THE FRENCHMEN

A spry intellectual history neatly blends with a memoir of studying modern literary theory.

In the Reagan years, literary theories imported from France were all the rage at Harvard and other campuses, “a symbol, however small, of intellectual nonconformism…that marked you as a member of the counterculture, different from—and critical of—the docile horde.” Much of that theory was barely comprehensible, courtesy of intentionally (it seemed) opaque philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, the last of whom once wrote, “No language can say the truth about truth, since truth is grounded in the fact that truth speaks and that it has no other means by which to become grounded.” Eakin, who shifted to journalism but retains a soft spot for the theorists, traces the history of such thought to forerunners, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss, to say nothing of Karl Marx. Their successors both drew from and rejected them, with Althusser, for instance, criticizing Sartre for perpetuating “a bourgeois conspiracy” in his humanist insistence on the sine qua non of freedom. Eakin writes with admirable clarity of ideas, such as the “always already,” the aporia, and the interpellation, and she mixes her understanding of such theories with nicely juicy bits of gossip: Althusser murdered his wife, de Man was a Nazi fellow traveler, Roland Barthes was run over by a delivery van in what some suspected was a deliberate assassination. And, she adds, the French philosophers’ attention to the slipperiness of language and meaning has proven a spur for the conservative backlash against the humanities. All the same, she concludes, “maybe theory didn’t teach us how to live with ease, but it taught us a new way to think”—especially, and with skepticism, about supposed alternative facts and “political claims posing as timeless truths.”

A fine account of the onetime primacy of French critical theory and its place in real life.