A final date. In 2018, as if anticipating these impatient remarks, Eagleton published a small book with Yale University Press, titled, Radical Sacrifice. Given the preceding I can hardly avoid it, but, more to the point, “reading” it (however sparingly) helpfully amplifies the gesture of sacrificing theory properly. In general terms this text continues Eagleton’s examination of conscience begun in his first book, New Left Church; indeed, it is dedicated to the “Carmelite Sisters of Thicket Priory” and builds steadily to an argument about the deep convergence between radical sacrifice and proletarian revolution. He writes:
It is axiomatic that men and women must accomplish their emancipation for themselves. It can no more be delegated than the act of dying. The notion of revolution turns on the paradox that what has been reduced by the arrogance of power to a state of inert objectivity is precisely on that account capable of emerging as a new kind of subject. […] Seen in this light, revolution is a modern version of what the ancient world new as sacrifice. (Eagleton 2018, 180–81)
As the rhetoric of dying, to which Eagleton devotes an entire chapter, and the becoming-subject of the inert object might suggest, radical sacrifice bears an undeclared relation to resurrection or, to reanimate the gothic register of Capital, galvanization. As a culminating gesture, these formulations clarify where the several preceding discussions of sacrifice were heading. While it is hard not to resonate to Eagleton’s utopianism—surely the world can’t get much worse—what does not yet hum is his willingness to overlook what is properly different in the various accounts of sacrifice to which he attends. The reader likely will not be surprised to hear that this stands out most conspicuously in his discussion of Agamben. Arising here and there in Eagleton’s rambling and allusive exposition (there are pages on which he drops five or six “big names” and he repeatedly solicits an invitation to spend Christmas with the Derridas) when he settles down to “read” Agamben, he concentrates his energies on Remnants of Auschwitz where the specter haunting the camps, the Muselman, shuffles out onto the mirror stage. To be truer to convictions I will go on to defend, Eagleton does not actually “read” Agamben. He “comments” on the figure of the Muselman largely to establish its solidarity, perhaps even its kinship, with homo sacer, a point on which we agree. What slips away, however, is the difference between the Muselman and the other internees. In effect, if homo sacer is the unsacrificable, the one who is simply murdered rather than sacrificed, then the Muselman does indeed qualify as sacred because in an important sense s/he is already dead, s/he contains nothing to offer to anyone or anything. S/he is bloodless. But this ought to complicate rather than confirm the correlations being drawn by Eagleton. This ought to remind us that to sacrifice properly what is offered is not, cannot be drained of value, and while it is true that Eagleton observes this difference in his other commentaries, the drive to funnel all ancient sacrifice toward modern revolution loses nuance worth holding on to.
Agamben himself struggles with this difficult matter, but Eagleton—who, after all, is writing after Theory—cannot be bothered to produce a theoretical encounter between his own aims and those of Agamben. Indeed, although the word “theory” occasionally appears in Radical Sacrifice, one has to sift with a prospector’s patience for the golden veins that run between this text and After Theory. They are there and they manifest in vessels, notably blood vessels, or put less facetiously, they manifest in the rhetoric of sanguinity that calibrates the scales of judgment in much of Eagleton’s writing and, as we have seen, nowhere more bluntly than in After Theory. Rather than demonstrate this proposition here, I will simply stress that my issue here is not doctrinal. I am not really concerned to establish whether Eagleton gets Agamben “right.” Of greater immediate pertinence is clarifying what stands illuminated about sacrificing Theory properly by holding onto the proposition that within the discussion of homo sacer sacrifice is at odds with itself, and nowhere more so than in the “zone of irreducible indistinction” (Agamben 1998, 9) wherein the sovereign and scapegoat rub elbows.
So, Theory must be offered and not merely offed. And yes, I am investing Theory with properties that cannot but strike one as exorbitant. With this in mind, consider the well-known formulation that concludes Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” a title whose French iteration (deliberately?) echoes Mallory’s fifteenth-century text on the death of a sovereign: “We are no longer so willing to be the dupes of such antiphrases, by which a society proudly recriminates in favor of precisely what it discards, ignores, muffles or destroys; we know that to restore writing to its future, we must reverse the myth: the birth of the reader, must be requited by the death of the Author” (Barthes 1986). “Requited” here is a translation for “doit se payer.” In an alternative Howard translation it is rendered as “ransomed,” but either way the notion of paying for a birth is here connoted in the register of what I have been calling sacrifice, although perhaps more like a pawn than a child. Something offered so as to secure something other. The author (and in the last sentence where the text cites its title, “Auteur” is capitalized) must be sacrificed for the reader. It is not therefore, unsacrificable. It is not sacred.
What begins to crown here is not simply the reader but reading, and more specifically, as what arises out of a corpus whose sovereign had been the author. It is not therefore uninteresting that precisely in his function as an educator Barthes, in 1972, addressed a group of lycée teachers on the topic of what he titled, in an oblique evocation of Robbe-Grillet, “For a Theory of Reading.” Such talks were designed to bring high school teachers up to speed with developments in the university, and it is therefore proper that Barthes opens by informing them that the traditional and thus familiar pairing of “work and author” has passed. Perhaps more startling, however, is his subsequent declaration that “there has never before been a theory of reading” (Barthes 2015, 157), a counterfactual so glaring—has he actually not read Reading Capital, or Of Grammatology?—that “reading” directly assumes a provocative idiolectal resonance. Barthes’s remarks, brief though they are, quickly then capitalize on this feint by advancing not only a grid of the four levels of reading along with their correlative disciplinary stakeholders but, as if acutely aware of the chiasmus of his title, a Theory of Theory. Theory does not mean, he insists, either “‘a philosophical dissertation’ or ‘abstract system’” (Barthes 2015, 158). Instead, the term designates a “description” that examines problems in their “infinite reach,” one “open to criticism,” in a word, “responsible.” This segues immediately to a bracing attack on interdisciplinarity, confronting his audience with a proper problematic, that is, an echo chamber of questions and answers, in this case those of reading, Theory and discipline.
Of particular pertinence to the task of sacrificing Theory properly is what I have called the chiasmus, that is, the proposition that a Theory of reading is at one and the same time a reading of Theory or, to nudge this toward the motif of offering, that Theory and reading are two words for the “same” gesture. Lest one think that this nudge is utterly without textual warrant, that there is nothing here about sacrifice, about offering, consider not only the context (an address to educators) but even more importantly the following:
Reading, as we know, is a social object/issue; it is prey to instances of power and morality. […] For my part, I shall formulate the ethical question in the following way: there are dead readings (subject to stereotypes, mental repetitions and sloganizing) and there are living readings (producing an inner text, homogeneous with a virtual writing on the part of the reader). Now, this living reading, during which the subject believes what he reads emotionally while also realizing its unreality, is a split (clivée thus divided and shared) reading. (Barthes 2015, 160)
Barthes goes on to associate, freely or not, this split with Freud’s account of the “splitting (Spaltung) of the subject (le moi, so the ‘self’ or ‘ego’)” and concludes: “‘living reading’ is a perverse activity and reading is always immoral” (Barthes ibid.).
Written in 1972 this set of formulations about a Theory of reading/a reading of Theory falls directly between S/Z (1970) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973). It retrieves and complicates the distinction drawn in the former