The Frenchmen with Emily Eakin

A deep-dive into the personal lives of the famed 20th century French theorists (all men) with their newest biographer.

References and suggested readings:

• Emily Eakin. 2026. The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory. Penguin Press.
• Sarah Bakewell books
• Ross Doubthat. November 2, 2022. How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right. New York Times.
• James Miller. 2010. The Passion of Michel Foucault. Harvard University Press.
• John Guillory and Merve Emre. 2023. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. University of Chicago Press.
• Meghan O’Gieblyn. 2026. Will and Attention: A Memoir. Doubleday.
• Emily Eakin’s website, essays at NYT, Instagram

Transcript

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Lauren

Welcome to American Campus Podcast. I'm your host, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. On today's episode, we're talking about our favorite 20th century French theorists with their newest biographer. Emily Eakin is a senior editor at the New York Times Book Review. She's here to talk today about her newest book called The Frenchman from Penguin Press. Emily, welcome.

Emily

Thank you so much.

Lauren

So this is an ambitious book. You weave together eight biographies of French thinkers from throughout the 20th century to show us that they were all kind of nuts, and some were evil, right? You tell us that Althusser strangled his wife. Paul de Man was an enthusiastic Nazi collaborator and an opportunist and a fraud. Foucault quite likely spread AIDS to several people because he didn't believe it was real. They were all philanderers of some sort with multiple children that they refused to claim.

But through all of the sort of crazy biography, you also go pretty deep into their theories, which I quite liked and found very helpful. So where I want to start the conversation is by asking why, alongside these crazed theorists, you're also a character in the book? You're the ninth biography. So perhaps you can say a word about your intended audience in light of that choice.

Emily

Sure. So I think of this book as one for the intellectually curious but definitely general reader. It is not a book of theorists of theory. It contains some readings of theory, but it is also a lot of storytelling. And my direct inspiration for the book was actually a book by Sarah Bakewell, a British author whose very smart but accessible and entertaining books about philosophers are just amazing to read. And she has said, in her 20s, she said, you know, my idea of a fun night was staying home and reading Heidegger. And now decades, and now decades later, I'm as interested, if not more interested in the people and their lives as their ideas. And I feel exactly the same way. 

And so I'm writing the story of these thinkers partly in order to recontextualize their ideas within a historical and biographical context. One I should quickly say they often disavowed. Most of them were quite suspicious of biography and of history. And so in that sense, I am trying to put the human back in the anti-humanists. And the reason I include myself as a character is I wanted to capture the seduction and thrill of theory at that time, the way it sort of enacted its spell on me, like so many students of the period. And I was really fortunate that I kept journals while I was in college and graduate school and I was able to draw on those and hopefully really convey just how thrilling and exciting theory seemed at the time.

Lauren

And just to add some context to that, so you were an undergrad, not a literature major, but what were you studying at Harvard in the nineteen eighties?

Emily

I actually was a literature major. That was the name that the college gave for a sort of theory-oriented undergraduate degree. This was a small concentration. We didn't even use the word major. Harvard always has its own terminology. And so literature concentrators were expected to know a foreign language and theory. And it was the theory major.

Lauren 

Yeah, interesting. And then and then you move to Columbia for graduate school to get into a career in journalism. I actually want to pinpoint that because I do want to come back to sort of maybe your own intellectual revolution away from the abstract to the, to the more concrete. Sure, perfect. 

So before we get there, do you see the US obsession with theory in the 80s and 90s, sort of your own heyday as a college student as a turn away from or towards Marxism? And I'm asking that question specifically because a lot of times on the show we talk about right-wing critiques of higher ed, and conservatives often put theory and Marxism in the same bucket. So how do you see that?

Emily

It's true. Marxism and Marx has become a kind of all-purpose slur, I think, for the right. And it's a good question because of course the French thinkers at the center of my book, almost to a person, were steeped in Marxism in their youth. I mean, for a couple of decades after World War Two, the French intelligentsia embraced a cult of Marx.

Althusser in particular was a committed Communist Party member his entire life. He called his work, although it was theory, he called it class struggle in the realm of theory. But by the time the structuralist wave came to the United States, let's say in the in the late ‘60s and into the ‘70s, it's clear that theory, what became French theory in the United States, had lost a lot of the Marxist dogmatism. This kind of real attention to language, you know, as the means by which power, ideology, bourgeois capitalist society sort of enacts its hold on the population. That that is there, that concern is there. But in the United States, what theory really becomes is kind of more generalized, a kind of generalized mode. I think, I really think of reading, reading with suspicion and skepticism toward authority. So not as part of an agenda to foment class revolution, but really to expose sort of contradictions and structures of power. So in that sense, I think theory and Marxism, as experienced by students in my generation in the ‘80s and ‘90s, were really distinct things.

And I even would go so far as to say that the way Marxist cultural critique entered the United States campuses was really through German thinkers, not the French.

So when I was in college, Frederick Jameson, perhaps the best known Marxist cultural critic in the United States who recently died, he was actually at Harvard teaching a class on the Frankfurt School. So unfortunately I didn't take it because I didn't know how interesting these German thinkers were, these German Marxist cultural critics like Adorno and Walter Benjamin and Horkheimer. So there was a strain of Marxist cultural critique, but I think it was much more associated with the Frankfurt school than with the Frenchman.

Lauren

Which is interesting too because a lot of what the Frenchmen were responding to was German theory, right? They were responding to a lot of the thinkers from the nineteenth century, not just Marx, but also even the early twentieth century. Like a lot of them are writing about Heidegger.

Emily

Right, right. They're responding to the phenomenology, and a lot of them sort of worked and were steeped in in the Germans, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, the three H's, and sort of taking their metaphysical concerns and and really drilling down even deeper into these sort of foundational problems. So getting away from sort of the concreteness of history and class struggle to look at reality, being, truth, all the even more foundational questions for them.

Lauren

So why do you think that theory is still attractive to students? You know, most of these men have been dead, most of the Frenchmen, we’ll say, have been dead since the seventies, eighties, nineties. What is its appeal to students today? Why didn't it just stay an episode in intellectual history in the twentieth century?

Emily

You know, Stanley Fish, who is a critic whose work I really love, he has an ability to be both incredibly smart but also memorably pithy about theory. And he says deconstruction is dead in the same way that Freudianism is dead. It's everywhere. And similarly, the feminist scholar Jane Gallup said recently, I read in an interview, she said, she said, you know, theory isn't gone, it's become foundational.

Which she noted is a paradoxical development since so much of theory was anti-foundationalist in its outlook. And so there's this sense in which the insights of theory that were so exciting for me and students in my generation are sort of embedded in the culture and are second nature. The idea that language is unstable or slippery, and that meaning isn't on the surface, or that ideology is embedded in language. I get the sense that for a lot of students in their 20s today in college, in graduate school right now, these ideas are sort of self-evident. But as you say, at the same time, theory does seem to continue to exercise this allure for students. And I think I have a college-age daughter myself who at her college has attended Fouc-arties, which are apparently, yeah.

I had to ask exactly what they were. Apparently parties in homage to Foucault. I think Foucault in particular is influential on both the right and left right now, which is interesting. But I do think that theory still gives students a kind of membership in an elite group, a kind of access to what feels like a secret knowledge or code.

And it gives a kind of patina, I think of intellectual sophistication to a to a generally sort of critical outlook, to a kind of skepticism that feels kind of intuitive. And it gives a kind of rigor, kind of analytical rigor and method to that intuition that what's on the surface is not all that that's really there, or that there's other layers of meaning and import. And so I think that's what theory's attractions are probably.

Lauren

I wonder if you could very briefly– you write about the right’s use of French theory to talk about the COVID lockdowns. Can you give us just a brief overview of what the claim is from the right?

Emily

Yeah, so Foucault is the thinker who's really central to that move right now. And I'm not the only person who has noticed this sort of embrace of Foucault by the right. Ross Douthat, who until recently was a conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column right during or sort of at the tail end of the pandemic about the Foucault realignment, where he too noticed that Foucault.

Foucault's theory about kind of the insidious, invisible ways power operates on a population, specifically his Foucault's idea of biopower, which is sort of the use of experts like psychiatrists or medical professionals to sort of control or manipulate a population through. Life in what appear to be life enhancing techniques or policies was embraced by the right as a way of analyzing and resisting mask mandates and vaccine mandates. These were seen as policies of population control that masqueraded as protective, life-giving, life-affirming science. And so I read several articles by people loosely affiliated with the right, suggesting that Foucault was a very helpful thinker for those who wanted to sort of resist these mask mandates and the kind of exercise of biopower by liberal regimes, including our own government.

Lauren

I always find it really interesting that the right’s intelligentsia, the right’s PhDs, are very steeped in leftist thought and it's interesting how it gets used. In this case, the instance that you talk about in the book, this is from a historian at the University of Chicago, Blake Smith, who would have been a PhD student at the time, or was he faculty? Do you remember?

Emily

I think he might have been a postdoc. I think he certainly is that now and he's not the only one. Thinkers associated with the left in Italy, for example, were also making the same argument. And other thinkers here, here on the right, Foucault has become somebody that I think the right sees as an attractive thinker at the moment. And because what his theories of power suggest is that whatever power is hegemonic might be manipulating us, in its population in an insidious way. So if you see liberalism as that sort of hegemonic power and you feel oppressed on the right, then Foucault becomes very attractive, which is ironic given that, you know, his activism during his lifetime, especially during the 70s, was all on behalf of leftist causes.

Lauren

Yeah, I can see where Foucault would be like a sort of a libertarian god or a god a god for libertarians, right? For his anti-statist ideas.

Emily

Yes, yes. This idea that the state is always insidious. There is this reflexive suspicion of of state power that can be generalized to any regime or manifestation of it.

Lauren

So when we opened the conversation, I wanted to sort of throw out for readers that like these people lived really crazy lives. And I was very surprised and very happy with the epilogue of the book, in which you come down on the side of, you know, theory might be helpful actually, you know, despite what these despite how it may have been used or the personal lives of the people who sort of come up with these ideas.

It actually helps explain a lot in our current moment, in light of the way that MAGA, for example, uses language to construct what they want reality to be. I say I was surprised by that because the first 350-400 pages of the book are about how these men are not good people. So I guess my question for you is this is sort of the Michael Jackson question, should readers separate theory from theorists? How do how do you think about it? 

That's my read. You can tell me if I got that wrong.

Emily

Well, no, you know, I think everything is subject to interpretation. Your read of their character is interesting. I mean it does depart from my own. I would not say that any of them were inherently evil men or bad people. I think that their lives were very complicated.

I don't think we have evidence that Foucault, for example, consciously spread AIDS when he knew he was HIV positive in the bathhouses in San Francisco. It's really unclear what he knew about his illness and when he knew it. And James Miller, who I think is his most perceptive biographer, really tried to investigate this question. There were rumors, right, that Foucault had contaminated and infected other men in the bathhouses in San Francisco. And Miller could find no evidence that this was true. I don't want to sound like an apologist for these men when I say that Althusser, he did strangle his wife. He was severely bipolar and no doubt was in the throes of a psychotic episode when he did strangle her. He murdered his wife. That's not to excuse him. He was deemed unfit to stand trial and was sort of mandated to a mental hospital instead. And so I think what I'm trying to say is I think it's difficult to pass easy judgments on these men. Paul de Man, another infamous case, someone who was shown posthumously to have collaborated with a pro-Nazi newspaper in Belgium. Very, very, very problematic.

Lauren 

But more than just collaborated, right? I mean, you sort of underscore, he stole 1.5 million francs from people. He was running financial schemes.

Emily

He did, he did, he did. And again, I don't want to excuse any of their behavior. I think they were all brilliant thinkers. And I hope that that's clear in my book. And I do think sort of contextualizing their thought within their biographies actually leads to some sort of fascinating suggestive insights.

For example, Derrida's experience with exile and exclusion as an Algerian-born French Jew who never felt Algerian, never felt really French. He was Pied-Noir, never even felt particularly Jewish. That it's very interesting to think about his experience with respect to his fascination with binary oppositions. This is a big thing for deconstructionists like Derrida, the way terms that seem really key in Western philosophy for Derrida. The big term, one set of terms that he was obsessed with had to do with speech versus writing. That one term is always privileged, in this case, speech. But according to Derrida, and he shows this brilliantly in his work, the less privileged term is never completely excluded, but always sort of is entangled with and haunting this supposedly privileged term.

And so this is just an example of a kind of intellectual thesis that I felt was illuminated by the biography in interesting ways. So when I get to the epilogue and I say these thinkers are really important, their influence continues. It's not so much to redeem their behavior, but to show the ways in which I do think their insights about how language operates, how ideology is embedded in language, is really powerful, if obvious to us today. These were revelatory insights.

And then there are other ways. I mean, Foucault's work on surveillance, for example, seems so prescient given the ubiquity of surveillance technology in our culture today. and so in all kinds of ways, I think that their work continues to be really important. And yes, we can separate the theory from the theorists, but it's also instructive to read their work in light of their lives and the larger historical context.

Lauren

Yes, this is a pro context show. On that note, I have a question about, this is a craft question, a writing question, throughout the narrative, you toggle back and forth between past and present, like for example, the book begins in sixties, seventies, eighties, and then we move back to Sartre. So we're in the thirties, and then ICE will pop up. And then George Santos pops up. So what was the decision behind toggling back and forth between past, present, but then even within the past, toggling back and forth between the decades?

Emily

You know, I think I really wanted to, there are eight lives, first of all. This is a book in which I'm biting off probably more than I should have. And I somewhat arbitrarily circumscribe this group of thinkers. One could also add other thinkers. I guess I've been dinged a bit for not talking more about the women theorists like Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cisoux, Luce Irigaray. I mentioned them in the book, but I don't go into great detail. There are other theorist, Jean Baudrillard, for example, Paul Ricoeur. One could really expand the cast. And so I had, I didn't, I knew I didn't want to tell a linear narrative. That was out of the question when I'm dealing with eight lives that overlap, that connected and departed from one another and merged. And so we have places of overlap and disconnect.

I knew I would have to move around in time. I would have to show how the revolutionary events of May ‘68 in Paris affected the different thinkers. And so I do circle, there's a lot of circling in the book, and I knew I needed a more thematic structural organization. And I think that allowed me to also intervene and signpost for readers places where the relevance of something in the past to a present moment just seemed necessary to point out. And so the ways in which Paul de Man, for example, who comes to America leaving, trying to leave behind, fleeing a criminal past, as you point out, he committed fraud in addition to collaboration during World War II, trying to leave that behind and start over in America was reminiscent for me of George Santos, someone I think readers will remember because he's recently been in the news, someone who left Brazil actually with criminal charges pending against him and reinvented himself and became a prominent person, much as Paul de Man did in the United States. 

And so though those were moments of connection that were sort of irresistible, and I felt fun. And interesting to point out. History, I suppose, is circular in that way, right?

Lauren 

I would not have connected George Santos to Paul de Man. So I'm glad that you did. I mean I thought it was really interesting. And to your credit, honestly, I didn't think there was a gendered component that was lacking. I mean you're writing, you know, authors make decisions about who they're writing about. And the entire middle section of the book talks about gender and there's gender laced throughout. I mean, because everybody's in conversation with Freud, I didn't find it lacking.

Emily

Well that's that's good to know. That's good to know. I think when I decided which theorists I would focus on, it really came down for me to the ones who had dominated my own education. And they weren't women, interestingly, even though I had the the theorists I took classes from at Harvard. Harvard's two big theory scholars were both women. And that occurred to me only later when I was writing the book that it must have been really hard for these women who represented the cutting edge in literary criticism. They brought Harvard into the theory age. They were also women coming to an institution that was dominated by men. And so I labored to understand the master thinkers and they were men. So that's how we ended up with these eight guys.

Lauren 

One of the things I really want to ask you about, this is a culture wars question, but we talk about often on the show how since the 1970s, the university in the US has  undergone a structural collapse. and that's only intensified since the 2008 recession, also since COVID. Do you place theory as part of this longer process? Or where does theory fit in this longer process?

Emily

You know what I think it's really, I mean, really many, many variables are playing out to sort of undermine our academic institutions. I mean, right now we have the federal government basically kind of choking off some of our our biggest and best universities, choking their finances to punish them, right? For following independent lines of thought, basically.

Where theory fits into this though, the way I see it is that theory helped slow down or operated as a break in a very long-term slow decline in the humanities. And so when theory comes to the United States through literature departments, literature departments being the portal through which it entered campuses typically in the ‘70s, but especially becoming powerful in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it sort of allowed humanities departments to kind of cloak themselves in this kind of patina of rigor and scientificity and technique.

All of these qualities that seemed essential to the survival of the humanities at an age of STEM becoming ascendant. And so Paul de Man is the subject of a famous reading by John Guillory, who makes this argument basically that Paul de Man’s theory, with its emphasis on rigor and technique and objectivity, a kind of clinical element to it, helps justify a kind of humanities approach at a moment when the culture is really shifting towards kind of technical, bureaucratic ways of thinking and doing and you see the rise of a kind of what he calls a professional managerial class. And so students who, you know, might have done close readings of Hamlet, you know, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, that no longer seems so impressive. But if you can show a kind of technical special knowledge and expertise, you were more competitive in the workplace. And so the kind of theory, I think theory sort of helped slow down the slow decline of the humanities. 

And you know, now we see all kinds of data suggesting that fewer and fewer students are English majors, right? Although I'll add one caveat to that, just recently we've seen that you know, philosophy may be having a comeback, that sort of AI is now undermining and eroding some of the kind of power around say computer science as a major and that that sort of a turn to back toward the humanities, towards disciplines like philosophy may become more and more attractive as AI kind of erodes the human in some of the more scientific fields.

Lauren

Yeah, I really enjoyed what you had to say at the end of the book about LLMs and where the structuralists can be helpful in understanding the limitations or, or just describing them, describing how they work and what they say about our larger society.

Is there a story that you want to share for listeners from the book?

Emily

Yes, I'll tell you, one of the episodes that I found most fascinating to research involved Derrida, who in 1981 took a trip behind the Iron Curtain. He went to Prague. He had volunteered to go on a mission to Czechoslovakia where his wife had Czech ancestry. And he worked with a foundation that sent scholars to deliver samizdat lectures and bring books to dissidents.

And so Derrida agreed to do this and he flew to Prague. And the whole time he's there, he has the distinct sense that he's being followed wherever he goes. And he's getting more and more nervous. But he does his job, he appears at the apartment where he's to give this samizdat lecture to a group of dissidents. There are about a dozen people assembled. And he gives this lecture. Apparently, it's on Descartes.

We don't have a copy of what he said. But his lecture was apparently greeted with silence for many minutes until finally someone in the crowd speaks up. It's a priest from an underground church, and he says, you know, what good is this method of reading, this deconstruction for those of us who live in a totalitarian society?

Unfortunately, we don't know what Derrida's response to this question was. But I love this, I love this anecdote because I think it really captures the gap between what deconstruction was trying to do really as a method of reading, right? Of reading contradictions and beneath the surface. And this effort in the United States, to use theory as a political weapon. Really, there is a disconnect, there's an incompatibility. Deconstruction is not intended as the foundation for a political movement, right? It's a critique of foundations in general. As Stanley Fish, my favorite Stanley Fish says: nothing follows from deconstruction.

And so this is only half the story. It goes on. It's an incredible episode where Derrida leaves this lecture, this apartment. He's very nervous. He decides to cancel his second lecture that he's supposed to give. He goes to his wife's relative's apartment to hang out until it's time for him to fly back to Paris. He goes to the airport and he's immediately pulled aside by the police who rifle through his suitcase, slice open the lining, and expose some white powder and arrest him for drug trafficking. So he's been framed, but he's thrown into a jail cell and ends up having to spend the night in this dirty jail cell near the airport in Prague. And the whole thing becomes an international incident. And he does eventually get out after interventions by the French state. And it's an incredible story and it was one of the most fun to research.

Lauren

I enjoyed how many episodes there were very similar to that. I think there's one pertaining to Sartre where these men are, are doing something illegal or something, you know, revolutionary, something that is anti-state, and they just get a pass. Like someone jumps in and says, who is it? It's not de Gaulle. Who is it? Who's the French minister at the time that's like, you can't arrest Voltaire?

Emily

Right, right, right, right. Sartre is such, he's such a sort of worshipped hero of French society that when he's resisting and protesting against the Algerian war, de Gaulle says you cannot arrest Voltaire. He is Voltaire for that generation of French people. But to be clear, Derrida had not broken any laws. He had been framed.

He had been framed and the Czech police had no idea who he was and were shocked when the French, you know, the French foreign ministry calls the Czech ambassador to come, he's been summoned to the office of state and told you must release this philosopher and the Czech ambassador is utterly baffled has never heard of Derrida, doesn't understand why the one the president himself is upset, but Derrida is released and returned to Paris.

Lauren

Yeah, lucky him. Well, unlucky him, and then lucky him. Going back to the discussion of gender, at the beginning of the book and at the end of the book, you very briefly mention how trans people fit into structure? Do you want to say anything about what any of these thinkers might have said about gender fluidity? Or if they did say anything in their own times.

Emily

You know, I don't think any of them could have anticipated the rise of a population of transgendered people in the world or in the United States, let alone the kind of political football that this, you know, this idea has become, right? Stoked by the right as part of our contemporary culture wars. But I think most of them, I know that Foucault, for example, believed, at least, he said to those who asked that, you know, gender and sexuality are fluid. And that, you know, again, this idea of being classified and organized and labeled was in general something he totally resisted. So it's hard for me to believe that he wouldn't have been completely supportive of transgender people having, existing, having rights, living their lives the way they wanted to. And Lacant, too, for all of his Freudian dogma transposed to the realm of language, he saw the patriarchy founded on what he called the phallocentric logic of the symbolic order as arbitrary.

So there's nothing, he got you know, there was nothing inherent about our biology that dictated our fates or our genders, but our society, the way society was organized, the way language was organized, that's where the constraints were imposed. And so I think Lacan too would have been a fan of the rise of a movement that said biology and gender are not inextricably attached to one another, right? And that there it that gender is a fluid concept. 

I can't speak for all of them. They lived a long time ago. So this would have been, this would be all very new and radical to them, but for the most part, I think they would have been supportive.

Lauren 

Yeah, I think so too. Well, thank you so much. There’s so much more we didn't talk about. You just mentioned Lacan. We didn't even get into Lacan and some of the other major characters of the book. So the lots for readers to continue to look forward to when they read this big 400 page book.

So can you tell us, now that the project is finished, what are you reading now?

Emily

I just read a wonderful memoir by a writer I really like, Meghan O’Gieblyn. I think the book comes out in October. It's called Will and Attention, a title that she takes from an essay by Simone Weil, another French thinker who I mentioned in passing in my own book. And Meghan O’Gieblyn memoir is about, well, it's really, it's a very philosophical meditation on will. The kind of complex associations with that word, free will, freedom, or willpower, force, and discipline. And in interwoven with these philosophical reflections is an account of her own struggle with alcoholism, which came as a total surprise to me. And her spiritual seeking, her effort unsuccessful ultimately to convert to Catholicism. So it's a very original and stylish and beautifully written book. very sophisticated. I loved it.

Lauren

Sounds great. And it comes out in October of 2026. Yeah, I'll link it below and then listeners can pre-order it. I think that's enough time to pre-order. Well, thank you so much. How about your work? How can I know that you are a book reviewer at the Times, but do you have any other forthcoming big projects that listeners can anticipate?

Emily

I do not. As an editor at the book review, I am allowed to write. And so now that my own book is finished, I hope I'll be doing more writing for the New York Times and for the book review. And that's probably the best place for readers to look for me.

Lauren

Okay, perfect. Well I'll link to your homepage at the Times and also to your website. Do you have a social media presence?

Emily

You know, I had a much better life off social media, but I did return when my book was about to come out. And I so far have used Instagram just for shameless self-promotion. I don't know what else I'll be doing there, maybe not a whole lot, but at least that.

Lauren

Okay, perfect. We'll get your Instagram and people's feeds and that way they can keep up with you there too. Emily Eakin, thank you for this great discussion. and thanks for the great book.

Emily

Thank you so much, Lauren. 

Lauren

And thanks, listeners. Check out the show notes to find The Frenchman and all the other references from our conversation. Thanks, Patreon supporters, for helping with the cost of the show. You can help us out for free by sharing this episode with someone or leaving a review. Another big thank you to the Albert LePage Center for History and the Public Interest at Villanova University. And as always, thanks, producer Fletcher. See y'all soon.