Emily Eakin with Adam Gopnik: The Frenchmen

Jacques Derrida. Roland Barthes. Gilles Deleuze. Michel Foucault. Jacques Lacan. For decades, a cadre of dazzling French theorists and philosophers captured the zeitgeist of American intellectual life — and for New York Times Book Review editor and cultural critic Emily Eakin, they were a portal to an unseen world of glamour and wisdom.

When 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 thinkers who had taken American campuses by storm. The Frenchmen argued that meaning is unstable and the self an illusion — and American students and scholars flocked to their books and lectures, intoxicated by a powerful new means of understanding the world. The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory is a thrilling intellectual memoir of Eakin’s young life that untangles the French theorists’ famously difficult works — and the strange spell they cast on American campuses — with delightful insight and clarity.

Who were these Frenchmen? What made them magnetic for Eakin and so many other young students? Why did they eventually fall out of style? And what might their ideas teach us about the world we live in today? In a conversation that brings to light the eccentric, scandalous lives of a legendary group of philosophers who were highly averse to biography, Eakin offers a daringly original cocktail of storytelling and intellectual elucidation.

Expect an evening that will make you rethink what you thought you knew about American intellectual life — and find out how a group of brilliant, notoriously difficult French writers fundamentally altered our understanding of power, truth, and identity.

“Rich, absorbing, seductive... Eakin’s own coming-of-age animates her masterful portrait of ideas that changed the world and the singularly eccentric figures whose lives were almost as remarkable as their thoughts.” — Ayad Akhtar