Terry Eagleton interview…

An interview from the series ‘The Books Interview’ at the NewStatesman by Jonathan Derbyshire…

There’s a good deal of nostalgia in your new book, The Task of the Critic, for the “socialist culture” of the Seventies.
What’s wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press. One of Walter Benjamin’s extraordinary achievements, for example, was to make a kind of revolutionary virtue out of a certain concept of looking back, or nostalgia. As a tutor at Oxford during that period, I could see all kinds of energies that simply had no outlet – all kinds of radical impulses that were rather inchoate, but certainly present. So I think nostalgia is justified to some extent.

There was at least one outlet for those energies, though: the Marxism seminar you ran at Wadham College, which you describe as a “hostel for battered leftists”. The left took even more of a battering in the intervening 30-odd years, didn’t it?
I think the Gramsci formula about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will gets at something. But I was struck, when I spoke recently at King’s College London, by the extraordinarily diverse number of militant projects and campaigns that were being either conducted or planned. It was like being back in the Seventies, or the late Sixties. For the full interview…