"I ***** love Foucault. I ***** with Foucault hard," enthused Supriya Ganesh, star of The Pitt, in a recent interview with New York magazine. Ganesh, who uses she/they ***** ouns, never felt comfortable with rigid gender and ***** uality labels, and Foucault's The History of ***** uality, Volume I showed her how these categories have in fact varied across cultures and through history: "I think this idea of defining ***** uality is very new—or at least that's the argument he's making … it really illuminated a lot of that for me."
Ganesh was unwittingly providing fresh evidence for the central argument of The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, which proposes that a small group of dead twentieth-century intellectuals are "crucial for understanding the world we inhabit today." Written by Emily Eakin, a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review, The Frenchmen focuses on eight French or French-speaking theorists (Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man) who, she argues, "permanently alter[ed] how we think not only about bedrock philosophical ideas but about the role of language in shaping those beliefs and everything else."
Eakin's Frenchmen are an eclectic group, differing in interests, politics, and methods. Two were practicing psychoanalysts. Most were academics, working in fields including philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, history, and comparative literature. They wrote on topics as varied as schizophrenia, prison architecture, photography, Edgar Allan Poe, and (in Barthes's case) their mom. What unites them, according to Eakin, is their emphasis on systems, as opposed to individuals, and their attention to the complex and contradictory ways that language operates. Instead of taking for granted (as the existentialists did) that people are autonomous free agents defined by their choices, they wrote about the ways people and texts are created and constrained by powerful yet unstable structures of knowledge and language—an idea that resonates in our era of inescapable algorithms and artificial intelligence. ("Chatbots frighten us," Eakin writes, "to the degree that they make literal theory's suggestion that thought does not require a human thinker.")
"Deconstruction," an ***** ytical method developed by Derrida, came to define French theory and is at the heart of Eakin's book. She defines it as "a style of reading" that "took apart" a text and left it in pieces, showing how it was undone by its own internal contradictions. A common deconstructive move is to show how the binary terms that a text's argument depends on—for example, speech versus writing—are not actually opposed after all. In classic Derridean fashion, Eakin structures her book around an oft-repeated binary between "theory" and "real life" that she sees as ripe for deconstructing, contrasting the Frenchmen's "stringent antihumanism" with their all-too-human lives; academic t
Ganesh was unwittingly providing fresh evidence for the central argument of The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, which proposes that a small group of dead twentieth-century intellectuals are "crucial for understanding the world we inhabit today." Written by Emily Eakin, a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review, The Frenchmen focuses on eight French or French-speaking theorists (Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man) who, she argues, "permanently alter[ed] how we think not only about bedrock philosophical ideas but about the role of language in shaping those beliefs and everything else."
Eakin's Frenchmen are an eclectic group, differing in interests, politics, and methods. Two were practicing psychoanalysts. Most were academics, working in fields including philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, history, and comparative literature. They wrote on topics as varied as schizophrenia, prison architecture, photography, Edgar Allan Poe, and (in Barthes's case) their mom. What unites them, according to Eakin, is their emphasis on systems, as opposed to individuals, and their attention to the complex and contradictory ways that language operates. Instead of taking for granted (as the existentialists did) that people are autonomous free agents defined by their choices, they wrote about the ways people and texts are created and constrained by powerful yet unstable structures of knowledge and language—an idea that resonates in our era of inescapable algorithms and artificial intelligence. ("Chatbots frighten us," Eakin writes, "to the degree that they make literal theory's suggestion that thought does not require a human thinker.")
"Deconstruction," an ***** ytical method developed by Derrida, came to define French theory and is at the heart of Eakin's book. She defines it as "a style of reading" that "took apart" a text and left it in pieces, showing how it was undone by its own internal contradictions. A common deconstructive move is to show how the binary terms that a text's argument depends on—for example, speech versus writing—are not actually opposed after all. In classic Derridean fashion, Eakin structures her book around an oft-repeated binary between "theory" and "real life" that she sees as ripe for deconstructing, contrasting the Frenchmen's "stringent antihumanism" with their all-too-human lives; academic t
2 months ago
