Three days into his hunger strike, Bobby Sands weighed 137 pounds. Six weeks later, on the day that he received last rites, the Provisional Irish Republican Army soldier was a little over a hundred pounds. He lived for another three weeks, before dying at the age of 27 on May 5^th, 1981 in H-block, the Maze Prison hospital, County Down, Northern Ireland.

In a photo from shortly before Sands died, one sees a man hunger has transformed into a living cadaver. Gone is the vitality evident in the iconic photograph of Sands as a young man—the same image seen in Belfast Republican murals—a long-haired child of the ‘60s in a red sweater with a handsome, hopeful smile. Before his death, rather, Sands is skeletal, with hair long, dark, and unkempt, a scraggly thick beard framing his angular face, and eyes distilled to hungry, pure intensity. An aura — the presence of that original icon. Sands appeared in life before death as nothing so much as a breathing pieta. The literary scholar Terry Eagleton might explain his transformation by telling us that Sands had undergone a “form of semiosis in which one’s body is converted into a sign.”

In his latest book, Radical Sacrifice, Eagleton notes that to be “martyred is to allow one’s death to be taken into public ownership,” and for insurgents from Belfast to Bethlehem, Sands resonated as symbol of post-colonial resistance. The young IRA soldier, improbably elected to Parliament while in the midst of his hunger strike, who died for national self-determination. For men like Sands, the “act of dying becomes an eloquent piece of discourse, as the flesh speaks more persuasively than any voice,” and so his death made a powerful argument about sacrifice and the sacred, oppression and the state. For his Irish Republican audience, Sands’ “eloquent piece of discourse” spoke loudly, and his argument was clear in international resistance movements from Palestine to Peru.

The reaction of Margaret Thatcher (she who did not believe that society was real), on the other hand, was predictable. Thatcher remained firm that “a crime, is a crime.” British newspapers were not much more nuanced; The Daily Mirror wrote in an editorial a month before he died that “the death of Sands would add another martyr to a history which has a surplus of them.” A columnist for that paper, John Edwards, wrote that Sands’ death was a “pathetic end for a man,” and a cartoon from the Daily Mirror mocked the Christian iconography of Sands’ death by claiming that he “died that others might die.”

Interpretations of Sands’ death varied by audience and political conviction — an ambiguous semiotics of extinction. For republican sympathizers, Sands’ death verified Eagleton’s claim that “martyrdom is a way of reaping sense from what is otherwise a mere fact of Nature, turning one’s mortality into a kind of rhetoric.” By contrast, 10 Downing Street and its media apparatus exoticized Sands’ protest as barbaric sacrament, Catholic theater for the credulous. An undercurrent ran through editorials claiming something unseemly in Sands’ sacrifice, a logic more pagan than it was political. Sands received dismissals that strongly resembled Winston Churchill describing Mahatma Gandhi’s hunger strikes as the act of a man who was a “half-naked… fakir of a type well known in the east.”

Sands evoked everything from toscad, the ritual fasting of ancient Ireland, to the Gorta Mór of 1845 to 1849 when the government he was protesting allowed a quarter of Ireland to starve to death. He drew on a reservoir of history, dream, and mythos far more profound than an editorial designed for the proverbial “man on the Clapham omnibus.” A nation that had, in 1563, pored over the gory stories of Protestant martyrs at Tyburn as described by John Foxe in his Acts of Monuments was no longer conversant in that particular tongue; Corporal mortification no longer spoke with an English accent. Neither Thatcher nor readers of the Daily Mirror thought of sacrifice as logical or fashionable. Thatcherites and others like them may assume the concept has been “consigned by liberal modernity to the ashcan of history,” but Eagleton argues that this is a limited, complacent understanding of sacrifice’s power and meaning and warns that to “see the custom [of martyrdom] in orthodox Enlightenment fashion as a species of savagery” is a grave mistake.

Sands appears nowhere in Radical Sacrifice, though seemingly everyone else does. Eagleton, in what is almost his 50^th book, focuses on fictional examples of martyrs from Virgil, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Naipaul, St Aubyn, Yeats, Eliot, and Walter Benjamin among several other men, while one of the only women included is none other than J.K. Rowling. And, of course, Eagleton includes the big examples of sacrifice from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels, though whether these are “fictional” depends on the reader’s epistemological inclinations — and besides, that’s never been the important question anyhow. What is important is martyrdom’s significance, and in Radical Sacrifice Eagleton makes a potent argument as to its perennial import, how it structures both the systems that oppress us and our means of resisting those very same systems. Radical Sacrifice is a brief that explicates not just the revolutionary significance of martyrdom, but also of art, nationalism, apocalypse, creation, and death. In it, he argues that we must embrace sacrifice, that we can understand it in a “positive or political light.” Religion can operate on a frequency that ears congratulating themselves on their rationality are deaf to hear.

“Late Stage Eagleton” has always been a religious project, a committed Marxist returning to the Christian Brothers who educated him in his youth. If you are only familiar with Eagleton from his landmark 1983 Literary Theory: An Introduction such theological concerns may seem unexpected. At a moment when “Theory” was ascendant, with its reputation for continental obfuscation’s and deconstructionist incomprehensibilities, Literary Theory offered a learned and, at times, funny encapsulation of what all the confusing new “-isms,” from post-structuralism to New Historicism, were about. When Eagleton’s obituary is written that volume will be mentioned in the lede, as that slim book remains the best single edition on the subject ever written for a general audience — an accomplishment for a work with a Marxist bent. All of which makes it perhaps all the more incongruous that he’s now written a book blurbed by the Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank, though it shouldn’t be surprising.

Stolid son of Irish Catholicism that Eagleton is, theological perspectives have informed his politics since his graduate work and he’s returned to religious themes in several recent works. So, while Eagleton clearly didn’t just develop these theological interests, for several reasons, he has spent the last decade making explicit what was often before left implicit.

Eagleton has always been more at home in the glass-and-concrete universities of Labour Britain than in he is in Tory Oxbridge, even after having studied and taught in those ivy-covered schools. High Theory never quite had a home among the Oxbridge set, and Eagleton always seemed more comfortable at places like the University of Manchester or the University of Lancaster, where the punkish enthusiasms of British cultural studies could flourish among scholars like Raymond Williams (his doctoral adviser) and Stuart Hall.

Rejecting the tweed and sherry set of Oxbridge also meant rejecting particular strains of gentlemanly atheism; the very British, very bourgeois, very Anglican form of disbelief practiced by the biologist Richard Dawkins and Eagleton’s former comrade in the International Socialists, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens. With pugilism, Eagleton has combated the largely moribund movement of “New Atheists.” Commenting on Dawkins (in a manner that U.S. intellectuals should try), Eagleton said that reading him was like being with “someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds.” If people exist on the other side of the Anthropocene they’ll read about Eagleton’s criticisms of Dawkins as one reads about Erasmus’s criticisms of the now obscure Johannes Pfefferkorn do today — with the aid of a critical footnote. Dawkins ostensibly believes that there is no God, but, also, believe that He is an Episcopalian. In truth, his atheism is much more about the rejection of a Muslim God, or a Jewish God, or an Irish one, than it is a coherent metaphysics. Dawkins is the sort of man who could never understand starving oneself to death for principle. Far from being radical, Dawkins’ theology is simply the ontological scaffolding for self-interested neoliberalism; thus, a critique of the New Atheists is always as political as it is philosophical.

Withering in his castigation of New Atheist smugness, Eagleton is also frustrated by the left’s dismissal of the theological. Anyone who has spent much time in the steadfastly secular environs of academic literary theory would assent to Eagleton’s observation that there are “questions not commonly investigated by the political left, and certainly not by its postmodern wing. Love, death, suffering, sacrifice, evil, martyrdoms, forgiveness and so on are not exactly modish preoccupations.” In Radical Sacrifice Eagleton presents an argument for the left that as concerns religion “there is a radical kernel to be extracted from its mystical shell.”

Eagleton’s frustrations are clear in his polemical 2003 After Theory, where he wrote that theorists promise to “Grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fail to deliver.” He goes on to say that they are “shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth.” Adding for good measure that this “is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on.” After Theory was Eagleton’s manifesto against theory’s superficiality, but he never traded in his Derrida for Augustine, his Foucault for Aquinas. Rather, for him, the two approaches supplement each other. Eagleton never rejected his beloved nineteenth-century German Jewish philosopher either, preferring rather to make manifest Christ in Marx, and also Marx in Christ. Radical Sacrifice is the latest volley in this regard; how successful it will be is uncertain, but what Eagleton does accomplish is a demonstration that political-theology is invaluable for any cultural theorist who wishes to say something coherent about that rather “large slice of human existence.”

In a contention as crucial as any he’s penned in his storied career, Eagleton argues that the “powers that constitute the social order are sacred, as well as those that threaten to undermine it.” The Gospels may be a revolutionary document, but Eagleton reminds us that Moloch was a god too, and no critique of oppression can ignore the fact that systems like capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and structural racism have their own occult theological kernel defining them (sometimes explicitly). Dismissing far-right manifestations of religiosity as simply being hypocritical is an anemic analysis, and it is better to understand them as their own faith that we must oppose. Political conflict as holy war? Dangerous perhaps, but also, at least in an interpretive sense, necessary.

Eagleton’s claims here are are sweeping. He argues that sacrifice is the core of our totalizing society (both at the center and the margins) and that the “violence that sustains the social order,” as manifested from the law to the military to the church, is sublimated in a “collective amnesia that [allows] civilization” to thrive. An astute reader might be reminded here of the French anthropologist Rene Girard’s seminal 1977 Violence and the Sacred, in which he introduced critical mainstays such as the “scapegoat mechanism” into academic treatments of sacrificial violence. Aware of his indebtedness, Eagleton stakes his originality with almost Oedipal anxiety (more or less convincingly, depending on what page of Radical Sacrifice you’re reading). Eagleton would have you believe that his biggest point of contention with Girard is his commitment to Marxian materialism, even as it sometimes feels as if he is using the example of Christ to convince himself of how much he still agrees with Marx.

“We are natural-born teleologists,” argues Eagleton, and any revolutionary movement is defined by a secularized millennialism. Eagleton has always prayed for the “impending upheaval which Marx calls communism and the Christian Gospel calls the Kingdom of God.” When Eagleton writes it’s not clear how literal he means to be; I suspect not very. But Christian apocalypticism, for Eagleton, does present an apophatic utopianism, an ethic that is based on finality, extinction, and mortality which can serve as an absolute moral even as late capitalism promises to make all that is solid melt into air. Thus, Eagleton proposes a universal morality of radical politics based in “the most radical forms of equality… our common killability.”

Eagleton sees an embrace of not just sacrifice, but death, as the ultimate axiom of revolutionary change. We could call this “gothic leftism,” or perhaps “memento mori radicalism,” but either way, this oozing, squishy, bloody and fragile embodiment is the “demonic truth” on which, he argues, a “more-than-imaginary community might be built.” Far from fearing the reaper, Eagleton claims that “It would be hard to imagine a more potent revolutionary force” than death. Not death as method, but rather the collective grappling with mortality’s implications; a spiritual critique of neoliberalism’s totalizing vacuousness. Freudian Thanatos is as repressed as Eros was in the Victorian era and, in part, Eagleton argues, it’s because there is no instrumental rationality to extinction, particularly to our own deaths, and so the vampiric logic of capitalism is such that we’re all marketed to as if we’ll never die. As though immortality can be fretfully purchased for the price of a few hours at the gym and a macrobiotic diet.

Eagleton encourages us to reengage the tomb, to parse the “ethics of the graveyard” as “death destroys the false, commodified identity of things, and in an ecstatic strike against time lays bare the sense of eternity at their heart.” Questions of why we purchase, why we save, why we work for others and not ourselves are proven to be empty, and as such Eagleton’s anti-utilitarian theology can be understood as an exegesis on the meaning of anti-meaning. The sepulcher lends itself to a paradoxical repudiation of nihilism. A cracked type of humanism, but a humanism all the same (and rare in either case).

Scholastic that he is, Eagleton argues that death is a demonstration of the absurd contingency of creation, for the fact is always that the world didn’t need to come into existence. This is of course true for all of us, and thus death unmasks the superficiality of an economics obsessed with utility, but which never answer the question of “Utility to what end?” There is a chain of production and consumption, and that chain links us, individual-to-individual, until the grave itself severs that link.

Eagleton’s ethics may be that of the cemetery, but it’s still the opposite of nihilism. Though our mortality cares not for “owing us a living,” neither do we owe anyone else our labor. Our “most flourishing acts” are not those done in the service of multinational corporations, but rather ones that are “performed as though they were one’s last, and thus accomplished not for their consequences but for their own sake.” Personal apocalypticism in opposition to “utility and instrumental reason,” where, rather, our “existence and that of others… [is] an end in itself.”

The rare thinker who takes Nietzsche at his word, Eagleton (unlike Ditchkins) understands that the death of God does entail a challenge to morality, that such a metaphysic ultimately implies the contention (often misattributed to Dostoevsky) that if God doesn’t exist, then “everything is permitted.” He can’t quite follow the Christian Brothers of his youth into a literal belief in Christ’s saving grace, but he does think that our shared embodiment can be the basis for a universal morality of a sort. This may seem more sentiment than argument, and yet in taking the question of nihilism seriously, Eagleton at least gestures to the gap left by the dead God.

What he doesn’t gesture towards enough are actual examples of sacrifice, especially those who were led to the gallows unwillingly. Eagleton prefers to dwell instead in literature and scripture, a weakness of the book which makes the entire project a bit arid when it could have been more fully human. Where are Trayvon Martin and Matthew Shephard? Where is Nia Wilson? If Christ has always been an embodiment of those who are treated as the refuse of the world, where are the African-American youths martyred by the police, women murdered by their partners, the victims of homophobic and anti-trans hate crimes? It reflects a certain comfort on Eagleton’s part that such questions aren’t raised in Radical Sacrifice, and it’s a detriment to the potential power of his study.

Still, there is a radical kernel to Eagleton’s book that is worth taking seriously. He conceives of Christianity as exemplifying the basis for a full politics in the most classical sense of the word. Eagleton understands the early Christians, in mystical communion with eternity, as having rejected the contingencies of Caesar for the perennial moment of Christ. He describes an ethos in which:

Those who live as though the future has already arrived pose a threat to the status quo. They are prophets, and as such figures marked out as objects of political violence; yet they also live like the lilies of the field and take no heed for tomorrow. In their touch of surrealist madness and casual way with material necessities, they proclaim the imminence of the reign of justice.

Such ruptures against the instrumental reason of our society are “concealed in the unfathomable depths of the present,” for “one should strive to treat every moment as absolute, disentangling it from the ignominy of circumstance.” Millennium is accessible now.

Radical Sacrifice offers an almost Taoist Marxist-Catholicism, explicating the radical potential of the present, that portal through which millennium could always arrive. His is an ethic that rejects the endless chain of dependence, singular lives rather justified as the thing-in-itself (like Creation, like God), and where the “sacred represents a critique of instrumental rationality.” Death, the great equalizer of medieval Fortuna, of Hans Holbein’s Danse Macabre with king and beggar, pope and peasant alike dancing with skeletal alacrity, their exuberance encouraging us to reject those things of this world, those things of this market. Placing the universality of death at the center of our radical politics allows us to say that the Market should be not proud, though some have called it mighty and dreadful, for Capital shall have no dominion.

***

Ed Simon is a staff writer at The Millions and the Editor-at-Large of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a frequent contributor at several different sites. His collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion will be released by Zero Books in 2018. He can be followed at his website, on Facebook, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.