The Seduction of the American Mind: Emily Eakin on Her Life in French Theory

“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 Distor