The Critical Politics of Aesthetic Agonism. A Lesson from T. S. Eliot

Abstract

Discussions on T. S. Eliot”s critical thought usually anchor on his conservatism, ignoring the opposite philosophical compromises of his early works. What I intend to demonstrate, however, is that his subsequent production can only be theoretically understood based on the critical relation developed in regard to those essays, a relation that is as fundamental as poorly studied with the attention it deserves. I argue, in effect, that it plays an operative role in Eliot”s critical activity, expressing a kind of critical modus operandi latent in his writings. Hence my hypothesis that Eliot”s poetry and literary critique involve a certain practical reason that can be recovered as a “politics of aesthetic agonism”, defined by the keeping of the contradictions in a polemical and permanent ironic tension. A “critical politics” that will prove to have an important pragmatic significance also for the socio-cultural domains of, particularly, politics and religion, as a lesson, finally, for any socially engaged philosophy ―and theory―, and the theoretical praxis itself.