[PDF][PDF] Subjects and truths

T Eagleton - New Left Review, 2001 - newleftreview.org
T Eagleton
New Left Review, 2001newleftreview.org
There is a paradox in the idea of transformation. If a transformation is deepseated enough, it
might also transform the very criteria by which we could identify it, thus making it
unintelligible to us. But if it is intelligible, it might be because the transformation was not
radical enough. If we can talk about the change then it is not full-blooded enough; but if it is
full-blooded enough, it threatens to fall outside our comprehension. Change must
presuppose continuity—a subject to whom the alteration occurs—if we are not to be left …
There is a paradox in the idea of transformation. If a transformation is deepseated enough, it might also transform the very criteria by which we could identify it, thus making it unintelligible to us. But if it is intelligible, it might be because the transformation was not radical enough. If we can talk about the change then it is not full-blooded enough; but if it is full-blooded enough, it threatens to fall outside our comprehension. Change must presuppose continuity—a subject to whom the alteration occurs—if we are not to be left merely with two incommensurable states; but how can such continuity be compatible with revolutionary upheaval? One might risk the generalization that French radical thought has, on the whole, plumped for unintelligibility rather than continuity. From Rimbaud’s ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’to Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the paralogical innovation, which creates its own law, this vein of avant-gardist theory would rather be opaque than old-fashioned. From Sorel and the Surrealists to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Levinas to Lyotard and Derrida, such thought returns incessantly to the break, crisis, disruption or epiphany of otherness that will tear you free of everyday inauthenticity—of doxa, das Mann, the consensual, the practico-inert or the être-en-soi—and throw open for you instead the portals of truth, freedom and authenticity. It is a current of thought suspicious of the German and dialectical, for which a certain revolutionary continuity would still appear possible. The result is a series of sharp oppositions between the kingdom of necessity and the realm of freedom: between otherness and identity, truth and knowledge, sublimity and beauty, history and Nature, freedom and bad faith, Vernunft and Verstand; the crisis-ridden truth of the subject and the stabilities of the sym-
newleftreview.org