Categories: uncategorized
Date: 13 May 2004 21:04:17
Like the spotty, overweight and paralytically shy, radicals would rather not be the way they are. They regard themselves as holding awkward, mildly freakish opinions forced upon them by the current conditions of the species, and yearn secretly to be normal. Or rather they look forward to a future in which they would no longer be saddled with such inconvenient beliefs, since they would have been realised in practice. They would then be free to join the rest of the human race. It is not pleasant to be continually out of line. It is also paradoxical that those who believe in the sociality of human existence should be forced on this very account to live against the grain. To the cheerleaders for Life, it seems unwarrantably ascetic. They do not see that the asceticism, if that is what it is, is in the name of a more abundant life for everyone. Radicals are simply those who recognise, in Yeats's words, that 'Nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.' It is not their fault that it is so. They would rather that it was not.
Terry Eagleton, 'After Theory', p. 181.