The Men Who Made Theory French
Guattari spent time in hospitals as a student and an analyst. Barthes had tuberculosis and “spent most of World War II in sanatoriums,” where, Eakin writes, “he was subjected to therapies that sound nearly as terrible as his illness.” Quoting Barthes’s biographer Tiphaine Samoyault, Eakin describes a three-month “reclining cure” that required Barthes to “lie at an angle to the horizontal for eighteen hours out of twenty-four, his lower limbs raised above the level of his thorax and his head, which made it difficult even to read.” Deleuze, another TB patient, had a lung removed in 1968.
But perhaps no institution loomed larger for the Frenchmen than school, where they spent much of their lives. Nearly all of them recalled their admissions and certification exams, known as the concours and the agrégation, as formative and terrifying ordeals. Derrida failed the concours twice before getting into the École Normale; Deleuze never passed, attending the Sorbonne instead. Lévi-Strauss spent hours before his agrégation violently ill from a drug a family friend gave him for his nerves. (“Morphine? Cocaine?” Eakin writes. “He never knew what, exactly.”) It’s a suggestive fact that Barthes, the most buoyant of the bunch, was functionally barred from attending the École Normale, owing to his TB. Perhaps the reclining cure, however unpleasant, was still less punishing than the École.
Eakin describes Derrida’s two years as a boarding student in a preparatory class for the concours as a nightmarish blend of prison, school, and sanitarium, replete with gray uniforms, barracks-like dorms, cold showers, and small, disgusting rations. According to his biographer Benoît Peeters, Derrida was “on the verge of succumbing” to madness there. But by then his most traumatic memory of school had already occurred: in 1942, at twelve years old, Derrida, who grew up in Algeria, was expelled from his school for being Jewish, and wasn’t allowed to return until after Algiers was liberated by the Allies. “The wound was of another order,” Derrida said, “and it never healed.”
These institutional experiences left their mark on the Frenchmen’s work. Eakin finds traces of them in Althusser’s repeated insistence that, as she puts it, “human subjects are not in charge of their actions or even their thoughts.” They’re visible in Foucault’s writing on the normalizing function of institutions, and in Deleuze and Guattari’s on schizophrenia. And they’re visible, she suggests, in Derrida’s preoccupation with binary pairs, such as inside/outside or center/margin, and in the attention he paid to their non-privileged terms.
They also suggest one reason for theory’s enduring appeal to college students: like many of the Frenchmen, most of them have never not been in school. The forces of normalization, containment, repression, and evaluation are constants in their lives. As far as they are aware—as far as they’ve experienced—there really is no outside. The picture presented by theory reflects the world that they know.
After college, Eakin got a master’s in comparative literature at the École Normale and started a Ph.D. program in English, but she dropped out partway through. She had “overdosed on theory,” she writes, and fled academia for journalism. In May, 1996, shortly after she joined the staff of Lingua Franca, a little magazine about academic life, it published a bombshell story by a physics professor at N.Y.U. named Alan Sokal. Sokal had submitted a satirical paper larded with jargon to the philosophy journal Social Text, which it accepted. When he revealed the prank, which became known as the Sokal hoax, critics of theory were giddy. The episode seemed to crystallize a broader turn away from theory, a growing consensus that it was pure chicanery.
