Daily Inspiration Quote by Terry Eagleton

Eagleton’s line is a neat bit of polemic aimed at rescuing deconstruction from its laziest caricature: the idea that it’s just a graduate-seminar shrug where nothing is real and everything is vibes. He draws a sharper target. The point isn’t that “truth” disappears; it’s that truth shows up wearing a badge. It’s made, circulated, and enforced through institutions that decide what counts as knowledge and who gets to speak with authority.

The phrasing matters. “Insists” gives deconstruction a moral posture, almost a prosecutorial tone: it’s not playing word-games, it’s making a claim about power. And the hinge between “illusory” and “institutional” is strategic. Eagleton concedes that there are realities we bump into, but he refuses the comforting fantasy that our access to them is neutral. “Institutional” doesn’t mean false; it means administered. Truth becomes less a pristine correspondence with the world than a social achievement: credentialed, archived, peer-reviewed, canonized, litigated.

Contextually, this is Eagleton the Marxist-inflected literary critic talking back to both camps: to conservative critics who hear “deconstruction” and reach for the fainting couch, and to poststructuralist enthusiasts who flirt with nihilism because it sounds radical. The subtext is a warning: if you reduce truth to illusion, you let institutions off the hook. If you see truth as institutional, you can ask the harder questions - whose institutions, serving which interests, under what historical pressures - and why certain “truths” keep winning.