Terry Eagleton
British literary theorist, critic and philosopher, who is regarded as one of the United Kingdom's most influential living literary critics.
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.
"Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach".
When it comes to who exactly should be exploited, the system is admirably egalitarian.
Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman “other” or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.
"Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions."
It is silly to call fat people “gravitationally challenged”, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
"It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself."
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.
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.
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.
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.
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.
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
"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".
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.
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.