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After Theory
After Theory Terry Eagleton Basic Books, 2003 231 pp. $25 |
In a prefatory note to After Theory, Terry Eagleton tells us that the influence of one Herbert McCabe has been "so pervasive" as to be "impossible to localize." Rushing past this reference, reviewers have missed a clue, not only to the book, but to the trajectory of Eagleton's career. A sardonic and generous Dominican friar who died in 2001, McCabe was a renowned Thomist philosopher and theologian, an editor of the British Catholic journal New Blackfriars, and a socialist—an "obstinate ultra-leftist," as Eagleton once wrote fondly, who demanded "nothing less than the resurrection of the body." McCabe saw no contradiction or willful eccentricity in these commitments, rooting his radical politics in the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition. From this vantage, socialism was neither an extravagant ideal nor a historical necessity but the epitome of practical reason.
Along with the Marxist cultural historian Raymond Williams and his fellow Dominican Laurence Bright, McCabe mentored Eagleton and other New Left Catholics at Cambridge in the 1960s. Known as the Slant group (after the name of the journal they founded), these lefty Catholics produced some of the most imaginative political theology of the Cold War era. Insisting (against "secular city" fashions) on the indispensability of theology to social and political criticism, Slant recalled an earlier Anglo-Catholic Left that included John Neville Figgis and Maurice Reckitt, and anticipated much in the contemporary "radical orthodoxy" of John Milbank and Graham Ward. As Eagleton put it in The Body as Language (1970), the Church, precisely as the body of Christ, embodied "a revolutionary vanguard … working to dissipate the layers of false consciousness," while the Eucharist betokened "a symbolic transcendence of alienation."
Slant fizzled, however, and Eagleton left the Church in the 1970s, espousing a Marxism leavened by postmodern literary scholarship and cultural politics. Decked out in the latest intellectual fashions—poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis—"cultural studies" programs appeared everywhere, "decentering" the bourgeois self, "deconstructing" Western reason, celebrating the fluidity and "hybridity" of sex, gender, and race. They turned from Romantic poetry to romance novels; from Jane Austen to Austin Powers; from otherworldliness to "otherness." They affirmed pleasure, frivolity, and the "gloriously pointless" against everything mercenary and utilitarian. Especially when influenced by Western Marxism, they avowed the utopian character of culture, modernity's substitute for religion.
These were "towering achievements," Eagleton asserts in After Theory, which "remain as indispensable as ever" despite the excess and nonsense of pomo intellectuals. (Most reviewers, citing Eagleton's asides about "vampirism, cyborgs and porno movies," have been very misleading in this regard.) Anyone familiar with Literary Theory (1983)—a book to which countless graduate students have turned for a quick and lucid initiation—knows that Eagleton's criticisms have always been broadly sympathetic.
Nevertheless, those criticisms grew in number and intensity, and Eagleton now parts from the motley ranks of "theory." Keenly interested "in coupling bodies, but not in labouring ones," divorced from any real political project, but beholden to the shibboleth of "transgression," postmodernism has curdled into a "libertarian pessimism" that is silent about evil and death, superficial about justice and morality, and shy of love, religion, and revolution. Even Marxism has become an "eccentric hobby," a "gentrified version" of its fearsome revolutionary forbears. So as war, capitalism, and religion return with thunder to the historical stage, cultural theorists must awaken from their undogmatic slumbers, confront "fresh challenges," "explore new topics," and "start thinking ambitiously once again."
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