Emily Eakin
“Eakin delivers exactly what we want: a panoramic and intellectually wised-up chronicle of the High Theory with which France seduced America, plus all the High Drama behind it: rivalries, takedowns, political ructions, betrayals, drugs, madness, uxoricide, fraud (not all of it intellectual), and jouissance (not all of it sexual). It’s an opera of ideas, and an absurdly entertaining one.” —Jim Holt, New York Times bestselling author of Why Does the World Exist?
Coming July 21, 2026
In the decades after World War II, a group of renegade French philosophers challenged our most fundamental assumptions about the world—from the way language works to beliefs about power, truth, and reality itself—and in the process transformed American intellectual life. The Frenchmen, or, My Life in Theory tells the improbable story of these thinkers—Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man (a French-speaking Belgian)—and their outsize influence in the 1980s and ’90s, including on me, a college student at the time, tracing the legacy of their ideas through the culture wars of present day.
“A superbly engrossing adventure of ideas, tracing the lives and rivalries of thinkers who were anti-humanist in their theories, but all-too-human in their personalities. I loved Emily Eakin’s wry account of her own youthful intoxication with these writers, and of her disentanglement from them — even while she reassesses what they might still have to offer in these strange times. This will surely be my philosophy book of the year.”
—Sarah Bakewell, New York Times bestselling author of Humanly Possible
“Rich, absorbing, seductive, The Frenchmen is an intellectual history that doesn’t leave out the body. Eakin’s own coming-of-age animates her masterful portrait of ideas that changed the world and the singularly eccentric figures whose lives were almost as remarkable as their thoughts. I loved this book.” —Ayad Akhtar, playwright and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Homeland Elegies
“Who knew theory could be so much fun? Deliciously gossipy yet super-smart, The Frenchmen illuminates the eccentric lives behind the philosophies that blew a whole generation’s mind on both sides of the Atlantic. Emily Eakin’s sparkling prose lets us relive the thrill of their intellectual chase—and shows why it still matters. Refusing to settle for easy judgments, this immensely enjoyable book reveals the making of a new world of thought, where philosophy overflows into politics, sex, and art.” —Clare Carlisle, author of Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaar
“A spry intellectual history neatly blends with a memoir of studying modern literary theory. . . 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 . . . A fine account of the onetime primacy of French critical theory and its place in real life.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Masterful . . . an engrossing portrait . . . Eakin makes her obsession with these thinkers contagious.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Meet the Frenchmen
About
Emily Eakin is a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review. She has also worked as a senior editor at The New Yorker, an ideas reporter for The New York Times, a fashion features writer at Vogue, and a deputy editor of Lingua Franca magazine. Her features, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books Daily, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. She has a degree in Literature from Harvard College and graduate degrees from Columbia University and the University of Paris, III. She lives with her husband and two children in New York City.