Frenchmen | Bästa pris

A superbly engrossing adventure of ideas…this will surely be my philosophy book of the year. Sarah Bakewell, New York Times bestselling author of Humanly Possible

Masterfulan engrossing portraitEakin makes her obsession with these thinkers contagious. Publishers Weekly, starred review

From leading critic and essayist Emily Eakin, a stylish personal history of French theory and its unlikely domination of American culture
When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors. This was French theory, a set of recondite ideas that had taken American campuses by a storm during the preceding decades. In retrospect, the influence of these men and their writings seems both extraordinary and improbable. The Frenchmen argued that language is all-powerful, meaning unstable, and the self is an illusion. Their prose was brilliant, dazzling even, but often mystifyingly elaborate and highly abstract. Yet American students and scholars flocked to their books and lectures, intoxicated by a powerful new means of understandingand perhaps even changingthe world. For Eakin, an unsophisticated graduate of a small-town Midwestern high school, theory was no mere intellectual exercise but a way of beinga heady shortcut to worldly glamour and wisdom.
The Frenchmen is the story of Eakins youthful love affair with French theory, alongside a wider examination of its rise and fall. Looking closely at Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and the French-speaking Belgian Paul de Man, Eakin untangles their famously difficult works with peerless, delightful clarity. Whats more, she brings to light the eccentric, scandalousat times criminal!lives of thinkers who themselves were often highly averse to biography, in a daringly original weave of storytelling and exegesis.
As she explores the magnetism of their work, Eakin illuminates not just the Frenchmens enduring legacy but some of todays deepest political, social, and intellectual arguments. She neither rejects nor flatters the Frenchmens ideas but instead reveals how they indelibly changed our understanding of power, truth, and identity. Eakin shows how, for better or worse, the Frenchmen continue to shape and unsettle our lives today.