You could say that “French Theory” is like “French fries”
You could say that “French Theory” is like “French fries” in that the term only really takes on meaning in America. Here in France, we wonder what’s so French about them. For French fries at least the answer is simple: when the Irish emigrated massively to North America after the Great Famine, they took their culture, recipes and language with them and, in old Gaelic, “to french” means “to cut into pieces”.
But not everyone is fluent in old Gaelic and the confusion about the origin of French fries is such that in 2003, when the French government declared its opposition to the war in Iraq, some people on the other side of the pond decided to change the name of their favourite potatoes and call them “freedom fries” instead. In France the attack missed its mark entirely as everyone knows that fries come from Belgium and that any connection between France and fries is just a fantasy that’s more or less exclusively American. For French Theory it’s more or less the same, but with less oil!
At the turn of the 80s, “French theory” carved out a place for itself as the absolute reference in North America. At a time when “deconstruction” became an everyday term, the names of some fifteen or so miscellaneous French intellectuals gained star status, almost on a par with Hollywood’s stars of the silver screen. Topping the bill was Jacques Derrida, who even inspired a cartoon character called Doctor Deconstructo (a perverse, long-haired superhero) and “Deconstructing Harry”, a film by Woody Allen whose French title (Harry dans tous ses états) leaves a lot to be desired. In English, Derrida’s “deconstruction”, despite the concept being difficult to get a handle on, became part of everyday language and was used to describe an analytical action that consists in showing that meaning results from the differences between the words used, rather than what words supposedly refer to.
Together with Derrida, but keeping their distance were: Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, not forgetting Roland Barthes amongst others. This little panel of thinkers, who were on the fringe of mainstream thinking in post-1968 France – as the floor was more willingly given to the bland “New Philosophers” – would by the intermediary of university departments of literature exert a certain form of domination over American campuses for two decades.
And so it was that from Baltimore to Berkeley, several generations of students feverishly and fervently read Foucault’s “The History of Sexuality”, “The Postmodern Condition” by Lyotard and “Anti-Oedipus” by Deleuze & Guattari.
French Theory How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States by François CUSSET
These critical and difficult texts (and many more besides) became deeply engrained in the American collective imagination to the extent that they influenced popular culture, from electronic music to science-fiction movies and from Pop Art to cyberpunk novels – so much so that a journalist from the Washington Post compared this “French invasion” to the “British invasion of pop music a decade earlier”.
However, even more than the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, the philosophers in question didn’t miss a chance to clash with each other in numerous controversies: they were, in fact, anything but a consensual and homogenous ensemble. In so-called “French Theory”, there was no community of ideas, themes or methods. There was however a collection of unique and diverse bodies of work that while they may have had conflicting relationships were almost always intellectually fertile. As French Theory was expressed in particular by means of interviews of one French author by another, the American public got the impression that theirs was a homogenous corpus.
Several common principles do however exist. In French Theory (2003), the first book written in French to deal with “the American adventure with French Theory” and which reached cult status, François Cusset identifies the importance of structure and the sign, a reinterpretation of Freud, Nietzsche and Heidegger and a critique of a certain form of triumphant philosophy, which for a while thought it was capable of representing the truth about the world.
Although an apparently artificial categorisation, French Theory did however leave its mark on a period in the history of ideas and have a genuine effect on real life. American campuses were a fertile breeding ground where, sometimes as a result of “creative misunderstandings”, the concepts bounced back and forth from one text to another, sometimes taking new directions or acquiring a new force. With its many and diverse voices, and without the ambition to become a school of thought, French Theory questioned notions of difference, power and the norm and in so doing contributed to a spirit of openness towards ethnic and political minorities, feminism and homosexuality. It was also a factor that led to the appearance of cultural, gender and postcolonial studies – in other words those fields of research that nourish French thinking today as young intellectuals read works written in English that are actually following in the footsteps of the aforementioned French Theory.
And so we come full circle – more French fries anyone?