Emily Eakin’s new book, The Frenchmen, offers a fresh perspective on the philosophers who defined post-structuralism. During the late 20th century, thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes rose to prominence by arguing that human systems and language were farcical. Eakin, an editor at The New York Times, revisits her own academic past to examine how these men rose to power and how their ideas eventually fell out of favor in the university setting.
The book functions as part memoir and part group biography. Eakin moves away from the dense, antihumanist nature of the work to focus on the personal lives of the philosophers themselves. She explores how their experiences as prisoners of war, their struggles with identity, and their personal tragedies shaped their abstract theories. By grounding these big ideas in lived experiences, Eakin shows that the author is never truly dead.
Eakin recounts the rise of theory on American campuses in the 1980s, where these texts served as a badge of countercultural identity. She describes the rigor and allure of the work for students who felt adrift. However, she also tracks the decline of these movements, noting moments like the Alan Sokal hoax which eventually signaled the end of the movement’s dominance in academia.
The text serves as a reminder that we are physical beings, not just minds trapped in an abstract world. As we face new challenges regarding information, surveillance, and the definition of truth, Eakin argues that returning to these thinkers provides a useful lens for the present. By re-embodying these philosophers, she demonstrates that their work still influences how we view freedom, social control, and our current environment.