Editor’s introduction
Neil Croally
History as text; text as history
Several weeks ago I was worrying that my view of the tragic was once again reducing the very idea to something true but somehow unsatisfactory: that there is more than one side to an argument; that conflict in areas of sharp moral concern is inevitable; that progress contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, etc.. It was in this (slight) funk that I started to flick through the Times Literary Supplement , where I found a review (by Edith Hall, I think) of Anne Carson’s new translation of Euripide s’ Trojan Women . 1 While I have a passing interest in that magnificent play, I was drawn to the review’s headline: Sweet Violence , also the title of a book by Terry Eagleton (subtitle ‘The Idea of the Tragic’). 2 And the name Eagleton, for people of my age, interested in literature but also in the political and other theory emanating mainly from France from the 60s onwards, is peculiarly evocative. He was still a fellow of Wadham College when I was an undergraduate in Oxford. One always sensed that there were plenty of academics involved in literary criticism around, but there was only one Terry Eagleton. At the age he was then (in the early 80s), he just about qualified as an enfant terrible , and he seemed to have his own sort of praetorian guard of students in the fearsomely committed campaigning group Oxford English Limited . He was, to be sure, a public intellectual, but he was definitely of the left, and neither respectable nor comfortable. Indeed, I sat near him once, during a lockdown in The Bullingdon Arms on the Cowley Road, as he loudly sang paeans to Irish Republicanism and its struggle. Only he – in his doggedly Marxist but also flamboyantly rhetorical way – seemed prepared to confront (and on their terms) the hyper-theorists disputing their differences in Paris. (I refer to Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, of course, but also Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Althusser and Deleuze.) 3 It was in that spirit that, at an event called Post-Structuralism Day (bizarrely held at that bastion of conventional politics, the Oxford Union), I saw him argue that the problem with the subject (or self) produced by Lacanian psychoanalysis was that they could never be capable of political engagement, could never, as he said, ‘bring down a Thatcher or a Reagan’. I had already heard him mount a very similar attack against Derridean deconstruction. But on this occasion, Eagletonwas speechless when amember of the audience told him that his desire to kill the father [sic] merely showed that he was in need of more therapy. Never did it seem more obvious that Marxism and post-structuralism were two discourses running in parallel, as it were, never to meet (hence the enigmatic statement at the top of this introduction).
Earlier in his career, in the 70s, Eagleton had tried to accommodate himself to post-1968 neo-Marxism. That produced some giddying prolixity and jargon richesse in Criticism and Ideology (1976), but soon after this Eagleton abandoned the Althusserian dance for a more direct, more rugged, more
1 Carson 2021. 2 Eagleton 2003. 3 Binet (2018) is an amusing, imaginative portrait of les maitres de pens ée.
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