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The Genre That’s a Shortcut to Wisdom
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“How are you on theory?” my editor asked me earlier this week. I knew what he was talking about—not my pet hypotheses about, say, the existence of cryptids, but rather a group of 20th-century French philosophers. Yet I didn’t know much else beyond that. I was familiar with Michel Foucault, partly from college coursework but largely from a popular meme that features his most famous concept, the panopticon. I know about Roland Barthes and the death of the author. I know that Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze are names that I should know.
“Not good,” I told him.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- Icarus in the faculty lounge
- Someone is mysteriously snapping up used books around the world.
- What if Freud was right?
- “Out Here,” a collection of poems by the Black Seed Writers Group
I could read their works for myself, of course. I could pick up Foucault’s Discipline and Punish at any one of the college bookstores that serve four major universities in my city. But frankly—and I don’t think I’m alone in this—I’d rather not. My preference as a busy adult is to begin my approach to foundational, complicated ideas with the help of a particular kind of book: the intellectual biography.
The structuralists would hate this. Lynn Steger Strong makes exactly that point in an Atlantic essay published this week about a new group biography of these thinkers. I may be oversimplifying their ideas (as Strong writes, any “smooth summary inevitably sacrifices complexity”), but in general, they disregarded biography as a source of useful information about art; Barthes, especially, rejected literary criticism that drew on an author’s life to unlock the meaning of their work. “There was only the text, over which the writer had little control,” Strong explains. “Even the self was ultimately an unstable text.” This makes a biography of the cohort feel almost sacreligious. Emily Eakin’s new book, The Frenchmen, focuses on these men’s personal lives to illuminate their earthshaking writings. After finishing it, Strong wonders: “How could biography not be important?”
I agree. Important ideas don’t just come to Earth fully formed and then flow through their speakers; they’re influenced by the wider context in which they develop. Earlier this year, when I was curious about the life and work of Karl Marx, the first book I reached for wasn’t Capital. Instead, I read Francis Wheen’s 2000 biography of the man—yes, I learned, he did ask Friedrich Engels for money immediately after Engels told him that his beloved partner, Mary, had died. And yes, he really did spend ages in the British Museum’s reading room trying to squeeze as much information as possible into Capital (which is not to say that he didn’t miss anything). The biography also reminded me that Marx did not invent socialism; he was building on an intellectual tradition that predated him by decades.
I encourage readers to try this out for themselves. Back in 2022, Talya Zax recommended nine group biographies that explain not only the lives of their subjects but also how those individuals influenced other people and movements. Personally, I’m on to a new topic: I’m about five chapters into Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s forthcoming biography of Roy Cohn, American Scoundrel, and the world of 20th-century New York City—an environment that incubated hundreds of famous and influential leaders, including our current president—is unfolding before me.
How Theory Took Over the World
By Lynn Steger Strong
The French writers of the postwar era argued that the author’s life is irrelevant. Emily Eakin’s lively new book proves them wrong.
What to Read
The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, by Peter Hook
The Haçienda in Manchester was a catalyst of the U.K. acid house scene in the late ’80s, and a prophecy foretold: “The haçienda must be built,” the Situationist poet Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in 1953. Heeding these cryptic words some three decades later, the audacious (and well-read) impresario Tony Wilson opened the Haçienda together with the circle of post-punk musicians and designers involved with his label, Factory Records. Their attempt to decipher Chtcheglov’s mystical phrase lasted 15 years. Hook, the bassist for New Order, served as a kind of player-coach at the Haçienda, helping manage its madcap affairs while his band became the club’s cash cow. In this memoir of misbegotten business administration, Hook returns to the storied nights out that changed British culture even as they threatened to bankrupt him—and worse. Beset by gangs and guns, the Haçienda faltered in the ’90s despite clever-sounding schemes such as replacing the club’s security with the gangsters themselves. This is a scrapbook of utopian folly, yes, but also an insider’s look at what was, for a time, the wildest workplace on Earth. — Andrew Holter
From our list: Five books about going out that are worth staying in for
Out Next Week
📚 Sunrise, by Téa Obreht
📚 Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland, by Ashley Kahn
📚 Under the Falls, by Richard Russo
Your Weekend Read
Do Not Paint Granite!
By Dorothy Robyn
History and aesthetics aside, Trump’s plan violates a key rule of building maintenance: Do not paint granite. Granite is a superior building facade that has been used for other distinctive structures in Washington, D.C., such as the Library of Congress and the Old Post Office. Left unpainted, granite requires little maintenance. Once granite is painted, however (and examples are rare), it requires extensive maintenance in perpetuity. Greg Werkheiser, a co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm representing the DC Preservation League (which is suing over the project), has warned that the EEOB could become the Golden Gate Bridge of federal buildings: As soon as painting is finished on one end, it will be time to begin again on the other.
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