In this new book, Eagleton saw little need to develop his claims against the ostensible radicality of the cultural thinkers he attacks-the argument of his The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) is asserted again here. “Only an intellectual who has overdosed on abstraction could be dim enough to imagine that whatever bends a norm is politically radical,” claims Eagleton (15), a nonvulgar Marxist in the tradition of Theodor Adorno. And by power he means the coarse kind that decides who eats and who goes hungry. Here is the problem, which September 11 and the resulting War on Terror made crystal clear: cultural theorists-and by this label he lumps together all those wrong-minded poststructuralists, neopragmatists, and postmodernists, from Jacques Derrida to Stanley Fish to Fredric Jameson-strip majorities of the norms and stable identities that are necessary to oppose real power. It is this perversion that Terry Eagleton hopes to remedy with his newest jeremiad, After Theory. Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public PracticeĬultural theory fiddles while the world burns.Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration. Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice.Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media.Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation.Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice.
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