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not see that there is a connection between living and death. 'Life is a rehearsal to death' when you are giving
yourself away before dying. Life is loaded with richness for those who are able to give, but absolutely terrifying
for those who are not. This argument was supported by the Christian teachings about poverty. Not being loaded
with materialistic baggage makes people let go of things easier, be able to sacrifice, and accept dying and giving.
The discussion swells to include another important aspect, forgiveness and its ambiguous meaning. Eagleton
describes forgiveness as a kind of sacrifice, because it includes giving something very pleasurable, revenge. It is
also seen as a way of breaking the endless circle of retribution. Forgiveness, Eagleton explains, does not mean
that you forget or behave like you have forgotten. Confronting the past is vital to move forward in life.
Eagleton ends his discussion by emphasizing that forgiveness does not mean feeling good about the offender. It
is an act that has nothing to do with feeling. Just like love, as Wittgenstein suggests, is not a feeling. Love is not
about loving friends, it is about loving strangers. 'It is a state of create in action, that something comes out of
nothing, like God's creation, it is a gift not a necessity.'
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Interview with Terry Eagleton
Rachel Holland and Chloe Buckley, Lancaster University
Terry Eagleton is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster, and on his Lent Term visit he
agreed to give an interview to The Luminary. Rachel Holland and Chloe Buckley posed questions based on
issues raised by his most recent book, The Event of Literature, published this year by Yale University Press. In
The Event of Literature Eagleton attempts to develop a theory that can account for what we mean when we
discuss texts in terms of them being literary – a question that, for him, was left unsatisfactorily resolved with
the decline of ‘high’ theory in the late 1980s. Eagleton suggests that the literary work operates in a paradoxical
space between ‘structure’ and ‘event,’ wherein the structure is fixed and unchangeable, yet also dynamic in the
sense that it must constantly respond to the challenges it creates for itself during the dialectical process in
which it shapes an ever-present external reality for its own purposes. It is in the unpredictability, both of this
process and the fluctuations in reader response, that the ‘event’ of literature consists.
RH: Your most recent book – The Event of Literature – is something of a return to a kind of ‘pure’ theory that
might not be recognizable to many postgraduate researchers today. How would you respond to the suggestion
that this change in direction involves a kind of de-politicizing of criticism? What prompted your return to the
big questions of theory?
TE: I’ve written somewhere that the history of theory goes hand in hand with the period when the left was
briefly on the ascendency, so that in that whole period theory and politics were closely related. In that sense I
don’t see a return to theory as depoliticizing, although it’s true that the questions I’m asking in the book, ‘what
is literature?’ and so on, are not directly political, that’s for sure. I’m not asking particularly about the political
effects or implications of literature, but I do think that theory itself, and an ability to think theoretically and
generally abstractly, is actually quite important for radical politics. The political right on the whole is somewhat
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