In Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, an earnest young woman heads to Brown to study literature. Once there, she finds that novels are MIA. In their place: the poststructuralist theories of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Her peers are bewitched. “Derrida is my god!” one declares.
This satirical scene frames Emily Eakin’s The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, about the author’s own misadventures in a theory-crazed, Ivy-league English department. Eakin, who dropped out of Columbia’s doctoral program in the late eighties and now reviews books for The New York Times, asks why she and so many others fell under the spell of a program with an anti-humanist bent—that is, with so little interest in personal identity or human intention as signifiers of meaning. Mostly, she concludes, it was the yearning to feel smart and transcendent. “The allure of poststructuralism was precisely its abstraction, which…I associated with rigor and purity of thought—with truth.”
There’s much to admire about this book, especially for others of us who caught the bug—in my case, as an English doctoral student at University of Maryland in the 2010s. The Frenchmen presents dense theory in plain prose, and it recognizes how American academics haphazardly uprooted theory from its French context. It’s also colorful. Readers find Derrida at a urinal smoking his signature pipe and an eleven-year-old Jean Paul Sartre disavowing God at a bus stop. In these moments, the book succeeds in humanizing the men who tried to disappear into arcane ideas, mostly about the instability of language and other signifying systems.
The Frenchmen’s major shortcoming is that Eakin simultaneously disembodies her subjects. Time and again, she ignores their theological inheritances. Portraying Sartre and others as having left religion behind, rather than transposing religious language into a philosophical register, she fails to apprehend theory’s moral valences. This turns out to be a consequential mistake. By confining herself to ideas about language, authority, and power, Eakin concludes that theory broadly failed to improve society—or worse, paved the way for Trumpism. In reality, theory has flourished in the very realm arguably giving Trump the greatest fight: the Church.
From the very first page, Eakin writes religion out of the story. Here, we meet a sly Derrida christening his signature style of reading—which forsakes authorial intent to look for textual contradictions—deconstruction. “Everyone had a notion of what deconstruction was and all the wonderful or terrible things it could do,” writes Eakin. “Everyone, that is, except Jacques Derrida.” The handsome, pipe-smoking theorist could not define deconstruction except as a set of “non-concepts” or, even more enigmatically, as “the experience of the impossible.”
Two hundred pages later, Eakin admits that Derrida didn’t pull the word out of thin air, instead adapting Martin Heidegger’s destruktion, which describes the clearing-away of metaphysics from Western philosophy. But even this etymology falls tellingly short. As philosopher John Caputo has emphasized, Heidegger took his cues from Martin Luther, whose destructio refers to a method of dismantling medieval doctrines to recover their authentic Christian truths. This is to say: Deconstruction has exegetical roots. It’s a project of holy unveiling.
This wasn’t lost on the Jewish Derrida, especially in his elder years—which get short shrift here. To deconstruct is to say yes, Derrida wrote. It is to open the door for the one who is coming, the one whose arrival we cannot foresee.
Curiously, Eakin mentions Derrida’s Judaism only to accentuate childhood ostracization. Never does she ask how Judaism’s messianic hope may have structured his thought.
She is no more interested in the first language of Catholics-turned-philosophers. But these one-time communicants are so numerous that they haunt the text. Readers learn, for instance, that George Bataille considered becoming a monk before turning to philosophy. Gilles Deleuze and Louis Althusser hailed from Catholic families before they, too, took to philosophy. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan horrifies his Catholic parents “by renouncing religion and reading Nietzsche in his original German.”
These details may be true, but they have the cumulative effect of setting theory against religion, sometimes even confounding Eakin’s narration. We’re told, for instance, that Lacan is so repulsed by the Church that he recoils when his younger brother becomes a priest. Only a few chapters later, we find the psychoanalyst giving lectures at the Catholic University in Brussels. (One of these actually began with his praising religion’s treasury of truth.)
Derrida spoke about Holy Communion the sole time Eakin saw him. Still, she never pauses to ask: Beyond promising total knowledge, might religion and theory share a grammar? A sacramental or messianic one? Why were so many Jews and Catholics drawn to poststructuralism?
By the time I entered a doctoral program in 2011, I’d given up God, the idea of a strongman in the sky was too much a strain on the intellect, especially one yearning to be absorbed by academia. I was ashamed of having grown up in an insular Catholic charismatic community, beginning each school day praying for the Holy Spirit’s descent. But I can see now that I was drawn to Derrida precisely because the verb he associated with deconstruction was so strangely familiar: come.
As a child, I’d heard adults speak of the Spirit “pouring out over the earth.” However, it wasn’t until I read Derrida that I could imagine the divine as an event, as someone or something that happens. This theorist gave me a way to think about the futural in terms that both resonated with and revealed the fractures of my childhood faith. He also made me want to outrun the long shadow of fundamentalism. Whereas many peers spoke disparagingly of belief, Derrida had me feel around for a pulse. I eventually took deconstruction to mean that nothing and no one is totally turned to stone, which is the opposite of nihilism, of which he’s often accused.
Eakin does write that even if theory failed to materially change society, it gave people an intellectual burst. For me, it was more of a moral burst—one whose aftershock I still feel.
It’s because of this that I’ve returned to many of the theorists studied in graduate school, finding them hardly as profane as I once believed. Lacan was entranced by the Holy Spirit, viewing it as the manifestation of language and the unconscious—the “entry of the signifier into the world.” Sartre famously argued against God’s existence, but he later clarified that he felt God’s absence, which was quite a different thing. “He is dead,” Sartre wrote in a 1943 essay. “[H]e used to speak to us and he has fallen silent.”
French theory, like phenomenology before it, was not a secular project. This is true even if certain of its practitioners formally disavowed God. At moments, Eakin seems to intuit theory’s theological register, writing, for instance, of the “Derridean gospel” and of Deleuze and Felix Guitarri’s “liberation theology for the unconscious.” Notwithstanding these metaphors—and for all her claims to have come to her senses—she is unable to measure theory’s legacy except in abstract ideological terms.
Focusing on attitudes about language and authority, for instance, Eakin repeatedly claims that theory “wasn’t really good for much.” But theory has revitalized the Church. Derrida and his peers are routinely taught in seminaries, which form people for pastoral work. Countless Americans claim to be “deconstructing” religious fundamentalism, some explicitly nodding to Derrida. There is even a Protestant denomination, the Emergent Church, whose mission is to apply the broader insights of poststructuralism to Christianity.
It’s not just progressives. Pope Benedict dialogued with poststructuralist Julia Kristeva and social theorist Jürgen Habermas. Bishop Robert Barron, the most popular living Catholic evangelist, has lectured on Derrida, whose writing on “the gift” he perceives to illuminate the radical, unearned nature of grace. (Barron is critical of other of Derrida’s ideas.) Just because The New York Times wrote off theory, as Eakin tells us, it doesn’t mean that others did.
In her denouement, the woman so dismissive of her younger self has a moment of positive feeling. Eakin, who has all along “blushed” to remember her love of theory, references Mark Taylor, the philosopher most famous for questioning the religious-secular binary. Taylor, Eakin tells us, understands theory as “a ‘kind of belief,’ a way of living with uncertainty, complexity and difference.” This, she says, “has undeniable appeal.”
Reading The Frenchmen, I kept wanting Eakin to lean into such feeling. I kept wanting her to take her former self seriously, asking if, for all its pretenses, theory had once allowed her to dream. The arc that she traces—from aloof undergrad to knowing-better journalist—is just too neat, especially for a book that purports to re-physicalize its subjects and author. People are strange and contradictory. Like texts, they speak with many voices. This book tries to tell a grand narrative only to crack open. That’s the thing about deconstruction: It happens with or without the author’s permission. But never, as Derrida once said, “without love.”
What an excellent review, thank you.