Maybe I'll Read That: Flattery Falls Flat

Installment the fourth

being a review of ‘Lingua Franca’ by Clancy Martin

being itself a review of ‘The Frenchmen’ by Emily Eakin

a history of French theory

Alright! Alright! That’s quite enough! You think I don’t see what’s happening here? A publication publishes a review of a book written by a senior editor at that publication. … Have you no shame? Or do you just have such a low opinion of your readers that you think they wouldn’t catch on?

Given the circumstances under which this review was published, I am not at all surprised to discover that it is all aglow with adulation. Even the reviewer’s “little complaints” reek of flattery: “it would have been nice to see [the author] trace the ways theory has influenced her as an accomplished intellectual in New York, an editor, a wife and a mother,” the reviewer says, which I translate into transparent English as, “your only flaw is that you don’t brag enough about your flawlessness.” Even such a caricature of servility as Benito’s Babo refrains from exalting his master so highly. But come, does not Professor Martin deserve a chance? Perhaps there is something critical, after all, waiting to be dug out of the critic’s critiques. Let us then turn to another “small complaint” of his. Martin complains that the philosophers Eakin writes about in her book are “eight men: that is one small complaint I’d like to lodge.” And here’s the zinger: “Some of the best thinkers of this period were women.” This complaint arrives in the tone of a schoolboy who, when his teacher tells the class that squares have four sides, stands up to announce his complaint that triangles have three. Moreover, the reviewer is not unaware of Eakin’s reason for writing only about men — and not even about all of them: “The women have mostly outlived the men, [...] and corpses [...] are easier to dissect than witnesses.” It can be interpreted only as a sign of great intellectual weakness that Martin presents his complaint only to proceed to explain it away on behalf of the book’s author. If it had been a real complaint, then it would not have been so easily resolved by the one who complained. Moreover, Martin goes, as if doing so were honorable, directly for the low-hanging fruit. It is not only an excuse for laziness, but a lazy excuse for not being able to identify any shortcomings of real consequence in the book he’s supposed to be the expert on. He comes up with a complaint that no reader of the New York Times Book Review would bat an eye at. “Hurrah,” the reader says, “justice shall prevail, thanks to Clancy Martin.” Professor Martin knows that there is no real reason to lodge such a complaint, and yet the opportunity to publicly identify himself with such an admired cause as gender equality is so irresistible that he splutters the words onto the page as voluntarily as one surrenders to a nervous tic.

Well, perhaps I have spoken too soon — if I have made any sort of overarching judgement on Professor Martin. For he does seem to have something serious in mind in his discussion of Eakin’s book. He says the fact that the Frenchmen’s ideas are not as scrutinized as their personalities “at times made me worry that, in Eakin’s telling, philosophy is little more than the intellectual fashion of the moment.” Now, if philosophy were really nothing more than a footrace of fashions that all go out of style between the start and finish lines, then we would have a real problem on our hands. Then we would have been deceiving ourselves if we ever thought that philosophy was something of any lasting importance. But the truth is that no matter how much it receives the same treatment as fashion from some, there will still be the option for others to treat it with the gravity it deserves. So even if Eakin thinks what Martin thinks she thinks, then why should that be worrisome? This may shock you, Professor, but you don’t have to agree with her.

I, for myself, am mildly interested in discovering whether Eakin’s book really poses a problem for philosophy, or whether Martin is just afraid of the shadows of ideas. So maybe I’ll read it.