Slate Magazine67%
Toward a Theory 58%
By Laura Miller57%
7/21/2026, 3:13:31 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Hasty Generalization, and Framing Effect, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 43.5% saturation with 468 hits. Analysis detected 2,477 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,075 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 55.1% and a BS Rank of 58% (8,380 of 19,671 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 57.40% of the article peer group.
In 1994, while a graduate student in literary studies at Columbia University, Emily Eakin met another student in her program at a party on the Upper West Side.
She asked the woman which authors or literary period she concentrated on, and her classmate laughed.
“Oh, I don’t read books,” she replied.
“I just do theory.”
For anyone who wasn’t in or near academia during the 1980s and ’90s, this statement probably sounds nonsensical.
For anyone who was, it’s all too redolent of a time when many American scholars wrote and spoke in a manner outsiders found incomprehensible.
Eakin—who bailed on her Ph.D. in part because of conversations like the one described above, becoming a journalist and, currently, an editor at the New York Times Book Review—has written an account of that time and her own sojourn in the realms of structuralist and poststructuralist thought.
The result, *The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory*, is an exquisite blend of gossip, memoir, and philosophy, of recondite ideas explained with admirable lucidity, as well as a chronicle of human folly.
And, despite her eventual disillusionment with theory, Eakin persuasively argues that what once seemed to be the most esoteric of intellectual pursuits has in fact had a profound effect on American culture.
The major figures in structuralist and poststructuralist theory were all French, or French-adjacent.
(One of the most influential, Jacques Derrida, was an Algerian-born Sephardic Jew, and felt himself to be “a little black and very Arab Jew” in the eyes of the French.)
As Eakin acknowledges, for Americans some of the mystique of theory sprang from its Frenchness, and from the enviable status of intellectuals in France, where philosophers could become famous and, if fashionable enough, even considered sexy.
(She quotes a friend’s observation that “the French were philosophers because it got them laid.
We Americans never understood the erotic frisson associated with being a philosopher in France.”)
Eakin begins with Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existentialist philosophy, with its belief in a heroic individual constructing his own meaningful life, the structuralists rejected in favor of the idea that culture, specifically language itself, constituted a system of meanings in which all human beings are embedded and from which we cannot escape.
The structuralists and their heirs were shaped by continental philosophers—Heidegger, Nietzsche, Husserl—and by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as by Freud and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Many of them had connections to the Surrealists and such transgressive literary figures as Georges Bataille.
Several of the influential figures in this group started out as psychoanalysts, most notably Jacques Lacan, whose patients—from Eakin’s description of his high-handed and eccentric therapeutic practices—one can’t help but pity.
Speaking of Freud, *The Frenchmen* offers an account of the development of these philosophies that’s positively Oedipal or, more precisely, very much resonant with the “anxiety of influence” narrative articulated by the late Yale professor Harold Bloom (who, in his salad days, also dabbled in theory).
Over and over in this story, a brilliant upstart—Louis Althusser, Lacan, Michel Foucault, Derrida, Paul de Man—makes his reputation by standing up at some public event and brutally dismantling the theories of the reigning philosophe, a man he has previously claimed to admire and even revere.
One of Eakin’s chapters is titled “Sartre Gets a Drubbing,” and she likens the intellectual public feud between Foucault and Derrida to “a match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, or Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal: riveting—and too closely fought to judge the rightful winner.”
To any American peripheral to the enclaves of theory—and to quite a few inside them—such dramas were subdued if not downright invisible.
“Theory” appeared to be a daunting edifice of impenetrable words tended by acolytes who insisted that it was revelatory and even revolutionary.
You might, through hours of strenuous study, feel that you’d gotten a grip on some segment of it, only to have that understanding slip away without the constant application of concentration.
The professors who mastered it became “stars,” or what Eakin calls “academostars,” typically youngish and clad in glamorously edgy clothing, who were fought over by department heads and consequently paid extravagant salaries.
These men typically commanded almost cultish followings whose devotion seemed particularly ironic given that their philosophies, like so much of French intellectual culture, were obsessed with criticizing authority.
Eakin depicts her student self as dutifully struggling to deploy poststructuralist analysis in a series of academic papers, with only middling success.
By the time theory achieved its vogue in the U.S., it had become a phenomenon of literary and social studies.
(“With rare exceptions,” Eakin writes, “American philosophy departments wanted nothing to do with” Lacan.)
Yet, with several of her college friends, she became increasingly bothered by the way that reading highly abstract works of interpretation had supplanted actually reading the literary texts themselves.
Theory seemed unassailably ascendant in the academy, even when it came under attack from conservative critics, who confused it with the only somewhat related advocacy for “multiculturalism.”
Yet if theory turned out to be little more than a fleeting intellectual fashion, it would leave its acolytes with little to show for their scholarship.
While Eakin provides an excellent primer on the key structuralist and poststructuralist ideas through *The Frenchmen*, it’s tempting in the end to view the whole enterprise as a bit absurd, a sort of elaborate mirage that ultimately went poof.
But as the American academic Stanley Fish put it to the New York Times in 1994, “Deconstruction is dead in the same way that Freudianism is dead.
It is everywhere.”
Eakin argues that theory’s way of scrutinizing the world of words that swarms all around us has sunk in and, furthermore, for the good.
It showed us how to identify dog whistles and other rhetorical sleights of hand.
“It taught us,” Eakin writes, “a new way to think.
Be skeptical.
Be alert.
Pay very close attention.
Beware political claims posing as timeless truths.
Notice arguments that seem to boil down to this versus that, us versus them—neat binaries in which one term is championed at the expense of the other.”
I finished *The Frenchmen* wishing that some of these guys, however maddening, were around to weigh in on the alternate reality that is the internet, a realm of signs, symbols, and words that has, for some of us, almost supplanted the physical world itself.
I suspect they’d feel right at home, until they started taking the place apart.
Analysis
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