The Poison and the Cure

French theory’s postwar intellectual movement, spanning structuralism, post-structuralism and the work of thinkers including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser, is reassessed in two new books, Emily Eakin’s “The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory” and Onur Erdur’s “School of the South: The Colonial Roots of French Theory.” The catch-all term “theory,” as Fredric Jameson noted, papered over disputes such as whether Foucault was a philosopher or a historian, and Derrida, once dubbed by Terry Eagleton “the sexiest philosopher on the planet,” said in 1991 he never thought he had “something to say philosophically.” The books matter because they reopen the question of what the “French philosophical moment” actually was and how much of its authority rested on philosophy versus adjacent humanities and social sciences. Watch for how the two authors weigh the movement’s colonial roots and its afterlife in literary criticism against its claim to philosophical originality.