Returning To Body: Eagleton On Body

The body is both a natural phenomenon and a social product. As one of the greatest cultural theorists and literary critics, Terry Eagleton positively speaks in defense of the body. Based on Marxism, Eagleton puts up with the discourse of returning to the body. In his The Ideology of The Aesthetics, he points out that aesthetics was born as a discourse of the body, trying to reunite the idea of the body with more traditional political topics of the state, class conflict and mode of production through the mediatory category of the aesthetic. In his The Illusions of Postmodernism, his body politics is a critic of new somatics through the analysis of culturism and the promotion of bodily subjectivity.This essay will mainly make comments on Eagleton’s discourse of returning to the body from the following three chapters. In chapter one, there is no position for the body in both traditional metaphysics and theology. The body began to step on the stage in the 20 th century. However, it quickly sank beneath the waves of misunderstandings. Reconstructing everything on the body presents the body into the position of a starting point, as Eagleton states that the body is a hinge between Nature and Culture. Chapter two discusses the theoretical foundations for Eagleton’s returning to the body. They mainly include Eagleton’s selective absorption of Marx’s laboring body, Nietzsche’s body as power, Freud’s body of desire as well as Merleau-Ponty’s body subject. Chapter three analyzes Eagleton’s critic of new somatics with the discourse of returning to the body in the context of postmodernism and the collision and cooperation between Marxism and postmodernism in current age.