[In the following review, Wright offers positive assessment of The Ideology of the Aesthetic.]

What R. H. Tawney did for religion, Arnold Hauser for art history, Adorno for music, and Raymond Williams for literature, Terry Eagleton has done for aesthetics: namely, to uncover the ideological motivation that ideology itself exists to conceal. In spite of a modest disavowal he comes challengingly close to doing the same for philosophy. In the favoured definitions, self-confirming premises, chosen controversies, chosen opponents, bland ignorances, and shared assumptions of what is to be banally true, he charts a new map for aesthetic theory from Baumgarten to the postmoderns. It is part of Professor Eagleton's originality to realize that this is a demystification that has been imperative for some time. As one reads it, one has the refreshing feeling of at last having an illusion exorcised. In rending the ideological fabric, he brings into salience philosophical questions of the place of the aesthetic in the bases of culture and society, indeed, showing it to be essentially imbricated in knowledge and language, and, moreover, in ideology itself. Answering these questions is not part of his brief, but it is evidence of radical success that such questions have to be put.

Professor Eagleton does not claim to provide a history of ideology in aesthetics, but has rather taken certain key figures, mostly German, and analysed their basic positions in the light of the dominance of bourgeois individualism. The theories themselves are the historically concrete illustrations: the more he lays bare the individualist partiality that shapes and maintains the arguments under examination, the more evidence he is amassing in support of his thesis. It is a case of the scope of a theory being an element in its plausibility. When the problem of reconciling freedom and necessity is invested with the bourgeois fantasy of a sovereign self, then Kant's attempt to found a secure moral freedom outside determinism can be understood as a defensive idealization. Similarly, Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man tries to effect the same reconciliation between the freedom of the ‘sense-drive’ and the necessity of the ‘form-drive’ via a ‘play-drive’ that would optimistically harness the dynamism of the former to duty in the latter. Professor Eagleton cannot help but see this as a hegemonic move to keep the suspicious world of the senses within the law without having recourse to the compulsion of the law. He avoids the cynicism to which such analyses might lead, for he sees Kant as still holding to the democratic notion of a ‘kingdom of ends’ (albeit of abstractly equal and indistinguishable citizens) and Schiller as sensitive to the stunting of capacities that a greedy civil society can bring about.

It is perhaps in his treatment of Jean-Francois Lyotard that Professor Eagleton shows a certain partiality, in that he accuses Lyotard of moral subjectivism in a theory that places undecidability as a stubborn aspect of the aesthetic and yet he praises Benjamin and Adorno for retaining a place for the sensory. Professor Eagleton approves of Benjamin's saying that ‘there is no better starting point for thought than laughter’ (p. 337), and yet he is suspicious of postmodernists who ‘urge us to abandon truth for dance and laughter’ (p. 227). It is precisely in the shifting about of Benjamin's ‘constellations’ on the stars of the sensory that those ironic transformations are made that might be said to be at the core of the aesthetic. In Le Différend Lyotard has addressed himself to the very questions Professor Eagleton has raised, namely, how ‘given’ truths and facts are established and transformed. It is in Lyotard's ‘unpresentable’ and Adorno's ‘riddle-figures of empirical existence’ that the Body, which Professor Eagleton professes to favour as a concept, shows its presence.

Terry Eagleton's book [The Ideology of the Aesthetic] is distinguished throughout by clarity of exegesis coupled with his usual lively wit and inventiveness. Thus, he ends his account of the dire relationships of the Lacanian family trio driven into misrecognition of desire, with the lapidary comment: ‘None of these individuals desire each other in the least; it's nothing personal.’