The Seduction of the American Mind: Emily Eakin on Her Life in French Theory

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. When I was a graduate student many years ago, back in the 1980s at University of California in Berkeley, there was a rage for Frenchmen, French theorists, historians, linguists, Foucault, Michel Foucault in particular. I was in the political science department, so Foucault was very influential. I came over from England, so I didn't know any of this French stuff. And my friends in the literary department were endlessly talking about Jacques Derrida. I never quite understood what he was talking about. I'm not sure they did, but perhaps that made him all the more intriguing. There were many other influential French theorists at the time in political science. We used to talk about a French antihumanist Marxist called Louis Althusser, who murdered his wife, rather odd character altogether. These Frenchmen were enormously influential. And now we have a book on them by my guest, Emily Eakin. Her book is called The Frenchman, or My Life in Theory. And like me, Emily was exposed in the 80s as a student, not at Berkeley, but at Harvard to these Frenchmen. So Emily, congratulations on this book.

**Emily Eakin** (1:47)
Thank you so much.

**Andrew Keen** (1:49)
I've actually been waiting for this book, not from you, but a book like this. I'm amazed. So is the best book seem the most obvious. I'm amazed that a book like this hasn't been written before. Tell me about your relationship with these Frenchmen. You begin the book on a very personal note.

**Emily Eakin** (2:07)
Absolutely. So I too, like you, Andrew, was deeply enmeshed in the milieu of the French philosophers, as improbable as it seems in the late 80s and early 90s. And I think I was primed to be seduced by these thinkers, partly because I grew up in a family of Francophiles. My father is now a retired professor of American literature, but he was a Francophile. And every time he had a sabbatical, he would take the family to Europe.
And we lived in Paris in the early 70s at what was really the sort of tail end of the structuralist wave. And one of my earliest memories is of my mother being very late to pick me up at the Maternelle, the nursery school, because Claude Lévi-Strauss' lecture had run over. My parents were attending these lectures, like all the intellectuals in Paris at the time. They were reading the structuralist books that they would buy at the structuralist bookstore on the route Claude Bernard. So I was just a little kid, but that was the milieu. And I think that theory had real attractions to me also because when I got to college, here I was this middle class kid from a kind of middling, midwestern public high school. I was from Bloomington, Indiana.
And I was really aware of the inadequacies in my education. And theory seemed to offer this kind of shortcut. Theory said, it doesn't matter what you've read, it's how you read. And for a student like me who was studying literature, it was this sort of shortcut into this kind of cutting edge elite intellectual class.
Sort of like The Little Black Dress. That's how I think of it. You know, the cliché about The Little Black Dress is that it looks expensive, even if you buy it on sale off the rack at Macy's. And theory was sort of the intellectual equivalent of The Little Black Dress.

**Andrew Keen** (4:13)
One word that was associated with all these Frenchmen, and you begin the book on this, is the word deconstruction. No one knew quite what it meant. Even the guy who invented it didn't know what it meant, or at least his definition didn't seem very clear. But what you also note at the beginning of the book, and you're a literary theorist, you studied literature, now you work at The New York Times Book Review, so you're steeped in literature, is that words matter. So Emily, let me quote back a word that you just threw out there. Seduced. There is a sexual element to all this, isn't there? And these guys knew it very clearly. They played with this idea of seduction. It was in some ways, maybe this is an inappropriate word, but it was at the heart of all this theory, seduction.

**Emily Eakin** (5:01)
Absolutely. I've thought a lot about this. There's a novel by Lorrie Moore, the wonderful comic novelist, called Gate at the Stairs. And in that she describes a young woman, not unlike me, a farm girl from the Midwest, who goes to the big city to college, and she attends this literature lecture that's delivered by a young professor in jeans and a tie. And he's talking about masturbation of the comma in Henry James. That's a total kind of parodic description of the sort of excesses of theoretical lecturing.