Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton
From Moses to Marx (and back)
In January, the British literary theorist and philosopher, Terry Eagleton, will be speaking on religion in the lecture series, Now is the Time, in Amsterdam. As an introduction, here is an intellectual portrait of a thinker who is known as one of Great Britain’s most vehement polemicists.‘We know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know there are things we know we don’t know we don’t know.’ – Donald Rumsfeld For the British literary theorist, Terry Eagleton (b. 1943), polemics are the core of his work. As one of the most prominent post-war Marxist cultural theoreticians, he sees it as the task of any critic to connect his academic work with broader (sometimes volatile) issues. This should happen without the critic allowing himself the luxury of hiding behind a vocabulary that is mastered only by the happy few. For Eagleton, literary and cultural theory and activism are flawless extensions of one another. That this strategy, which is certainly not common practice in academic circles, has sown results, has been shown by the fact that he was no stranger even to Prince Charles, who characterized him before a student audience as ‘that dreadful Terry Eagleton’.Recently, Eagleton again practiced what he preached in a heated controversy with the writer, Martin Amis. In a revised introduction to his rather prosaically titled manual, Ideology: An Introduction, written in 2006, Eagleton referred to a comment that Amis made in an interview in The Times. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, Amis confided to his interviewer, ‘There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order,’ whereupon he proposed that Muslims in Great Britain should not be permitted to travel, that it should even be possible to deport them.[1] Eagleton felt that these statements were an actual, bitter illustration of the current importance of ‘ideology’ and ideological criticism. Amis’ strategy would not differ much from that of parties with dubious political agendas (from neoconservatives to the extreme right-wing British National Party). Behind the words of an apparently respectable British writer lurked a history full of social and economic inequality and violence, which remains unidentified or is even reversed in Amis’ self-declared Western victimization. In the British media, the polemics quickly got out of hand, so much so that Eagleton was even accused of professional jealousy (shortly after Eagleton’s attack, Amis would become a creative writing instructor at the same Manchester University that employs Eagleton).[2] But where Eagleton is concerned, what the battle of words primarily demonstrates is that theory and practice are not separate domains. He has succeeded in putting the subject of ‘ideology’, which had repeatedly been declared dead, back on the agenda, by taking it as the starting point for a vehement argument. It would seem that for Eagleton, there is something else at stake. Amis’ somewhat curious experiment in thought is primarily a part of his extremely critical attitude towards religion. Although Eagleton emphatically presents himself as a Marxist, religion is a consistent theme in his work. He refutes the all too simple rejection of religion on the basis of enlightened Western thinking and also refuses to see religion as the proverbial opium for the masses. He claims this is precisely the argument used by Amis. The irrationality of religion, the claim of the ‘unknown known’, as he refers to it – God or Paradise – can justify violence that makes the line that divides religion and totalitarian ideology dangerously thin.[3] Since his earliest publications, Eagleton has always wanted to underscore the liberating potential that is also upheld in the ‘unknown known’ of religion. In this sense, religious and modern socially engaged – i.e., Marxist – ideals are decidedly not diametrically opposed to one another. But the primary reason for Eagleton’s irritation was that Amis’ concept of religion made it the equivalent of a dangerous ideology, whose only alternative was simply the independent, Western critical mind. Amis thus maintained the fiction of the independent mind and disguised the social, political and class-dependent conditions for the possession of an ‘independent mind’.Eagleton’s polemics with Amis are consistent with his recent publications, despite the diversity of subject matter involved (from criticisms of postmodernist theories to the heritage of classic tragedy). In After Theory (2003), Sweet Violence (2003), Holy Terror (2005) and The Meaning of Life (2007), religious experience, its effects in our culture and its political importance, continue to be an issue. Readers and critics who know Eagleton as a Marxist critic of the first (and last) hour no doubt have difficulty with this religious twist in his work. But apart from the fact that he is not the only one, given the many admired contemporary thinkers who show an interest in religion (from Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy to Jurgen Habermas), religion has in fact always played a role in his work, even in the studies that gained him status as the pontiff of leftist cultural theory. Looking at his earliest books, such as The New Left Church (1966), we see that his career and his thinking have always moved back and forth between Moses and Marx.
The New Left Church: Christ, Marx and Theory
In the autobiographical tale, The Gatekeeper (2001), Eagleton sketches the extent to which the environment of Irish labour migrants in northern England, where he is from, has been connected with Catholicism. The lack of outspokenness on the parts of his parents and neighbours was not the result of a repressive Catholicism that proposed to maintain social contradictions by calling on the Bible and tradition. On the contrary, the Christendom that Eagleton sees professed in the working-class neighbourhoods of Manchester does not stand in the way of political consciousness. ‘The Christian gospel invites us to contemplate the reality of human history in the broken body of an executed political criminal.’[4] In earlier books, such as The New Left Church, and his contributions to the progressive Catholic magazine, Slant, many of Eagleton’s themes were already present: the unavoidability of history (and the very concrete material relationships determined by such history) and the necessity of alienation and individual vulnerability in tendencies towards communal resistance. For Eagleton, culture is the starting point for any such ethical political programme. Again and again, he underscores the entanglement between culture – notably literature – and political or social reality. With not only the lessons of engaged Catholicism from his youth at the back of his mind, but also those of the young ‘humanists’, Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre, Eagleton referred to the untenability of the British ethical tradition, which as a successor to Matthew Arnold, defines culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said’, and which makes ‘high’ culture a separate, abstract domain. Eagleton in fact emphasizes the emancipating power of literature and the opportunities that literature has of effecting direct change in reality. In his last explicitly Catholic book, The Body as Language (1970), he referred to the duplicity of language and symbolism. On the one hand, (linguistic) symbols give us a false opportunity for reducing the world and others (or better put: of abstracting them) into understandable things that can be manipulated, stripped of their physical presence, vulnerability and similarity to ourselves. On the other hand, language and symbolism make communication and communion possible, which puts us in a position to create a true, classless society. In Eagleton’s early work, we see how, slowly but surely, Christian themes and figures of thought become inextricably bound to a Marxist vocabulary.From the early 1970s, Eagleton more and more emphatically established himself as a Marxist literary and cultural theorist. Criticism and Ideology is Eagleton’s most dramatic and theoretically expanded attempt to achieve a coordinated, Marxist ‘theory of text’. As an extension of Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey’s structuralist Marxism, Eagleton claims that for literature, there is no escaping ideology, but that literature is indeed capable of reflecting its fault lines and blind spots.Eagleton’s conceptual radicalism is continued in his repeated and ongoing involvement in what, in the 1970s and 1980s, was termed Theory – with a capital ‘T’ – an amalgam of structuralist and poststructuralist ideas, feminism and psychoanalysis (in which such thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan play major roles). Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) demonstrated Eagleton’s talent for picking the right moment to respond to new and relevant ideas. This manual became an academic bestseller and remains one of the most influential English language cultural theoretical overviews, exploring the critical and subversive potential of ‘theory’. Eagleton here announced the end of traditional study of literature by way of his gentleman scholar. ‘Theory’ is of strategic importance in the battle against a liberal humanism that has too long held thought about culture in its grasp. At the same time, as always, Eagleton approaches his subject with the requisite polemic acuity and scepticism. He blames such theorists as Derrida that the emphasis on deconstruction of symbolic systems threatens to wipe out history, notably that of the (social) vulnerability of mankind. The intellectual radical chic is apparently not capable of giving perpetual suffering and equally perpetual hope a place. It was the German Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) who showed Eagleton a different model, one that was both Marxist and messianic. In his book, Walter Benjamin (1981), Eagleton claims that a critical interpretation or reinterpretation of cultural symbols can indeed be conducted with an eye to history. And attentive reading on the part of the critic can once again give a voice to groups that have been forgotten or repressed by history. In this way, we can once again rekindle the emancipating and even utopian spark, so that it takes on contemporary and future liberating potential. As did Benjamin, in the two decades to follow, Eagleton will make the slumbering ‘unknown known’ the driving force behind his work.
From Ireland to Iraq
In the 1990s, Eagleton’s attention was increasingly directed towards Ireland. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), he showed that the history of Ireland – the first victim of English colonial expansion – was not only missing in the official British version of history, but it was also absent in progressive cultural theory. In the 1990s, the studies, as well as plays, including Saint Oscar (about Oscar Wilde) and Saints and Scholars, which Eagleton devoted to modern Irish history and culture touched on a number of themes that had long been absent from the dominant cultural theoretical agenda – community, self-sacrifice for a political purpose, ethics and morals – but which had already resounded in Eagleton’s early writings, including The New Left Church. These themes in fact revolve around something that had almost been forgotten, or was in any case repressed in Western (leftist) post-war thinking: religion. As he had done in his ideological criticism, Eagleton continues to point out the blind spots in our world view. For him, in his most recent work, his involvement with Ireland was the prelude to a natural engagement with religious issues. Reactions to the September 11 attacks, the war in Iraq, statements by Donald Rumsfeld or those of Martin Amis all indicate that today, little account is being taken of the ‘unknown known’. In After Theory and Holy Terror, Eagleton sketches the inadequacy of the latest Western thinking in the presence of Islamic fundamentalism. He dismisses this fundamentalism as totalitarian nihilism – the political translation of Freud’s death wish. But at the same time, our intense reaction to it shows the fear of the big words of a cultural theory permeated with anti-essentialism, while the confrontation with fundamentalism in fact demands great words, such as good and evil, hope and humanity (and their renewed, positive interpretation).His book, Sweet Violence (2003) emphasizes the role that religion and religious figures of thought and forms of narrative can play in finding new role models that no longer leave us just a choice between suffocating fundamentalism and utterly amoral, global capitalism. As it had in Eagleton’s earliest work, religion is again seen in terms of community and equality, as the motor behind an ethical and socio-cultural turnaround. At the same time, as already mentioned, Eagleton emphatically rejects any overly coercive idealistic and ethical religious models. His (renewed) interest in theological issues certainly entails no rejection of the materialistic view of the world and history that Marxism has prescribed for him. On the contrary, Eagleton’s definition of ‘religion’ remains unadulteratedly materialistic. Religion puts the body – in particular, the suffering body – at the centre. In his recent pamphlet, Holy Terror (2005), Eagleton demonstrates that the roots of terrorism therefore also have to be sought in shared human experience, such as suffering and repression, and the ‘terror’ – fear, fascination and revenge – that they evoke. The historical relativism of leftist cultural criticism has no eye for these deeply human experiences, nor does the ‘name-and-shame’ rhetoric of Martin Amis, which ultimately does nothing more than lay the causes of terrorism at the feet of a presupposed Other, who is far enough removed from us so that he is unable to ask us any awkward questions about the universality of suffering and the terror that it generates.Eagleton’s metaphysical turn has certainly not taken a reactionary course. In his work on religion, he has shown himself to have an inexhaustibly militant spirit. Religion (notably Catholicism), like Marxist tradition, offers Eagleton a wealth of affective and liberating connections that are worthy of defending to the limits. Joost de Bloois
Joost de Bloois
