Daily Inspiration Quote by Terry Eagleton

Eagleton’s line lands like a perfectly timed heckle from the left balcony: postmodernism, he suggests, didn’t just drift away from the political ambitions of the avant-garde; it cannibalized them, then laughed. Calling it a “sick joke” isn’t moral panic so much as a diagnosis of cultural mood. The joke is “at the expense” of revolutionary avant-gardism because postmodernism borrows the avant-garde’s signature moves - rupture, irony, collage, refusal of bourgeois taste - while stripping them of the wager that art could help reorganize life. The form remains, the fuse is cut.

The intent is polemical and strategic. Eagleton, a Marxist critic shaped by the high theory boom, is pushing back against a late-20th-century academic consensus that treated grand narratives, universal claims, and political programs as naïve or dangerous. Postmodernism’s skeptical posture can read as sophistication, but Eagleton hears capitulation: critique that flatters itself for being “beyond” ideology while quietly harmonizing with the era’s dominant reality - flexible markets, fragmented identities, privatized horizons.

Subtext: the avant-garde once imagined shock as a way to unfreeze perception and create new social possibilities; postmodernism turns shock into style, endlessly remixable and safely consumable. That’s why “revolutionary” matters here. Without a revolutionary vector, avant-garde gestures become cultural capital - knowingness as a substitute for risk.

Contextually, this is a fight over what theory is for. Eagleton is defending the unfashionable idea that interpretation should not only deconstruct power’s language but also keep faith with the possibility of collective change. The barb stings because it implies the cleverest criticism can still be a consolation prize.