The Business of Theory (Page 2)

It is here that Aristotle passes over into Christianity. For the latter, the chief virtue is love: We find our own fulfillment by contributing to the fulfillment of others--a self-sacrifice that Eagleton never claims is less than very difficult but that becomes a good bit more thinkable once we see it as a rehearsal for the ultimate, inevitable self-abandonment of death (the one reality consumer society is most desperate to deny). The archetype of such selflessness is the martyr, who dies so that others may live, but it is in any case a figment of capitalist ideology to believe that we ever possess ourselves, possess our bodies, in the first place. The force that should bind our collective life, in Eagleton's conception, is not self-interest, as in liberalism, but reciprocity. And the name for this ethic, when it assumes political form, is socialism.

All this is admirable and powerful, but there are problems. For one thing, the argument isn't nearly as coherent as I've made it sound, but proceeds instead by zigs and zags, often little more than a grab-bag of discussions, definitions and digressions, as Eagleton tries to tackle every issue he thinks the present situation demands but without having integrated them all into a coherent framework. Reading his two previous books, The Gatekeeper, a memoir, and Figures of Dissent, a collection of reviews, one discovers that he's adapted nearly a score of passages from those works for the present one. (His fertility, it turns out, is partly a matter of shameless self-plagiarism.) No wonder the book feels patched together.

For another thing, Eagleton's argument is often not much of an argument at all but rather a series of assertions that sympathetic readers are likely to agree with but that hardly stand up to the kind of rigorous analysis he himself uses so tellingly against his opponents. The fact is that for all his polish and brilliance as an explicator of other people's ideas, Eagleton has never been much of an original thinker. (Those who can, think up Marxism; those who can't, apply such insights to Clarissa or Wuthering Heights.) He even acknowledges as much in The Gatekeeper, referring to a youthful job as an encyclopedia salesman as his "earliest experience of peddling ideas to the masses, a project which was later to become my full-time occupation." The remark may be funny, but it's no joke. Here, trying to create a kind of moral-political Theory of Everything, he gets badly out of his depth.

But those aren't the most serious problems. Whatever the shortcomings of his argument, I for one am perfectly ready to agree with its general thrust: that capitalism is irredeemably wicked, that no amount of incrementalist tinkering will make it otherwise and that, in the face of the intellectual paralysis that has taken over the left, we must have the courage to imagine revolutionary new social models and take the collective action necessary to bring them into being. The big problem is that Eagleton doesn't say the first thing about how to get from here to there, or even, except in the most tritely general way, what "there" would look like. Yes, Professor Eagleton, "we need to imagine new forms of belonging." So how about trying to imagine some? Indeed, for all that Eagleton has always preached the necessity of situating objects of analysis within their historical contexts, and for all of this book's announced post-cultural studies, post-9/11 topicality, he makes virtually no reference to the present world situation in the second half of the book. It's as if he were waiting for someone like Fredric Jameson to articulate a real Marxist analysis of the latest phase of capitalist development so that he can restate (and market) it in his own much cleverer, more lucid language.

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