The Process and the Moment. A Note on Terry Eagleton and Alain Badiou’s Notions of Time and History, and Their Idea of the Good Life

Authors

  • J. Manuel Barbeito Varela

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30827/tn.v5i2.25068

Keywords:

Terry Eagleton, Alain Badiou, Marxism, Time, History, Ethics, The Good Life

Abstract

Commenting on Alain Badiou’s Ethics, Terry Eagleton states that Badiou is “as much caught in a sort of antithesis between the ordinary and epiphanic as Derrida” (Figures of Dissent 250). The opposition between process and moment is inherent to various key oppositions in the Western tradition: ascesis vs. ecstasy, works vs faith, observation vs contemplation, perception vs. vision, reason vs. imagination, discourse and calculation vs. intuition, finitude vs infinity, time vs. eternity, life vs. death, ordinary vs. authentic life. This essay focuses on Eagleton’s and Badiou’s dialectic treatment of these oppositions and its bearing on their notions of time and history and on their proposal of a good life on a materialist basis that overcomes those oppositions.

In the first part of the essay, I will briefly look at the question in the Western tradition. In a first step, I will consider various aspects of the relation between the process and the moment as they appear in a few well-known poems in English; in a second step, I will examine Peter Osborne’s approach, particularly regarding the relevance of the moment for the temporalization of (chronological) time and history, in his book The Politics of Time. In the second part of the essay, I will contrast Eagleton’s and Badiou’s competing solutions to the problem by analysing their points of convergence and divergence and examining their causes.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan C. Collins. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Auden, W.H. Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. London, Faber, 1976.

Badiou, Alain. Ethics, translated by Peter Hallward. London, Verso, 2001.

____. Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham. London, Continuum, 2006.

____. Number and Numbers, translated by Robin Mackay. Cambridge, Polity, 2008.

____. Logics of Worlds, translated by Alberto Toscano. London, Continuum, 2009.

____. “Eternity in Time”. Lecture at the European Graduate School, 2010a.

____. “Philosophy and Time”. Lecture at the European Graduate School, 2010b.

____. “The Ontology of Multiplicity” I, II. Lectures at the European Graduate School, 2011.

____. Métaphysique du bonheur réel. Paris, PUF, 2015.

Badiou, Alain and Nicolas Truong. Éloge de l’amour. Flammarion, 2009.

Buber, Martin. ¿Qué es el Hombre? México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. Demons. New York, Vintage, 1995.

Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London, Verso, 1981.

____. The Idea of Culture. Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2000.

____. Figures of Dissent. London, Verso, 2003a.

____. Sweet Violence. The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2003b.

____. Ideology. An Introduction. London, Verso, 2007a.

____. The Meaning of Life. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007b.

____. Trouble with Strangers. A Study of Ethics. Oxford, Wiley-Backwell, 2009.

____. On Evil. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2010.

____. “Un debate con Eagleton”. An interview with Margarita Estévez Saá and Jorge Sacido Romero, translated by Jesús Saavedra Carballido. Theory Now, vol. 5, no. 2, 2022, pp. 205-222.

Langbaum, Robert. “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature”. The Word from Below: Essays on Modern Literature and Culture, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

Marx, Karl. “Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”. Collected Works, III. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Moscow, Progress, 1975, pp. 229-346.

____. Capital. Collected Works, XXXV-XXXVII. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Moscow, Progress, 1996-98.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost, Scott Elledge (ed.). New York, Norton Critical Editions, 1975.

Norris, Christopher. “Setting Accounts: Heidegger, de Man, and the ends of Philosophy”. What is Wrong with Post-modernism. Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy. Baltimore, John Hopkins, 1990, pp. 222-283.

____. The Matter of Rhyme. Brighton, Sussex Academic Press, 2018.

____. The Winnowing Fan. London, Bloomsbury, 2017.

Osborne, Peter. The Politics of time. London, Verso, 1995.

Paz, Octavio. El arco y la lira. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979.

Plato. The Symposium, edited by M. C. Howatson and Frisbee C. C. Heffield, translated by M. C. Howatson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Ricoeur, Paul. Finitude et culpabilité. Paris, Editions Montaigne, 1960.

____. Temps et récit, vol. 3. Paris, Seuil, 1985.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire. Paris, Bordas, 1987.

Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited by Stephen Booth. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1977.

Spielberg, Steven. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Paramount Pictures, 1989.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Ghostwriting”. Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 65-84.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill. New York, Norton Critical Editions, 1979.

Yeats, William Butler. A critical edition of Yeats’ “A Vision”, edited by George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood. London, Macmillan, 1978.

____. Yeats's Poems, A. Norman Jeffares (ed.). London, Macmillan, 1989.

Published

2022-07-28

How to Cite

Barbeito Varela, J. M. (2022). The Process and the Moment. A Note on Terry Eagleton and Alain Badiou’s Notions of Time and History, and Their Idea of the Good Life. Theory Now. Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought, 5(2), 28–52. https://doi.org/10.30827/tn.v5i2.25068

Issue

Section

"That Dreadful Terry Eagleton": Politics, Ethics, and Literary Praxis