Terry Eagleton
British literary theorist, critic and philosopher, who is regarded as one of the United Kingdom's most influential living literary critics.
All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.
Chaucer was a class traitor
Shakespeare hated the mob
Donne sold out a bit later
Sidney was a nob.
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
"In some traditionalist universities not long ago, you could not research on authors who were still alive. This was a great incentive to slip a knife between their ribs one foggy evening, or a remarkable test of patience if your chosen novelist was in rude health and only 34".
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.
What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.
Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.
Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.