Emily Eakin
Coming July 21, 2026
In the decades after World War II, a group of renegade French philosophers challenged our most fundamental assumptions about the world—from the way language works to beliefs about power, truth, and reality itself—and in the process transformed American intellectual life. The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory tells the improbable story of these thinkers—Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Roland Barthes, and Paul de Man (a French-speaking Belgian)—and their outsize influence in the 1980s and ’90s, including on me, a college student at the time, tracing the legacy of their ideas through the culture wars of present day.
Meet the Frenchmen
About
Emily Eakin is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. She has also worked as a senior editor at The New Yorker, an ideas reporter for The New York Times, a fashion features writer at Vogue, and a deputy editor of Lingua Franca magazine. Her features, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books Daily, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. She has a degree in Literature from Harvard College and graduate degrees from Columbia University and the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris. She lives with her husband and two children in New York City.