Lola Seaton, The Poison and the Cure. The Life and Afterlife of French Theory, The Ideas Letter, 29 October 2026
The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin
School of the South: The Colonial Roots of French Theory by Onur Erdur
In 2005, Alain Badiou argued that in the second half of the 20th century, there was a “French philosophical moment” comparable to the peaks of classical Greece and Enlightenment Germany. Badiou was not an impartial observer—he described himself as perhaps the era’s “last representative”—yet no one would seriously dispute that les trente glorieuses produced a blaze of intellectual activity that radiated around the world, transforming not only academic study but the wider cultural atmosphere. There, however, consensus stops.
Was this “moment” purely, or even primarily, a philosophical one? It was born with an anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, borrowing a framework from linguistics, and among the central aims of the resulting method, “structuralism,” was to topple a philosophical movement: the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and others. And while many of the leading thinkers who embraced structuralism were educated, like Lévi-Strauss, in philosophy, they also worked in other areas of the humanities and social sciences. Roland Barthes was concerned with mass culture and canonical literature; Louis Althusser with interpretations of Marx; Jacques Lacan with Freudian psychoanalysis; and Michel Foucault with history, and excavating the logics underpinning a range of institutions and practices—medicine, psychiatry, prisons, sexuality. The writing of Jacques Derrida, meanwhile—for a time “the sexiest philosopher on the planet,” in the words of the literary critic Terry Eagleton—amounted less to a conventional contribution to philosophy than a thoroughgoing critique of its founding assumptions. “I never thought I had something to say philosophically,” Derrida reflected in 1991—and his example was chiefly followed by literary critics.
