How it came to be that French Theory Is American.
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's Timing»
As a result, it became "Americanized" via Homogenization (Cusset), Institutionalization (Cusset), and A Bias Toward Action (Cusset).
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].