even Nietzsche’s Übermensch represented, Eagleton writes, a “counterfeit theology.” In our incorrigibly ironic era of postmodernism, the venerable questions of meaning and destiny are sloughed off as unreal and coercive “metanarrative”; even revolutionary hope—another grasp at transcendence—yields to the conquest of cool, the imperium of a hip plutocracy. “The only aura to linger on,” Eagleton sadly concludes, “is that of the commodity or celebrity.”
