After Theory by Terry Eagleton (PDF)

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The golden age of cultural theory (the product of a decade and a half, from 1965 to 1980) is long past. We are living now in its aftermath, in an age which, having grown rich in the insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida, has also moved beyond them. What kind of new, fresh thinking does this new era demand? Eagleton concludes that cultural theory must start thinking ambitiously again – not so that it can hand the West its legitimation, but so that it can seek to make sense of the grand narratives in which it is now embroiled.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I suspect that the title of Terry Eagleton’s After Theory is intentionally uncertain. The book is readable, interesting, insightful, just like Eagleton’s numerous other publications. But one gets the distinct impression that he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do or where he wanted to go when he started working on this one. In fact, there is a stream-of-consciousness feel to much of the book that invites the judgment that Eagleton wrote After Theory as he went along, off the top of his well-stocked head, without much prior planning.After Theory is oddly disjointed. Chapters are strung together with a bare minimum of connective tissue, using transitions consisting of no more than an off-handed sentence or two. In this respect, the book reminds me of a hurried paper prepared for presentation at a meeting that is scheduled a day or two earlier than the author would like. With some judicious editing, however, After Theory could easily consititute a much more coherent presentation.Similarly, Eagleton is good at aphorisms. He knows a lot, has read and remembered a lifetime of disparate literature, has an enormously broad range of references, and achieved mature insights that certainly merit sharing. Some of his pages are heavy-laden with four, five six … truly pithy observations, but they remain disconnected and undeveloped. Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman autodidact who wrote The True Believer, was fond of saying that he thought in aphorisms, and that he had trouble understanding the work of authors whose work could not be reduced to aphorisms. If Hoffer were still around to read After Theory, he’d see that Eagleton, especially in the latter half of the book, has done the reduction-to-aphorisms work for him. It’s good material, but mabye Eagleton should have titled his book “What I Have Learned: Make of It What You Will.”Eagleton also seems to have mixed, perhaps irreconcilably contradictory, assessments of recent literary and cultural theory, meaning structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism. He begins by paying homage to the power and originality of writers such as Athusser, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and numerous others whose theoertical work came to fruition during the period from 1965 to 1985, generating intellectual ferment in literary studies and the interpretation of culture generally. Eagleton’s laudatory observations, however, remain at a very high level of abstraction. When he gets concrete, rather than offering accolades he focuses on the authors’ conceptual tunnel vision, over-reaching, internal contradictions, misconstruing the meaning of basic ideas, and the trivializing of genuinely important issues while over-valuing the aesthetics of personal preference. Eagleton may be perfectly serious when he argues that the theoretical frameworks and perspectives promulgated during the intellectual excitement of the mid-’60’s to the mid-’80’s are of enduring value. He may really mean it when he says that these points of view enable us to see a good deal of value that we otherwise would miss. But he seems hard-pressed to come up with concrete examples. Even when he expresses indebtedness to Foucault for providing the conceptual wherewithal that made the concluding section of After Theory possible, Eagleton offers no explanation.The further we get into After Theory, the clearer it becomes that Eagleton regards these recent theoretical developments as, for better or worse, extensions of early Twentieth Century modernism. The first decades of the Twentieth Century, as a result, seem much more theoretically fertile than the period from 1965 to 1985. By giving priority to earlier decades, Eagleton presents subsequent theoretical work as rooted in, and perhaps ancillary to, the emergence and development of modernism early in the last century. In the case of post-modernism, moreover, modernism, as Eagleton sees it, has been perverted into a manifestation of the globalization of capital, with its unmistakable claims that markets are the only sacred institutions and that value is transitory, arbitrary, unsubstantiated, and groundless.Whatever the merit of recent theoretical work, Eagleton finds the work of Marx and Freud still fresh and conceptually powerful, providing the intellectual wherewithal to understand today’s world. Structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism may very well have a contribution to make, but the work of Marx and Freud remains much more illuminating than anything that has come along since they put pen to paper.I suspect that Eagleton is of an age and temperament that make finding satisfaction in slippery signifiers and excietment in radical anti-foundationalism seem decadent. Such notions have their place, but they have been over-valued, and their effect on efforts to make the miserable world that we share a better home for all of us has been pernicious.After theory is not Eagleton’s best book, but it is a good one. It’s good to read something that takes a stand against the self-indulgent triviliazation of important issues that one finds in modern social theory, and tries to find a philosophical basis for social action of a genuinely progressive sort.

⭐A dense yet engaging read. Eagleton’s polemics are witty and imaginative and his critique of cultural theory is highly insightful.

⭐Terry Eagleton’s After Theory was hailed as philosophically serious and important on arrival and is destined to be far more popular that anything he has written before. It’s not the first book to be titled After Theory, but it is the first book to take on the pretentions of `high theory’, especially as articulated through postmodernism and cultural studies, explain its claims, evaluate them and offer alternative ideas and projects in plain language and with lots of excellent humour. With three or four stand alone one-liners on most pages and ideas concretized with examples from popular culture (as well as Aristotle, the Book of Isaiah, Shakespeare and Marx) and ordinary life, it is a rollicking good read and a welcome corrective to the laborious Derridean obscurantism that some still mistake for wisdom.Eagleton is happy to concede that high theory has entrenched some useful if not original insights such as the ideas that human beings are about desire and fantasy as much as reason, that ordinary life is an important focus of critical attention and that seriousness and pleasure are not necessarily separate. But he also argues that it has a disabling tendency towards the valorisation of the experiences of elites and the disregard for the experiences of ordinary people. He is deeply skeptical about, say, an Indian academic moving between Oxford and Harvard who celebrates cosmopolitanism and hybridity as the vanguard of post-coloniality while saying nothing about the children sewing Nike shoes in Delhi. He is equally skeptical about academics who reject the idea of progress without rejecting dental anesthetics. And he shows that post-modern arguments are very easily deployed by overtly reactionary agendas. He explores the attraction of postmodern arguments about liminality and diversity to reactionary Ulster academics. Some reactionary Afrikaaner academics have made very similar use of postmodernism.But the essence of Eagleton’s critique goes deeper and is more interesting than his attacks on the pompous narcissism of Theory. He argues that postmodernism is a symptom of capitalism and not, as it claims, critical theory. Postmodernism celebrates the non-normative and sees redemption in diversity and transgression. Eagleton’s point is that `the non-normative has become the norm…the norm is now money’. `Money’, he notes, `is utterly promiscuous’ and infinitely adaptive without any opinions of its own. Body piercing and Kwanza and sado-masochism are all just niche markets. They pose no threat to capital. And while capitalism has invented or exacerbated social divisions and exclusions when alliances with local elites are to its advantage it is, in principle, `an impeccably inclusive creed, it really doesn’t care who it exploits…Most of the time it is eager to mix together as many diverse cultures as possible, so that it can peddle its commodities to them all…It thrives on bursting bounds and slaying sacred cows. Its desire is unslakeable and its space infinite. Its law is the flouting of all limits.’Eagleton argues that the rise of the global anti-capitalist movements has shown that thinking globally is not the same as being totalitarian and develops a range of arguments against the postmodern critique of its own caricature of radical politics. For example he observes that conviction is not the same as authoritarianism and truth is not the same as dogmatism. One can be passionately democratic and committed to the truth that experiences differ. He argues for a radicalism that gives ontological priority to experience of the poor and seeks to enable collective action to sub-ordinate the market to democratic control.Once one has learnt the jargon of high theory it is quite easy to prick its wildly over inflated balloons. But Eagleton goes further and shows that it is entirely possible to return to questions that matter. He develops stimulating and important meditations on virtue, suffering, death, politics and revolution. But his consideration of these questions is primarily ethical with the result that the hard political questions about strategy are not taken on.Omissions are inevitable, but the book does have one obvious failing. Eagleton makes much of Hardt and Negri’s argument that the poor have an ontological privilege when it comes to rebellion because they incarnate the failure of the system and so have less delusions about it and less of a stake in the system. But he ignores Hardt and Negri’s warnings about anti-Americanism. Eagleton’s scathing contempt for American consumerism and fundamentalism is persuasive and his argument that these are two, mutually dependent, consequences of the same ethical and political failure to respect the dignity of ordinary people is very interesting. But he completely ignores the radical America that Howard Zinn’s history records and takes no account of the genuine popularity of radicals like John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie and, in the current era, Bruce Springsteen. This omission gives Eagleton’s account of America something of the feeling of a very English caricature.After Theory is not written for a non-specialist audience. Slavoj Zizek and Frank Kermode are wildly enthusiastic about it. But it will be particularly appreciated by people whose encounters with `high theory’ have been intimidating rather than enlightening. It proves the validity of Nietzsche’s dictum that “Those who know they are profound strive for clarity: those who would like to seem profound…strive for obscurity.” Hopefully, After Theory will prove to be one of many new books that seek to explore important philosophical questions in a spirit vastly more democratic than the narcissistic obscuratism of high theory.

⭐I have recently read this book, and I have to say that I’m less than impressed with it. When I started it, I was pleased and relieved that it was so easy to read and entertaining, but after a couple of chapters of Eagleton’s witticisms and biting humor, I found myself waiting for the “theory” to kick in…and it took him until the last three chapters. The book seems to be primarily a rant directed against capitalism (i.e.-the United States, though he does make a tiny disclaimer about this in the postscript), and while it’s not surprising coming from an alleged Marxist, it does eventually begin to wear on the reader–at least on this reader. He has good points, but After Theory really feels more like a soapbox for a fist-shaking rant than a discussion of the decades that have comes after literary theory’s “golden age” of 1965-1980. I was really hoping for more out of this book.

⭐A very good read humerous auther

⭐Un essai qui se veut sérieux sans quitter le domaine littéraire ? Ce qui fait son charme. Les attaques qu’il conduit contre le postmodernisme se présentent sans systematicite épistémologique comme on l’aurait souhaité. Cependant quelqu’un qui connaît « l’accusé » peut facilement identifier les vices. La lecture organisée à travers la thèse de la vertu intellectuelle rend le livre encore plus attrayant.not written in a particularly academic way and sprawls a bit too much for my taste.perhaps at its best in summarizing and contextualizing theory as a phenomenon located in particular historical phases.

⭐Eines der interessantesten Bücher, die je gelesen habe: Eine mitreissende, kritische Analsyse unserer Zeit und all dessen, was wir in den letzten 100 Jahren ideologisch zu verdauen hatten. Geschrieben mit Herz, Witz und Verstand sowie (natürlich) einer gehörigen Portion marxistischer Kulturkritik. Wer geistiges Super tanken möchte, sollte unbedingt hier anhalten!have not had time to read this as yet. have skimmed it and will get time soon to read properly

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