Episode Details

Emily is a senior editor at the New York Times Book Review. She’s also worked as a senior editor at The New Yorker, an ideas reporter for the NYT, a fashion features writer at Vogue, and a deputy editor of Lingua Franca magazine. Her new book is The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory.

A polished transcript is here, including money quotes. Below are timestamps for the main sections of the pod:

* 03:56: Emily’s upbringing in a Francophile family

* 14:27: The postmodern idea that language is everything

* 31:05: The postmodern New Right

* 41:14: The dark dysfunctional lives of many of the French thinkers

* 103:27: The fatalism in pomo discourse

* 117:14: How Emily became skeptical of postmodernism

For two clips of the episode — on the word games of postmodernists, and the screwed-up lives of Foucault and others — head to our YouTube page.

More topics: Emily growing up in Indiana with regular trips to France; the country’s post-war boom but drop in world status; colonial revolt in Algeria; Heidegger and Nazism; Barthes and Maoism; Derrida and language; Levi-Strauss and structuralism; Camus and existentialism; nihilism; bourgeois as an epithet; Lacan and the unconscious; Althusser strangling his wife to death; the Straussian cult; Allan Bloom; the Sokal hoax; Stanley Fish and deconstruction; John Boswell and homosexuality; Foucault deconstructing gayness; the AIDS crisis; the prison system; Orwell and Oakeshott; Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne; HR and pronouns; the fatalism of Coates; and Trump’s exec orders on language in government.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Michael Lewis on the bureaucrats who fought back against Trump, Evan Barker on how the Democratic Party got hijacked by elite activists, Sean Illing on the relevance of Camus and Nietzsche, Catherine Conybeare on Augustine, and Cyrus Habib on leaving politics to become a Jesuit priest. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.