The Frenchmen Or, My Life in Theory, by Emily Eakin

Expand

The Frenchmen Or, My Life in Theory, by Emily Eakin

Philosopher Paul de Man implied that there was no continuity between language and experience. Perhaps language is the only experience for which humans are wired, and we are trapped in its Matrix. The Belgian-born academic was one of a dozen major Francophone figures who seized American literary studies with what was called Theory. One of de Man’s sycophants praised him as a connoisseur of “nothingness.” Is human agency an illusion?

De Man’s fall came fast after archivists found how he employed language during World War II. He wrote for a collaborationist newspaper in Nazi-occupied Belgium, including antisemitic reviews. The paper’s editor was sentenced to death after the war while De Man slipped away to a successful career in America. Were his theories nothing more than a smokescreen or a self-justification?

Like a virus, Theory spread through humanities programs in the ‘80s, threatening to cripple the enterprise from within. Emily Eakin, a Harvard student in those years, caught the bug and lived to tell all in The Frenchmen Or, My Life in Theory. She was attracted to the intimidating difficulty of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, de Man and the gang—their cultlike inscrutability, the lure of seeming cutting edge (i.e. superior) to her peers and the Francophilia of it all. The Theorists occupied the place once held by the Existentialists, with a terrible difference. The Existentialists called on human potential. The Theorists could be understood, if understood at all, as stringently antihuman.

Eakin is a better, livelier writer than most of the men (they were mostly men) whose lives and work she describes. The New York Times critic playfully tells their stories through hers, recalling her exposure, fascination, disillusionment and ongoing engagement. There are many “What was I thinking?” moments as she grapples with what the Theorists were thinking.

Even at Theory’s zenith, there were detractors. Most famously, feminist academic Camille Paglia denounced the Theorists in a pungently worded assault. She described Lacan as “a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula,” Derrida’s forte as “masturbation without pleasure” and Foucault as “one of the dullest, most frigid and constipated theorists of sex ever.” By Eakins’s biographical accounts of those men, Paglia wasn’t far from the mark. They appear thoroughly unlikable and maladroit despite the public adulation they received. Most were given to depression, perversity, suicide and madness. Louis Althusser strangled his wife and was judged unfit to stand trial. The unconventional Marxist lived in fear of being exposed as an intellectual fraud. He never read the second and third volumes of Das Kapital.

Was it all bad? Eakin makes their theories clearer in hindsight than they seemed at the time. The Theorists shared a belief in the power of language to mold consciousness, even if they sometimes doubted than anything existed outside of words and their syntactical structures. While guilty of stretching historical facts to fit his ideas, Foucault had profound insights into the mechanics of social control. Eakin argues that Theory shifted the paradigm, increasing awareness of how contingent our ideas are on prior assumptions.

True enough, but hasn’t this encouraged the spread of “alternative facts”? Eakin points to the current administration’s war on words, scrubbing “bias,” “climate change” and “gay” from government websites. She asks a scary question: Are the Large Language Models of AI Foucault’s nightmare of social control made real?

Get The Frenchmen on Amazon here.

Paid link