How French theory captured the American mind
The roots, rise and heady influence of the intellectual movement that swept US universities and sparked the early ‘culture wars’
In 1994, Emily Eakin, then a graduate student in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, was considering her options. In her captivating new book The Frenchmen, an elegant combination of literary memoir and intellectual history, Eakin, who is now an editor at the New York Times, revisits her decision to abandon her doctorate. She’d read a study which showed that too many literature PhDs were competing for too few academic jobs. But there was another, deeper reason for her disenchantment. “The clincher,” she writes, “was theory. I had had enough of it.”
“Theory”, the name given in the US to an intellectual movement that emerged in France in the 1960s, would change the face of the humanities in American universities and in the process become a casus belli during the early skirmishes in what were later dubbed the “culture wars”.
Eakin, who first fell “under the Frenchmen’s spell” as an undergraduate at Harvard, traces theory’s origins to the structuralist revolution in the human sciences, which, she asserts, was “really two revolutions in one”. First, the structuralists replaced Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist notion of a self imbued with agency and the capacity to choose with the idea of the impersonal system. And second, they anointed language the master system above all others. They took from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure the view that language is a system without positive terms, in which the meaning of words derives entirely from their relation to one another.
The increasingly rancorous battles over the significance and implications of theory in the 1980s weren’t confined to the academy. In 1987, for example, the conservative philosopher Allan Bloom topped the bestseller lists with The Closing of the American Mind, a book that railed against the corrupting effects of “jargon derived from the despair of European thinkers”. Today, Bloom’s jeremiad continues to influence many of those who criticise the state of American universities from the political right.
But for students like Eakin, “deconstructing” the fundamental assumptions of western metaphysics was heady stuff, even if you had only a “glancing familiarity” with the great works of the philosophical tradition. So why, having fallen so comprehensively for theory, did she come to regard it as a “dangerous substance” to be renounced or forsworn?
The Frenchmen attempts to answer this question. And in doing so invites us to see Eakin’s own story as somehow symptomatic of the experience of what the critic Nicholas Dames has called the “Theory Generation”. (It is ironic, incidentally, that this cohort should have seen its college years frequently depicted in a form — the realist novel — that theory did so much to “denaturalise and demystify”, as Dames puts it. Think of books such as Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections or Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs.)
At the same time as tracing her own journey through theory, Eakin also seeks to “re-embody” its master thinkers, “to recover the hidden human element” beneath their often austere and impersonal theorising. Onur Erdur tries to do much the same in his more conventionally scholarly book, School of the South, on the “colonial roots” of French theory.
For both Erdur and Eakin, it is of decisive significance, for example, that the philosopher Jacques Derrida should have been raised a Jew in what was then French Algeria and that he was expelled from school in 1942 after the collaborationist regime in Vichy introduced a quota for Jewish pupils. Derrida himself said that the episode caused a “disorder of identity” that he never quite got over. He, like several of his contemporaries, was forever a kind of outsider.
Eakin’s “Frenchmen” are a varied bunch. Alongside Derrida are the philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the Marxist thinker Louis Althusser, Félix Guattari, a psychiatrist and Deleuze’s sometime co-author, and the literary theorists Roland Barthes and Paul de Man.
The latter was in fact a francophone Belgian who’d emigrated to the US after the second world war. But his close friendship with Derrida is central to the story of theory in America, and therefore to the story Eakin wants to tell here — as is Derrida’s sometimes fraught relationship with Foucault.
By the mid-1970s, French theory had set up outposts on both American coasts: Derrida at Yale, where de Man, who chaired the department of comparative literature there, had arranged a visiting post for him; and Foucault at Berkeley in California, where he became an enthusiastic patron of San Francisco’s gay bathhouses.
Eakin argues that Derrida and Foucault represented two divergent paths for theory in America: “Along one path stretched rhetorical analysis, obsession with paradox, and the scrupulous close readings proposed by Derrida; along the other, investigations of political and social power in the form of ‘discourse’, championed by Foucault.”
The latter, in particular, seemed to carry with them a borrowed “whiff of rebellion”, lingering traces of the “insurrectionary mood” that had reigned on the Paris barricades in May 1968. But, in truth, this was surrogate politics, a kind of revolutionary cosplay that had little actual political effect.
As for Derrida and de Man, what looked like an obsessive preoccupation with arcane linguistic subtleties began to attract the charge of nihilism or worse — and not only from traditionalist literary scholars or more sober-minded philosophers of language. William Bennett, secretary of education in the second Reagan administration and a particularly doughty culture warrior, also had it in for the so-called Yale school of deconstruction, which he claimed encouraged a “perverse embarrassment . . . about the achievements of our civilization”. No matter that, as Eakin points out, Derrida’s interest was in “reading, not trashing, the canon”.
Worse was to come. In 1987, a Belgian researcher discovered more than a hundred articles that de Man, who died in 1983, had written for a collaborationist newspaper during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. At least one of the pieces was explicitly antisemitic.
This discovery stunned de Man’s colleagues and students, and was particularly traumatic for Derrida, who attempted a tortured but ultimately unconvincing reckoning with what his friend had written as a young man. For theory’s enemies, the revelations simply confirmed everything they’d thought all along about the pathologies of deconstruction. “The timing of the de Man revelations,” Eakin observes, “could not have been less auspicious for theory’s advocates — or better orchestrated by America’s newly ascendant political right”.
It must have been tempting, in the face of all that, to write a repentant latter-day version of the cold war communist apostasy memoir. But it is to Eakin’s credit that she doesn’t really go in for what Erdur calls “theory bashing”. Her book ends not with an obituary for a “god that failed” but with a provocation — that, for all its excesses and its broken political promises, theory’s legacy of “vigilant questioning, of scrupulous attentiveness to language’s complexities and contradictions” might not be as “antithetical to the common good” as many of its critics have charged.
The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin Penguin Press $35, 496 pages
School of the South: The Colonial Roots of French Theory by Onur Erdur, translated by Andrew Brown Polity £25, 288 pages