So far as I recall, he introduced his guest with the words “This man’s had a hard time. He needs your support.” Sadly, Dr MacCabe spent the next hour innocuously deconstructing some very obscure passages of Shakespeare: his hearers departed with the vague feeling that a cultural opportunity had inadvertently been lost.One could see then why Eagleton, Marxist though he was (and is), was so avid to attach himself to this kind of presumed dissension, and one can see it even more clearly in the somewhat muted light of After Theory. In global terms, circa 1980, the Marxist “project” was running into trouble. Neither the regimes who still affected to profess it, nor the local Marxists who used it to justify their political shortcomings, were doing it any favours. Economically it looked an even worse bet than the monetarism then staggering into fashion; culturally, it spoke of woolly jumpers and some even woollier critical language. Such signs of radicalism that there were came almost entirely from academe, and they assumed their most combative focus in the newly created realm of “cultural theory”, what Eagleton correctly characterises as “a continuation of politics by other means”. A clutch of (mostly) French philospher-artists who believed not in “meaning” but a multiplicity of interpretations, who delighted in exposures of hierarchy and gender, who aimed to reduce a text to a kind of fine powder of politico-sexual assumptions – all this was enticing to a man who had reached the stark conclusion that capitalism was washed up, and the perhaps starker conclusion that hardly any capitalists, and scarcely anyone living under capitalism, had noticed.After Theory, then, is the record of a failed love affair between an ideologue (a witty and impassioned ideologue, it must be said) who imagined that “theory” could reignite the flame of contemporary Marxism, only to find the latter left far behind on the post-modern tide.

Eagleton begins what might be described as a very fair-minded polemic by noting a few of the ironies about the animal known as “post-modernism”. One of these is that post-modernism, with its suspicion of public norms, values, hierarchies and standards, looks suspiciously like some of the more stringent versions of economic liberalism: “It’s just that neo-liberals admit that they reject all this in the name of the market.” Another is that the “universality” that most contemporary theorists reach out to embrace – the world envisaged as a sprawling monocultural hypermarket – is contradicted by events on the ground. Oddly enough, the inhabitants of much of the former Soviet Union wanted their own postage stamps as well as the chance to drink Coca-Cola: in a world supposedly getting smaller by the moment, the number of seats at the UN table is mysteriously increasing.All this, though, is superstructure. Subsequently Eagleton spends a couple of judicious chapters attending to his beloved’s blemishes and attractions. The memories of those long years spent together under the counter-cultural duvet surface in a claim that objections to theory are either “false” or “fairly trifling”. The girl is praised for the tenacity of her close readings, defended for her proud reliance on jargon (most professions, as Eagleton rightly points out, have their specialist language) and back-patted for drawing attention to a whole stack of stuff that would otherwise have been swept under the carpet by those “belles-lettrist gentlemen” who bossed the show before she sashayed into the lecture hall and started whispering about hermeneutics.

For all Eagleton’s sniffiness about the belles-lettrist gentleman in the library (which goes all the way back to his 1986 attack on John Bayley in Against the Grain) there were plenty of people, pre-Barthes, who went in for “close readings”: the first deconstruction of Dickens’s prose, in the context of his early career as a journalist, was performed as early as 1865 by R H Hutton. Then again, from the other side of the cultural stream that Eagleton assumes to flow through the pre-and post-theoretical world, he might want to consider how much the hierarchical, autocratic and in some cases practically religious air of the Derrideans and the Barthesians owes to bygone critical hierophants like F R Leavis.Ask what remains in the wake of this for the most part exhilarating dissection and there heaves into view the spectacle of a jaunty and somewhat old-fashioned Catholic moralist, niggling away at post-modern deracination (“The creature who emerges from postmodern thought is centreless, hedonistic, self-inventing, ceaselessly adaptive”, etc) and relativism (“Anyone who genuinely believed that nothing was more important than anything else… would not be quite what we recognise as a person”) and reaching his loftiest flights, oddly enough, in some fragments of Biblical criticism – see, for example, his remarks on the Book of Isaiah. It’s no surprise, of course, to find that the weapon on which he ultimately falls back is good old “intuition”, something whose existence the average theorist would probably want to deny altogether. My own particular intuition convinces me that the neo-Marxist commune which Eagleton seems to propose as an antidote to the world’s ills would be quite as dreary as the international hypermarket model.

Nevertheless, After Theory’s huge achievement is to show just how formidable a presence the Marxist cultural critic can be, even here in the thronged and dismaying universe of Bush, Blair, Derrida’s diff?nce and the celebrated M Jean Baudrillard, who, you may remember, affected to doubt that the Gulf War even took place.. She talks him out of killing them both by reciting Philip Larkin (sounds preposterous, I know, yet Vida makes it believable). The rest of this slender, poised, talked-about first novel by the young editor of the hip new literary magazine The Believer, and the wife of Dave Eggars, is about how, over the next couple of months, the episode affects Ellis and those around her in a hundred little ways.She changes her hair style and stops wearing make-up. After about three weeks she realises she hasn’t been out for a walk Her feet ache for no reason, and she keeps smelling garlic. Some people want to comfort her, others feel the need to apologise.