Theory’s Rise and Fall  

Over recent years, a number of books have offered a delightful path into exploring the development of European thought in the twentieth century. The subject, when taken purely in terms of ideas, can prove abstruse and inaccessible. When analyzed as the response of real human beings to real situations, drawing on a tradition of European thought, a clarity emerges, often seasoned with amusing anecdotes of the rivalries, petty and grand, that shaped the interactions of those who helped to form the modern mind. 

Sarah Bakewell set the standard with At the Existentialist Café, her study of the intertwined lives and thought of Sarte, de Beauvoir, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and Aron. Now, Emily Eakin has written an excellent volume that also addresses French thought. In The Frenchmen, or, My Life in Theory, Eakin starts with Sartre and carries the story through to Derrida, focusing on the development and impact of Theory. Her work is learned, thoughtful, and most entertaining, replete with helpful exposition of the various theorists as thinkers and illuminating tittle-tattle about them as people. (Who would have imagined that, when staying at hotels, Lacan would insist that his silk underwear should be sent out and laundered by hand? Or that he ended his career only in the third person, a habit I had previously thought was restricted to superannuated heavyweight boxers?) Her narrative has two more fascinating facets: first, she weaves in her own story—from being mesmerized by Theory as an undergraduate to her current attitude toward it, one that might be characterized as appreciative but critical. Second, she focuses particularly on the reception of Theory in the United States. 

The story begins with the displacement of Sartre and the existentialism he represented by a rising set of new thinkers. These thinkers replaced his emphases on the individual and on freedom with attention to those things that lay behind the construction of the individual. Among them, the most prominent were to be Althusser, Bataille, Barthes, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, then Derrida and Foucault. With them, the Cartesian ego was plunged into new levels of complexity. Structuralism made the self a systemic construct, determined by a web of relations within which individual self-consciousness existed and by which it was determined. Eventually, this gave way to post-structuralism, with any notion of meaning being destabilized and endlessly deferred. Individual significance—a central preoccupation of the earlier generation of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty—came to appear an illusion as the spirit of negation tore down everything that presumed to present itself as solid. 

There were considerable differences among them. Althusser was an eccentric reader of Marx; Foucault was the great opponent of anything vaguely Hegelian. But what they all shared in common was the central place they gave to language. For each of them, language was not a means of reaching for the truth, but rather, a cage that itself constitutes reality, or a slippery, deceptive thing that had the appearance of stability but was slippery, manipulative, opaque, and elusive. After the trauma of the Occupation, when existentialism offered a useful means of discovering personal significance, post-existentialist thought reflected a Europe where the very possibility of individual significance was increasingly problematic. Structuralism and then post-structuralism provided philosophical rationales for the malaise. 

What is striking is how Theory became the means for scholars of modest renown in France to become what Eakin dubs “academostars” in the United States. It is not that intellectuals could not be celebrities in France—the YouTube footage of Sartre’s funeral demonstrates far otherwise—but America granted the likes of Derrida, de Man, and Foucault special status. This, in turn, raises the interesting question famously posed by Edward Said of what happens to a theory when it travels to a different context. The French theorists covered by Eakin all experienced the Occupation. It is quite understandable that the travails of Europe in the twentieth century provided fertile soil for the questioning of received values, the nature of power, and even the possibilities of meaning and truth. Transposing those onto a pre-9/11 America, marked by materialist consumerism and a confident belief that it was the shape of the future, even the Hegelian end of history, is interesting. And in America their adoring disciples in the academy generally lacked their deep background in the history of Western philosophy, often masking this lack with a standard academic trick: hiding their ignorance under a surfeit of impenetrable jargon. 

One way of understanding the ready reception of Theory in the U.S. was that it offered an exciting way of revitalizing the humanities, which had become exhausted and irrelevant. Eakin notes that the scholar John Guillory made a strong case for such a view. But I would suggest another, perhaps more plausible, possibility: for all its origins as a nihilistic function of Europe’s catastrophes, Theory in the U.S. allowed for a playful thumbing of the nose at authority that appeals to the anti-authoritarian and democratizing impulses that have always been part of American culture. And ironically, as Eakin notes, it created a situation where subsequent generations did not feel the need to read the great texts of literature as the Masters of Theory had read—and deconstructed—them on their behalf. It did not revitalize the humanities, but rather disemboweled and fragmented them.   

One question the book does not really address, but that needs to be raised, is the relationship between the personal lives of intellectuals and the ideas they peddle. And when those intellectuals have, like the subjects of this book, reshaped vast swaths of the university curriculum, the question becomes pressing. These are not people whose personal lives are easily separable from their work. They were not rocket scientists or engineers who happened to have exotic sex lives. Many of them were preoccupied with what would traditionally be called the darker aspects of existence: suffering, pain, violence, death, as with Bataille and Foucault. And many of them indulged in these things in their real lives. With the exception of Deleuze, all of Eakin’s chosen theorists were either womanizers or promiscuous homosexuals.  

This does not invalidate their thinking any more than Caravaggio’s murderous violence discredits his paintings, but, to apply some of their own thought to themselves, one wonders how much of their thinking was really designed to liberate them for indulging their sexual impulses. Lacan is a good example: his self-absorption and self-indulgence made me wonder if his deliberately rebarbative and sexualized patois was designed to allow him to (putting it bluntly) get laid as often as possible. And their practical interests scarcely ended with conventional promiscuity. Eakin notes that Foucault campaigned for the abolition of child sex laws but does not mention an (in)famous January 1977 open letter in Le Monde defending the actions of three men facing a criminal trial for having had sexual relations with minors. It was signed by Barthes, de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and Sartre, though not (despite claims to the contrary) Foucault—an impressive who’s who of French Theory. It says a lot that the serially adulterous Derrida and the bigamous philanderer Paul de Man were two of the more conventionally libidinous.   

Of all the figures Eakin discusses, this question of thought and life has typically been asked of Paul de Man, who turned out after his death to have been an anti-Semitic Belgian collaborator with the Nazis as well as an accomplished financial fraudster, a bigamist, and an absent father—in short, a sociopathic fake in every area of his life. But de Man has faded from view. Today, the question should be pressed most sharply on Michel Foucault, the theorist of most continuing relevance, and still (by some reports) the most cited thinker in humanities publications.   

Many of us first encountered his work through the important scholars who drew upon it. For me, it was Quentin Skinner, the intellectual historian, and Charles Taylor, the philosophical analyst of culture. But as Eakin indicates, Foucault’s fingerprints are everywhere, from literature to medicine to postcolonial theory. His consistent opposition to power in his own lifetime tended, by virtue of the politics of the sixties and seventies, to ally him generally though not exclusively with the left. Post-COVID, he has proven useful to the right, his concept of biopower standing in judgment of the left’s use of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. And now, with the advent of AI and other technological developments, the question that preoccupied Foucault—the abolition of man—is once again a pressing existential concern well beyond the classroom. Foucault looks set to remain relevant. 

But strange to tell, Foucault provides a rather extreme example of the kind of person that his acolytes among post-colonial theorists despise and debunk. According to his erstwhile friend, Guy Sorman, Foucault engaged in pedophilia. Like Gide and Wilde before him, he was a privileged, educated white European male from an affluent background who allegedly traveled to Africa to pay to rape young African boys in graveyards. And yet he continues to be one of the most widely cited theorists in academic literary circles. This goes well beyond the “benefit of clergy” that George Orwell pinpointed as the reason why an artist such as Salvador Dali was exempted from the moral codes applied to ordinary people. In our age, not all of the culture makers enjoy such exemptions. Lesser academics have lost their careers for sexually harassing students: certainly wicked behavior but not typically criminal and not the equivalent of child rape.  

Did he do it? The details seem almost too lurid to be true, and some have sought to deny the claims. But what his defenders have failed to acknowledge is that the alleged behavior is consistent with the amorality of his thought and with what we do know of Foucault’s fascination with sexual transgression and power. And the academic establishment has destroyed people for less while choosing to grant Foucault a pass, even though the alleged behavior seems consistent with his thinking about sexual behavior. He is what the French call a monstre sacré, a public figure of such renown that he is untouchable. For all of his many insights and contributions to cultural analysis, it shames academia that such a man still enjoys high status among intellectuals, and it demands that we face the question of how his personal predilections are connected to his intellectual contributions.  

The arc of Eakins’s own relationship to Theory parallels the fortunes of Theory in wider academia. Mesmerized by it as a young student, she has come to see its limitations, just as academia has done, even as aspects of it—e.g., its hermeneutic of suspicion—remain helpful tools. Take Foucault as an example. As Said, by no means a hostile critic, observed, his theories cannot account for historical change or allow for any notion of improvement or progress. And yet who in real life, given the choice, would not choose incarceration for a few decades over being executed by dismemberment for a failed assassination attempt, as was the case with Robert-François Damien? 

It is worth noting one aspect of the story that would be missed if Eakin were not as interested in the real lives of her subjects as she is in their thought. Toward the end, she tells of how the later Foucault came to value friendships. It is ironic, given that the premises of his thought would surely have precluded him from giving a theoretical account of friendship that did not reduce it to questions of power and manipulation. Nietzsche, his antecedent in the analysis of power, is never less persuasive and more absurd than when he tries to explain gratitude as a form of revenge.    

Perhaps here we see why Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human—e.g., love, altruism, friendship, gratitude—that fully reflect the human experience. Like so many forms of adolescent iconoclasm, Theory worked well for a while in the classroom, especially among young people with little experience of life. But it ultimately proved unworkable in practice. 

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