idiosyncratic marriage of criticism and ideology. 4 Thus, by The Function of Criticism (1984), Eagleton could write a sentence such as this: ‘The argument of this book is that criticism today lacks all substantive social function.’ 5 And it is in this same spare, provocative vein that, almost twenty years later in Sweet Violence , Eagleton takes on tragedy, and the idea of the tragic. In the first place, Eagleton is keen to distance himself froma form of leftist historicism that sees tragedy as fetishizing suffering and nobility, as trading in false universals, as promoting fatalism, and as privileging the individual over society. But it turns out that this form of historicism’s mistaken view of tragedy and of the tragic is actually a sign of a wider problem. For Eagleton sees this brand of leftist historicism as in thrall to a very post-structuralist, Franco-Californian attachment to plurality, self- fashioning and instability. As Eagleton says: ‘In a world of short -term contacts, just-in-time deliveries, ceaseless downsizings and remodellings, overnight shifts of fashion and capital investment, multiple careers and multipurpose production, such theorists seem to imagine, astonishingly, that the main enemy is the naturalized, static and unchanging. Whereas the truth is that for millions of harassed workers around the globe, not many of them academics, a respite from dynamism, metamorphosis and multiple identities would come as a blessed release.’ 6 For Eagleton, these leftists, because they are influenced by post-structuralism, have misunderstood the very basic differences between capitalism and socialism: ‘It is capitalism which is anarchic, extravagant, out of hand, and socialism which is temperate, earth-bound and realistic. This is at least one reason why an anarchic, extravagant poststructuralism has been rather wary of it.’ 7 Some leftists, then, have not grasped what late capital is, and what it does to those not fortunate enough to be paid for thinking about late capital in (sometimes) permanent jobs in the academy. 8 And those same leftists have also failed to understand history, which they wrongly see as primarily change rather than for the most part continuity. They fail also to see that the transhistorical (death, ageing, loss, the smallness of humanity in relation to the cosmos) is not to be feared as a concept, and that tragedy – capable though it is of dealing with the historically and politically specific – represents the transhistorical because it represents suffering, and explores the material and the objective because it represents the suffering body (‘aspects of sufferi ng which are . . . rooted in our species- being’). 9
I am not sure that all this takes us much further along in our understanding of the tragic; and the description of the post-structuralist position is perhaps something of a caricature. Indeed, for a classicist trained to explore (Athenian) tragedy as a political discourse arising out of and responding to
4 See, randomly chosen, Eagleton 1976 : 46: ‘The disjunction between historically coexistent LMPs [literary modes of production] may be synchronic – determined by the structural distribution of possible modes of literary production enabled by the social formation – or diachronic (determined by historical survivals). There is also the case of diachronic disjunction which arises not from survival but from ‘prefigurement’: LMPs which e nter into contradiction with the dominant LMP by ‘anticipating’ the productive forms and social relations of a future social formation (the revolutionary artists’ commune, ‘epic theatre’ and so on) . ’ I suspect that there are few who read Althusser these d ays. Judt (2008) is a convincing and devastating critique of Althusser’s brand of Marxism. 5 Eagleton 1984: 7. 6 Eagleton 2003: x – xi. 7 Ibid.: xi. 8 See Jameson 1984 for one of the most influential accounts of late capital as the postmodern. 9 Eagleton 2003: xiii.
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