newrepublic.com
Eakin’s Frenchmen are an eclectic group, differing in interests, politics, and methods. Two were practicing psychoanalysts. Most were academics, working in fields including philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, history, and comparative literature. They wrote on topics as varied as schizophrenia, prison architecture, photography, Edgar Allan Poe, and (in Barthes’s case) their mom. What unites them, according to Eakin, is their emphasis on systems, as opposed to individuals, and their attention to the complex and contradictory ways that language operates. Instead of taking for granted (as the existentialists did) that people are autonomous free agents defined by their choices, they wrote about the ways people and texts are created and constrained by powerful yet unstable structures of knowledge and language—an idea that resonates in our era of inescapable algorithms and artificial intelligence. (“Chatbots frighten us,” Eakin writes, “to the degree that they make literal theory’s suggestion that thought does not require a human thinker.”)
