This group has been designated for adults age 18 or older. Please sign in and confirm your date of birth in your profile so we can verify your eligibility. You may opt to make your date of birth private.
Terry Eagleton's Blog, page 3
November 12, 2014
Terry Eagleton reviews Trouble in Paradise and Absolute Recoil by Slavoj Žižek
It is said that Jean-Paul Sartre turned white-faced with excitement when a colleague arrived hotfoot from Germany with the news that one could make philosophy out of the ashtray. In these two new books, Slavoj Žižek philosophises in much the same spirit about sex, swearing, decaffeinated coffee, vampires, Henry Kissinger, The Sound of Music, the Muslim Brotherhood, the South Korean suicide rate and a good deal more. If there seems no end to his intellectual promiscuity, it is because he suffers from a rare affliction known as being interested in everything. In Britain, philosophers tend to divide between academics who write for each other and meaning-of-life merchants who beam their reflections at the general public. Part of Žižek’s secret is that he is both at once: a formidably erudite scholar well-versed in Kant and Heidegger who also has a consuming passion for the everyday. He is equally at home with Hegel and Hitchcock, the Fall from Eden and the fall of Mubarak. If he knows about Wagner and Schoenberg, he is also an avid consumer of vampire movies and detective fiction. A lot of his readers have learned to understand Freud or Nietzsche by viewing them through the lens of Jaws or Mary Poppins.
Academic philosophers can be obscure, whereas popularisers aim to be clear. With his urge to dismantle oppositions, Žižek has it both ways here. If some of his ideas can be hard to digest, his style is a model of lucidity. Absolute Recoil is full of intractable stuff, but Trouble in Paradise reports on the political situation in Egypt, China, Korea, Ukraine and the world in general in a crisp, well-crafted prose that any newspaper should be proud to publish. Not that, given Žižek’s provocatively political opinions, many of them would. He sees the world as divided between liberal capitalism and fundamentalism – in other words, between those who believe too little and those who believe too much. Instead of taking sides, however, he stresses the secret complicity between the two camps. Fundamentalism is the ugly creed of those who feel washed up and humiliated by a west that has too often ridden roughshod over their interests. One lesson of the Egyptian revolt, Žižek argues in Trouble in Paradise, is that if moderate liberal forces continue to ignore the radical left, “they will generate an unsurmountable fundamentalist wave”. Toppling tyrants, which all good liberals applaud, is simply a prelude to the hard work of radical social transformation, without which fundamentalism will return. In a world everywhere under the heel of capital, only radical politics can retrieve what is worth saving in the liberal legacy. It is no wonder that Žižek is as unpopular with Channel 4 as he is on Wall Street.
Continue reading...
Terry Eagleton reviews Trouble in Paradise and Absolute Recoil by Slavoj iek
It is said that Jean-Paul Sartre turned white-faced with excitement when a colleague arrived hotfoot from Germany with the news that one could make philosophy out of the ashtray. In these two new books, Slavoj iek philosophises in much the same spirit about sex, swearing, decaffeinated coffee, vampires, Henry Kissinger, The Sound of Music, the Muslim Brotherhood, the South Korean suicide rate and a good deal more. If there seems no end to his intellectual promiscuity, it is because he suffers from a rare affliction known as being interested in everything. In Britain, philosophers tend to divide between academics who write for each other and meaning-of-life merchants who beam their reflections at the general public. Part of ieks secret is that he is both at once: a formidably erudite scholar well-versed in Kant and Heidegger who also has a consuming passion for the everyday. He is equally at home with Hegel and Hitchcock, the Fall from Eden and the fall of Mubarak. If he knows about Wagner and Schoenberg, he is also an avid consumer of vampire movies and detective fiction. A lot of his readers have learned to understand Freud or Nietzsche by viewing them through the lens of Jaws or Mary Poppins.
Academic philosophers can be obscure, whereas popularisers aim to be clear. With his urge to dismantle oppositions, iek has it both ways here. If some of his ideas can be hard to digest, his style is a model of lucidity. Absolute Recoil is full of intractable stuff, but Trouble in Paradise reports on the political situation in Egypt, China, Korea, Ukraine and the world in general in a crisp, well-crafted prose that any newspaper should be proud to publish. Not that, given ieks provocatively political opinions, many of them would. He sees the world as divided between liberal capitalism and fundamentalism in other words, between those who believe too little and those who believe too much. Instead of taking sides, however, he stresses the secret complicity between the two camps. Fundamentalism is the ugly creed of those who feel washed up and humiliated by a west that has too often ridden roughshod over their interests. One lesson of the Egyptian revolt, iek argues in Trouble in Paradise, is that if moderate liberal forces continue to ignore the radical left, they will generate an unsurmountable fundamentalist wave. Toppling tyrants, which all good liberals applaud, is simply a prelude to the hard work of radical social transformation, without which fundamentalism will return. In a world everywhere under the heel of capital, only radical politics can retrieve what is worth saving in the liberal legacy. It is no wonder that iek is as unpopular with Channel 4 as he is on Wall Street.
Continue reading...October 10, 2014
If I were king for a day I would execute eavesdroppers, morris dancers and Bruce Forsyth | Terry Eagleton
My first move as monarch would be to tackle those grim institutions in which antisocial types are confined for years only to emerge as much a threat to civilised society as ever. Having abolished the public schools, I would turn to the question of language. On-the-spot fines will be issued to people who say refute when they mean deny, fortuitous when they mean fortunate and floor when they mean ground. People who tell you that they literally exploded with laughter will be literally exploded. Those who talk about their life as a journey will have their travels rapidly terminated.
Anything that cant change without either sea-changing or step-changing will be done away with. Nothing will be delivered except babies and parcels. There will be a prize for the first journalist able to write about young people or old people without using the word vulnerable. Nobody will pass away any more. Instead, they will die not least people who talk about passing away. Guardian leader writers will be paraded naked through the streets for thinking that beg the question means raise the question.
Continue reading...March 26, 2014
Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton - review
The novels of Graham Greene are full of reluctant Christians, men and women who would like to be rid of God but find themselves stuck with him like some lethal addiction. There are, however, reluctant atheists as well, people who long to dunk themselves in the baptismal font but can't quite bring themselves to believe. George Steiner and Roger Scruton have both been among this company at various stages of their careers. The agnostic philosopher Simon Critchley, who currently has a book in the press entitled The Faith of the Faithless, is one of a whole set of leftist thinkers today (Slavoj iek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben) whose work draws deeply on Christian theology. In this respect, the only thing that distinguishes them from the Pope is that they don't believe in God. It is rather like coming across a banker who doesn't believe in profit.
Such reluctant non-belief goes back a long way. Machiavelli thought religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful way of terrorising the mob. Voltaire rejected the God of Christianity, but was anxious not to infect his servants with his own scepticism. Atheism was fine for the elite, but might breed dissent among the masses. The 18th-century Irish philosopher John Toland, who was rumoured to be the bastard son of a prostitute and a spoilt priest, clung to a "rational" religion himself, but thought the rabble should stick with their superstitions. There was one God for the rich and another for the poor. Edward Gibbon, one of the most notorious sceptics of all time, held that the religious doctrines he despised could still be socially useful. So does the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas today.
What would Rousseau make of our selfish age?
Few thinkers have left their fingerprints on the modern age as indelibly as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the tricentenary of whose birth we celebrate on Thursday (28 June).. He was a philosopher who helped shape the destiny of nations, which is more than can be said for Pythagoras or AC Grayling. He was also a political visionary of stunning originality, a potent influence on the French revolution and a source of inspiration for the Romantics. Those who like their fiction drenched in lofty moral sentiment can also claim him as a great novelist.
Much of what one might call the modern sensibility was this thinker's creation. It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere. Gentlemen begin to weep in public, while children are viewed as human beings in their own right rather than defective adults.
Derrida: A Biography by Benoît Peeters - review
In May 1992, the dons of Cambridge University filed into their parliament to vote on whether to award an honorary degree to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, founder of so-called deconstruction. Despite a deftly managed smear campaign by the opposition, Derrida's supporters carried the day. It would be interesting to know how many of those who tried to block him in the name of rigorous scholarship had read a single book of his, or even a couple of articles.
The truth is that they did not need to. The word was abroad that this purveyor of fashionable French gobbledegook was a charlatan and a nihilist, a man who believed that anything could mean anything and that there was nothing in the world but writing. He was a corrupter of youth who had to be stopped in his tracks. As a teenager, Derrida had fantasised with some of his friends about blowing up their school with some explosives they had acquired. There were those in Cambridge who thought he was planning to do the same to western civilisation. He did, however, have an unlikely sympathiser. When the Duke of Edinburgh, chancellor of Cambridge University, presented Derrida with his degree in the year in which Charles and Diana separated, he murmured to him that deconstruction had begun to affect his own family too.
Woolwich murder: we must use reason to beat terrorists
Why did the Woolwich killing happen? Less than a week on, the debate has swiftly moved on to the issue of "preventative measures", with Theresa May proposing new internet controls and the banning of groups preaching hate.
Yet anyone who dares to use the words "western foreign policy" in this context is bound to be speedily shut up by the likes of Paxman and co. This isn't because they have never heard of drones and Guantánamo. They are surely aware of the countless thousands of innocent civilians dispatched to their graves by western operations in the Arab world, for whom there are no floral tributes piled on the London pavements. It is rather because they imagine, in their muddled way, that to explain an event is to excuse it. Those who point to the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan are surely doing so as a devious way of justifying the slaughter of a young soldier outside his barracks.
The North (And Almost Everything In it) by Paul Morley review
One of the many fascinating chunks of information to be found in Paul Morley's study of northern England is that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who once worked as an aeronautical engineer at Manchester University, used to attend concerts at the city's Free Trade Hall and whistle his way through entire symphonies. Twenty or so years later, the 12-year-old Mancunian Anthony Burgess, who would eventually become a composer as well as a renowned novelist, was taken to the same venue by his father to hear the Hallé orchestra perform Wagner.
Morley's book, however, fails to record that this great musical tradition suffered a steep decline. Three decades later, I myself stood on the stage of the Free Trade Hall clad in red blazer and grey shorts, singing shamelessly chauvinistic songs as a member of the school choir on Speech Day. The chauvinism, I now recognise, was an attempt by my Irish immigrant community to ingratiate itself with mainstream English culture. Within a few square miles of my home, a band of Salford men and women en route to stardom revealed their Irish origins in their surnames: Albert Finney, Shelagh Delaney, Steven Morrissey, John Cooper Clarke. Burgess can be an Irish name, and so can Morley.
The Frontman: Bono (In The Name of Power) by Harry Browne review
It is no surprise that Bono and Bob Geldof, the two leading celebrity philanthropists of our time, are both Irish. The Ireland into which they were born in the 1960s was caught between third and first worlds, and so was more likely to sympathise with the wretched of the earth than were the natives of Hampstead. As a devoutly Christian nation, it also had a long missionary tradition. Black babies were a familiar object of charity in Ireland long before Hollywood movie stars began snapping them up. Bono himself was a member of a prayer group in the 1970s, before he stumbled on leather trousers and wrap-around shades. Scattered across the globe by hunger and turmoil at home, the Irish have long been a cosmopolitan people, far less parochial than their former proprietors. Small nations cannot afford the insularity of the great.
Besides, if you were born into this remote margin of Europe and yearned for the limelight, it helped to have an eye-catching cause and a mania for self-promotion. Rather as the Irish in general were forced by internal circumstance to become an international people, so men like Bono and Geldof could use their nationality to leap on to the world stage.
Colin Wilson's glumness entranced me as a budding teenage existentialist
When I was 16, I tried to grow a beard and fancied myself as a bit of an existentialist. There was a good-looking girl at a local convent school who not only fancied herself as an existentialist but fancied existentialists, which gave me a strong motive for proclaiming the essential futility of human existence. Looking back, it's possible that I mistook adolescence for metaphysical angst.
I was also fascinated at the time by the so-called angry young men, most of whom were to end up as dyspeptic old reactionaries. I read Look Back in Anger, Lucky Jim and Room at the Top, and tried to imitate their truculent, iconoclastic style in my own unglamorous existence. This wasn't easy, given that I wore a school blazer and had only recently graduated to long trousers. I wasn't exactly sure what these writers were angry about, and later came to see that they weren't either. In fact, most of them weren't angry at all. It was mostly media hype. But they were putting what I saw as my own culture provincial, working-class, vaguely leftist, chip-on-shoulder on the map, and this was deeply exciting. In the evenings I took to wearing a cravat, a piece of clothing that I had seen the elegantly disdainful John Osborne wear on TV. It seemed to signify a certain cosmic dissidence.
Terry Eagleton's Blog
- Terry Eagleton's profile
- 1253 followers
