Materialism and Finitude: Terry Eagleton's Marxism

Abstract


 
 
 This essay focuses on the change of emphasis–already announced in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1997) and evident in Sweet Violence (2003)–that took place in Eagleton’s writing at the turn of the century: from showing a historicist scepticism about universals to advocating acknowledgment of human creatureliness (frailty, suffering, death) without which any political project would fail. This change coincided with an approach to a Thomist version of the Christian religion that reflected the influence on Eagleton of his friend the Dominican Herbert McCabe and with a profound interest in Jacques Lacan. The article argues that this change did not affect Eagleton’s Marxist faith or imply shunning political action. Rather, the turn concerned the materialist basis of Eagleton’s proposal of a just life. The appeal to existential forces entailed, on the one hand, a critique of left historicism and of the postmodern cult of culture and relativism and, on the other, an attempt to reinforce a Marxist critique of capitalism and the resistance against fundamentalism, Nihilism, and consumerism. To propose his idea of the just life Eagleton appropriates both the notion of Christian charity–the idea of self-realization through love and solidarity–together with the Thomist conception of morality rooted in the body, and Lacan’s imperative “do not give up on desire”.