An argument (from François Cusset 
) that French critical/cultural/philosophical speculations was turned into capital-T Theory only after they were imported into America. It shares this property with other "global" trends. The mechanism was threefold: homogenization, institutionalization, and what I might call the impulse that led to Pragmatism the Philosophy.
The Sequence of Events
> [...] a few concepts from their initial, North European contexts (Spinoza’s Amsterdam, Nietzsche’s Prussia, Hume’s England…) to their French inscription in the 1960s-1980s, then to their North American export and initial academicization, to their extension to Anglophone universities outside the US, and to their later impacts and recyclings in the entire Global South [...]
Once upon a time, there were a variety of French thinkers who were interested in different topics. Their ideas spread to America, but first to what you might call "the street" (in the sense of William Gibson's "the Street finds its own uses for things" ).
>
> the trigger [...] was the story of *Semiotext(e)*, a 1970s journal and collective directly instrumental in importing French Theory in the US but more at ease with noise music, psychedelic drugs, “unAmerican activities” and East Village artists’ squats than with curricula, reading lists, footnotes, or the publish-or-perish injunction.
> they were, for a crazy few years, free-floating cultural objects, unappropriated, radically unfamiliar, circulating from Bowery music clubs to East Village artists’ squats, alternative LA publishers to Berkeley activists and geeks.
It was then taken up by American academics. (Cusset makes it seem more of a sudden shift from Street-style punks to academic punks than I think is entirely valid: Derrida's big splash was at a Johns Hopkins 1966 conference "intended to promote structuralism.")
At that point, it was "Americanized" as described below.
From there, it spread back to the rest of the world, getting (in translation) to France "often one or two decades after their German or Spanish reception."
There, it was met with skepticism:
> French Theory became “théorie américaine,” feeding a new suspicion shared by all French conservative opinion leaders (and long held by American neoconservatives), the suspicion that French Theory was a Trojan Horse for [culture war issues].
His Thesis
> French Theory is like K-pop, Web programming, fusion cuisine, or all-news cable TV [...]: it is American not at all in the sense of an essentialized and monolithic anchoring, but in the opposite sense of an utter hybridity, inventive mixing, strategic dissolving of single identities.
These processes are "definitely not specific to US culture but often first experimented with there" because of the kind of country America *is* ("for reasons of demography, immigration, self-sufficiency, and [...]")
> Foucault’s biopolitics, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo-capitalism, or Derrida’s deconstruction describe, or at least help understand, American consumer society more than the old European-style class struggle, new technologies and virtual devices more than Continental philosophy, “infotainment” and societies of control more than the vertical traditions of French life.
Cause 1: homogenization
> [...] the act of assembling, and forcing into the same category, works and authors who might have been contemporaries and even have read and occasionally praised each other’s works but who remain impossible to juxtapose and even less to reduce to the same gregarious family: French Theory is a deliberately open-ended (or inclusive) and blurry rubric, [...] marketed in such a way that its American users and consumers will quickly forget that these people don’t have that much in common.
Giving it a short, powerful, single-word name ["Theory"] is probably a big part of that.
Cause 2: Institutionalization
> The second phenomenon is, of course, academicization itself, the domestication by the university as institution and as power-knowledge of a few texts and authors who had successfully avoided that fate in France (in part because the French academe didn’t *want* them at all).
> Academic domestication has its downfalls, with theory losing its inner political force or its extra-textual inventiveness, but it [...] made for a longer-term influence and explains why these texts and authors are still so present in the US for the new generation today, half a century after their initial entry into the New World.
Cause 3: Action Toward Goals
> the third phenomenon is the US pragmatic take on theory as something someone does, or manipulates, or acts with, as an object in the hands of a subject [...]
> Theory was an almost authorless series of concepts and arguments [...]
> In the US, as an instrument to help reach a certain goal, theory became, respectively, a method of reading (deconstruction), a praise of difference (micropolitics) [etc.] [...] Not that such active and deliberate takes are wrong per se, but they all are derived from a very institutional (university) and somehow cultural (North American) necessity to do things with words, to tend towards consequences, and to select the most relevant word formations one could find to that end [...]