> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://mereorthodoxy.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Magpie #7: Concerning "Theory" - URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-magpie-7-concerning-theory/ - Published: 2026-09-30T11:00:26.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-30T11:00:25.000Z - Description: An encounter with the men who "made thinking feel like doing" - Author: Mere Orthodoxy - Tags: The Magpie, Kirsten Sanders, Culture, Books **Emily Eakin, *The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory*. Penguin, 2026\. $35, 496pp.** > My relationship with theory was more fraught. Maybe I expected too much from it. I didn’t have a plan for after graduation. I didn’t know what I wanted to be; I was hung up on something more basic: what it meant *to* be. I lacked confidence and, more to the point, skepticism. I didn’t know how to take theory in small doses… Instead, I doubled down. ‘I had this euphoric moment at Widener Library tonight, sitting in a remote carrel reading a Marxist critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis,’ I wrote in my journal halfway through college. ‘It was thrilling. To read, to think, to walk through the cavernous halls of Widener after 10pm, alone!’ > The experience of reading theory could be like that—vertiginous, as when the bottom of the Gravitron at the amusement park falls away and you are pinned by centrifugal force to the spinning wall. Deconstruction, especially, had this effect. \~Emily Eakin, *The Frenchmen* Emily Eakin was a graduate student at both Harvard and Columbia during the years when “Theory” reigned supreme. She fell in love. Her account of being riveted by theory weaves together her own biography with short chapters about the main figures in French theory. By Eakin’s own telling, she was naive and gullible as a young undergraduate. French theory became a surrogate for her lack of sophistication. Though traditional English departments were “tweedy and old-fashioned,” concerned with “conventionality and received wisdom,” *Theory*, on the other hand, was “cutting edge, brilliant, and intimidating.” Theory promised superior insight and cultural cache. It covered over “shameful gaps in my education,” Eakin writes, and allowed her to presume a kind of intellectual mastery that she hadn’t earned. I suspect anyone who has sat in a seminar room in the last fifty years can identify this dynamic. In my day, upper-level graduate students who “did theory” had charisma. They were aloof. They spoke in abstractions, their sentences peppered with untranslated French. They talked about *jouissance* or *differance* or *bricolage*. Everything was about sex. Socially, these students carried themselves with aplomb. They dressed with flair- sometimes all in black, sometimes, for reasons I can’t quite figure, in clothes from Tibet and Nepal. They were condescending and could be rude. The social manners of welcoming in newcomers- or, for that matter, explaining what you were talking about- were completely absent. The most important thing about theory was that you could “do theory” without having read the book. You could do a postcolonial reading of Jane Eyre or a feminist reading of Jane Eyre or a homosexual reading of Jane Eyre without having read Jane Eyre. It was a way to not do the homework, but for the intelligentsia. Eakin was completely caught up in this world. She now sees this preoccupation as embarrassing, “a multiyear breakdown I hadn’t realized I was having.” Theory allowed her to feign a kind of sophistication she didn’t have, and bypass the work of intellectual rigor and growth that would have produced the real thing. *The Frenchmen* exists on two levels. Eakin reflects on her own training in theory throughout, offering stories of her graduate and undergraduate years and reflections on her engagements with some of the theorists. But she also offers short biographies of the French theorists who dominated the world. These stories are juicy and gossipy, but they provide a real missing lens on some of the most consequential thinkers of the twentieth century. Abstract ideas were the domain of the philosopher, not the social worlds that generated them. “The notion of a philosopher’s life is vaguely preposterous”, she writes. Her attempt at writing biographies of the Frenchmen is a way to undercut the very notion of theory as something that is untouched by life. And what lives these men lived. Though her vignettes are brief, Eakin offers unusual insight into the motivations of the various theorists she covers. She writes, quoting historian Tony Judt, that many of the Frenchmen preferred Marxism because it “offered a way of recovering ‘the illusion of total knowledge’. French theorists preferred theories that emphasized ‘totality or the absolute’ over partial explanations. Eakin connects this desire for grand theories to her own interest in theory: “With its grand explanatory ambitions, theory swept away doubt, offering in its place the certitudes of an all-encompassing system.” As a young undergrad, what she wanted was the security of a totalizing system. These theorists came up in a historical moment where the philosopher might also be a subject of a front-page newspaper headline, or a contentious philosophical debate might make the evening news. Philosophers were superstars and public figures. The book is engaging and interesting enough for the stories it tells about this particular moment in history. But for all of her juicy stories of the salacious and dysfunctional private lives of the Frenchmen, Eakin’s book is most significant for the way it traces the thread of the development of the modern subject. French theory, by Eakin’s account, took the traditional philosophical task of articulating first principles and cut it off at the knees. There could not be any “first principles” because all we have is language, which is a human creation. There is no “beyond” language- nothing signified- only the endless doom loop of the signifiers. The focus of Jacques Derrida, one of the most prominent Frenchmen, was to demonstrate that “Philosophy’s preoccupation with first principles”- with reality, truth, and being- “was doomed.” The words which attempted to express the truth about the world- what philosophers call metaphysics- were merely an illusion. Language was cover for our ignorance. It made it seem that we knew things we could not know. It’s worth noting, as Eakin does, that philosophy departments in the late-1980s- when theory was taking off- were preoccupied with analytic approaches. These “highly technical arguments rendered in formal logic- philosophy that resembled mathematics,” were not much better at getting at first principles. If you wanted to grasp after the deep truths of human existence, you would need to choose between high flying literary theory that spoke about existence in dense and convoluted prose, or philosophy that read like a mathematical proof. The continental school- the school of the Frenchmen- “continued to probe the big existential problems, even if only to show the impossibility of resolving them.” What mattered was not the big problems of human existence- what commonly fell under the category of wisdom- but *discourse*. “Theory”, writes Eakin, “made *thinking* feel like *doing.*” Eakin’s story begins with Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist whose personal history traces the end of the second World War. “For Sartre, the great limitation of orthodox Marxism was that it had nothing to say about individuals.” Instead people were “wholly formed by their class and its relations to production at a particular moment.” Sartre’s *self* was a “trembling existentialism”, endowed with choices and the responsibility to act. She had “independent projects” and above all, the freedom and agency to execute them. Compare this with Louis Althusser’s *subject*\- the structuralist version also endorsed by Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan- who was “abstract”, faceless and nameless. Most importantly, he was a *subject* more than a *self*. “Not born into a particular family or cultural milieu,” the subject was “*interpellated* by ideology into the larger social system.” For structuralist thinkers, we are never outside ideology. “The illusion of freedom” is really a “bourgeois conspiracy.” Existence is not defined by freedom but is “shaped by impersonal networks of power and symbols in which we were all enmeshed.” For thinkers like Lacan, the “closed symbolic system in which we were all trapped” is largely populated by Freudian concepts concerned with the mother’s gaze and sexual proclivities. The individual is caught in a symbolic system, and the solution is psychoanalysis, where the individual identifies the system they are caught in. It’s worth noting that escaping the system does not seem possible. The system is total, and psychoanalysis, more than a temporary release valve, is a lifelong project. Althusser spent nearly his entire adult life in analysis, peppered by fifteen depressions and some instances of mania, before he murdered his wife. He was quite literally trapped by his psychosis, as he spent large portions of time institutionalized. The transition from speaking about a “self” to a “subject” is critical. Sartre’s “self,” vying for freedom and agency against the tides of world historical forces, has now become a “subject,” reclined on the therapist’s couch. But even this therapeutic subject would soon be torn, limb from limb, with the post-structuralist view of the individual impaled on the forever turning wheels of power. The goal of the latter view is liberation. If existentialism gave way to structuralism and the self became a subject, with Foucault the subject became an activist. Foucault’s influence in modern theory is massive. He is *the* man to be reckoned with. By my accounting, he is also responsible for the vast majority of destruction that the world of modern theory has wrought. Foucault’s theoretical framework is radical- meaning both revolutionary (intending to overthrow existing systems and frameworks) and *to the root*. What had begun as an argument over the end of metaphysics became with Foucault a never-ending cycle of struggle and critique. But it wasn’t always. In fact, by Eakin’s read “the value of deconstructionist philosophy for those deprived of freedom” had to be intentionally connected. Words about power became words toward liberation. Theory felt like *doing something* long before it was actually socially engaged. But once this connection was made, it was permanent. Deconstruction was *for* the oppressed. Power for Foucault was everywhere, “a current running through social institutions and human beings alike.” For Foucault “prison was the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as a moral force.” Power’s operation was to “organize, subdue, and control.” The work of Foucault, as “the first of the modern intellectual *engage*”, was to expose it- whether it occurred in governments, prisons, institutions, or churches. The exposure of power and its pathways was Foucault’s hallmark, and by my reading has become the hallmark of the modern intellectual. The goal of exposing power was to help it change hands. Foucault was willing to side with the proletariat’s violence simply to overturn power- a “completely amoral” view, in the words of none other than Noam Chomsky. Foucault's obsession with hidden power engendered a “low-level paranoia that took the place of thought while making you feel smart", wrote Jonathan Rosen. This trade has hoodwinked many into thinking that overthrowing power is the same as intelligence. But the trade is a terrible one. In Foucault’s world there is no beauty, no heroes, and no agency. There are just the controllers and the controlled. The only goal of intellectual work is to subvert the two. If you think Foucault’s theory of power is the accurate one, you will see such exposure as *the* work of the intellectual, the hallmark of intellectual sophistication and acumen. The Frenchmen, and especially Foucault, perpetuated “a farce with consequences”. They “made *thinking* feel like *doing*.” Resisting this farce may feel like hammering on a closed door. It is certainly choosing the old-fashioned and stodgily conventional world of received wisdom over the cutting-edge brilliance of the superstar intellectual. But if, like me, you think Foucault’s view of power and its working is deeply unchristian- even demonic- you will resist.