More Tragedy and Violence Despite The Complete …
More Tragedy and Violence
Despite The Complete Review�s lamentations about the decline in newsprint given over to book reviews, I am occasionally surprised at the quality of the reviews on offer. Take Sweet Violence, a new on tragedy book by Terry Eagleton, the famously Marxist Oxford professor of English. He praises the author for presenting �complex ideas [made] not just � accessible, but conveyed in a way which registers their ethical and intellectual importance.� For example: �Eagleton questions the cornerstone of so much progressive thought: that culture goes �all the way down�. Tragedy tells us otherwise: there are things in nature deeply alien to humanity and, because we are still part of nature, they remain within us. They are, as St Thomas Aquinas says of God, closer to us than we are to ourselves. Many today believe that if sex is freed from religion and superstition, it will become a pleasure just like any other. Again, tragedy tells us otherwise: human desire retains something potentially destructive of social cohesion and individual identity.�
This is seriously stimulating stuff for a newspaper! Dollimore, it has to be said, is an academic himself, so the courtesy and engagement is more understandable; it isn’t from some lazy hack.
Speaking of which, compare the above review with George Walden�s of the biography of Georges Bataille that I blogged on recently (unfortunately you have to register with the Telegraph). Walden begins as he means to continue by referring to the title as �portentous� (though we can only see Bataille�s name at the top). Bataille�s ideas are wearily adumbrated before all those interested in him are dismissed as tiresome.
As I said in my earlier blog, I don�t know Bataille very well at all but Walden seems to know even less! He appears to believe that he wrote only a couple of pornographic novels. One would have thought the reviewer was chosen because he had, heaven forbid, read his major works. Actually, however, I can see Walden�s point. I too have serious doubts when interest in Bataille�s ideas among students comes at the expense of attention given to more profound, yet less sexy philosophers, such as Blanchot. Then my doubts seesaw back when Walden refers sneeringly to those grim pictures of a Chinese execution that fascinated Bataille as �lovingly reproduced� in the biography. What distinguishes them from the other photos in the book to gain this adjective? Nothing, it seems, except the prejudice at the heart of Walden�s review.
As a Conservative MP, George Walden served under Baroness Thatcher who famously declared �there is no such things as society, only individuals and families� (such as the dozens of individuals and families who died in the April 1986 bombing of Tripoli and Bengazi, the most violent act of international terrorism that year, which she sanctioned). As far as I know of Bataille, he was concerned to find alternative means of re-establishing the bond of human community in a century ravaged by what Dollimore calls �the fatal inversions� of ideology (see the book The College of Sociology). Walden might want to reflect that the culture of selfishness, greed and callous disregard for human dignity he sees prefigured in Bataille’s ideas, is something he is closer to, and more responsible for, than Bataille ever was.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Georges Bataille Browsing in Borders, I picked…
- Sidestreet
- Cultural and Religious Theory (Journal of)
- The Book to Come
- Modern Philosophy Classics In Germany, you can…
