her understanding of such theories with nicely juicy bits of gossip … A fine account of the onetime primacy of French critical theory and its place in real life.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Masterful … an engrossing portrait … Eakin makes her obsession with these thinkers contagious.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A superbly engrossing adventure of ideas, tracing the lives and rivalries of thinkers who were anti-humanist in their theories, but all-too-human in their personalities. I loved Emily Eakin’s wry account of her own youthful intoxication with these writers, and of her disentanglement from them — even while she reassesses what they might still have to offer in these strange times. This will surely be my philosophy book of the year.” —Sarah Bakewell, New York Times bestselling author of Humanly Possible

“Rich, absorbing, seductive, The Frenchmen is an intellectual history that doesn’t leave out the body. Eakin’s own coming-of-age animates her masterful portrait of ideas that changed the world and the singularly eccentric figures whose lives were almost as remarkable as their thoughts. I loved this book.” —Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Homeland Elegies

“Who knew theory could be so much fun? Deliciously gossipy yet super-smart, The Frenchmen illuminates the eccentric lives behind the philosophies that blew a whole generation’s mind on both sides of the Atlantic. Emily Eakin’s sparkling prose lets us relive the thrill of their intellectual chase—and shows why it still matters. Refusing to settle for easy judgments, this immensely enjoyable book reveals the making of a new world of thought, where philosophy overflows into politics, sex, and art.” —Clare Carlisle, author of Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard

“Eakin delivers exactly what we want: a panoramic and intellectually wised-up chronicle of the High Theory with which France seduced America, plus all the High Drama behind it: rivalries, takedowns, political ructions, betrayals, drugs, madness, uxoricide, fraud (not all of it intellectual), and jouissance (not all of it sexual). It’s an opera of ideas, and an absurdly entertaining one.” —Jim Holt, bestselling author of Why Does the World Exist?

Emily Eakin is a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review. The Frenchmen is her first book.

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