Cultural theory fiddles while the world burns. It is this perversion that Terry Eagleton hopes to remedy with his newest jeremiad, After Theory. 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. And by power he means the coarse kind that decides who eats and who goes hungry. “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.

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. That earlier effort was not particularly unique—save for the cosmic irony that it was Eagleton himself who had introduced many people to “theory” with his primer Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Illusions was only one of a number of compelling critiques published at about the same time, including Mark Bauerlein’s Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), John R. Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), and Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

There is one exception to Eagleton’s general failure to develop his counterclaims; he compulsively targets the “anti-theorist” who practices the “heresy of fideism,” whose “philistine complacency … could be summed up [as] ‘Don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch’ ” (54, 55, 72). These indictments were reserved for the final author named above, Rorty, the “postmodern” American who snatched the Leftist ground from its traditional European setting (72). As much as anything, this book wants to rebut Rorty’s thesis in Achieving Our Country, that the academic Left collaborates with the political Right in substituting cultural politics for political politics and consequently cedes civics to reactionary agendas. Though the difference between Rorty’s Deweyan principles and Eagleton’s Marxist conceptions seems one of degree more than of kind, there is no restraining the radical’s hatred for the liberal. And it is precisely in hammering away at the liberal’s relativistic belief that social progress comes from attempting to achieve consensus that Eagleton’s study becomes provocative, rewarding, and brilliant.

In a delicious move that has already caused an uproar in other reviews, Eagleton contends that the body is the first principle of truth and objectivity, absolutes that form the foundation of the ethics this book introduces. Let us walk through the arguments, which take up the second half of the book.

Eagleton’s first step will leave many flabbergasted, since it is aimed at showing that there is such a thing as absolute truth, even if those truths are often pretty trivial. Saying, for example, that something is absolutely true simply means saying that its opposite is simultaneously not true, that “p cannot equal not-p” at any one particular moment; absolute is not an intensifier. There is nothing authoritarian in this logic—no disinterested perspective, no timelessness, no true, now, and forever. All the same, it is certainly the case that establishing whether or not a belief is true can be an exceedingly difficult task: truths are always subject to reconsideration or falsification. How, then, are such absolute truths to be established? By “argument, evidence, experiment, investigation” (109)—empirical strategies that acknowledge that there can be no escaping point of view but without making truth a function of “culture,” which is merely the name we give the signifying system by which we make sense of the world. Culture can only give a morally indefensible “truth for,” not plain “truth.” In questions of truth, the world just doesn’t care how we make sense of it: if it’s raining for me, it’s raining for you, even if you think God is crying but I’m just wet. This sort of absolute truth is a realist position, one that holds that a material world exists in a meaningful way regardless of our apperception of it.

In the second stage, Eagleton seeks to confirm an equally discredited concept: objectivity. This mission takes some especially creative work and requires that he restrict the discussion to the moral realm. By means of a sequence of substitutions that may leave some readers unconvinced, Eagleton fancy-foots his way to objectivity via a discussion of what constitutes human well-being. Thinking on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in general terms, he argues that people thrive only when pursuing their essential function: “Our function is to be functionless” (116). Living so is to live a fulfilling life, which is the definition of virtue at work here. This pursuit is an end in itself. But there is a problem: people have occasionally been known to deceive themselves about the quality of their own virtue. So the program needs some checks and balances, which, as herd creatures, we find in our fellow humans. It falls on other people to guide and validate our functioning, as our behavior is adjudicated by success and failure in social interactions. Though this last point is one Rorty could have made, Eagleton takes this basic sociability to mean that “we become the occasion for each other’s self-realization” (122), an occasion the Judeo-Christian tradition calls charity (which makes for a rather sharp distinction to the poststructuralist’s misanthropic view of mutual dependency). Since thriving is a social affair, what then counts as objective are those instances of human flourishing that are evidenced by behavior in the public sphere. While this conception of objectivity is a bit of a bait-and-switch and could have been worked out more thoroughly, it is really no different from the treatment of absolute truth above; “objective” in terms of morality is simply whatever is empirically determined to help all people thrive: “Other persons,” he writes, “are objectivity in action” (138). In politics Eagleton of course believes this anti-injunctive ethical project is socialism.

The final turn is a radical one that grounds absolute truth and objective moral judgments in the materiality of the world, since Eagleton argues that ethics is a face of biology: “The material body is what we share most significantly with the whole of the rest of our species, extended both in time and space” (155). This shared human nature—you borrow your body from the species—is what gives Eagleton’s ethics its universal purview, a materialist affinity that urges us to surmount local cultural differences and dump the global-village metaphor for a commonwealth conception. He suggests that we do this by embracing our functionless nature, the essential “non-being” that contingency gives. By facing death each instant we live, we lose the avarice that supposed immortality provides and can live with self-abandonment. This practice would solve a lot of the world’s problems, making that BMW you want or that fight with your mother all seem rather beside the point. Non-being, Eagleton explains, “can remind me of my creatureliness and finitude, of the fragile, ephemeral nature of my existence, of my own neediness and the vulnerability of others. By learning from this, we can turn facts into values” (211). These values are neither rules nor laws, but are instead the behavior that comes from accepting our indivisibility from others.

After Theory arrives at something of a tipping point in the field of art history—a time when a crop of younger academics have begun publishing studies indebted to cultural theory. Like the previous generation, this second one rightfully found theory exciting and sexy, provocative and insightful. But as Eagleton so aptly reminds us, theory’s golden age (1965–1980) was over even before we younger scholars were marching in our high school graduations. Cultural theory entered its decadent phase long ago: he writes, “Those who can, think up feminism or structuralism; those who can’t apply such insights to Moby-Dick or The Cat in the Hat” (2). If nothing else, this study shows the regressive sides of the ongoing appeals to authorities such as Gilles Deleuze or Jean-François Lyotard. But Eagleton’s admonition is much more than just a Red swipe at collaborators in the academy. As September 11 and its aftermath of total war so clearly indicate, capitalism’s untenable global narrative needs to be replaced with a political formulation that has non-being, or something like it, at its heart. This is more important than book writing; it is the very ethics that promises everyone the opportunity to thrive.