I just read it, thanks. It doesn't sound like this 944-page (!) book has any news to break, though I confess I hadn't heard that anecdote about Joyce trying to read Capital before. Eagleton's essay is also a tissue of self-quotations from his earlier writings on nationalism and modernism, even though these date to the 1980s, and it's no longer the 1980s, and, actually, while we're on the subject, is it so bad if you didn't and don't want to "g[i]ve comfort to the IRA," who were placing bombs where they might kill civilians? Is there some coded Straussian reading I am supposed to infer from this defense of Irish nationalism in 2026, not 1922 or even 1982, as 2026 is a year when Irish nationalism may well connote anti-immigrant rather than anti-imperial sentiment? (To be clear, I place tremendous blame on "liberal" politicians who do not respect the pragmatics of immigration insofar as immigration may in fact create social, cultural, or economic instability, as much to the detriment of the immigrants as to the settled population; in a perfect world, every person could cross every border, but we do not live in that world; limits must be respected, and politicians who self-servingly flout those limits are responsible for the entirely predictable resulting chaos. But one still reprehends xenophobia as such, and xenophobic violence especially and absolutely.) Also, whom does it pragmatically help to go on and on about the depredations of the English now? David Rieff may have been correct when he made the Burkean argument that it is in fact better to forget, an argument inspired by his time with the nationalists who carved up what had been Yugoslavia. I suppose we might imagine Eagleton to be thinking of Ukraine and Palestine as the icons of legitimate national self-determination today (he tends to equivocate about Ukraine but doesn't take the full tankie line); and yet Russia and Israel, too, are motivated by nationalist or nationalist-adjacent ideas, so, morally, it appears to be a draw no matter which side you're on. Anyway, Eagleton's original version of this argument about Joyce (see here: "what is turned disruptively against bourgeois culture is in a sense bourgeois economy: the leveling, equalizing, indifferent operations of the commodity form itself, which respects no unique identity, transgresses all frontiers, melts solidity into air, and profanes the holy") is more coherent, and I've written similarly myself, but it's still hard to say what role an insurgent nationalism was supposed to play in effecting The Revolution, rather than the revolution that actually came about, with all its parochialisms and worse, especially when Marx himself seemed to think it was necessary to pass all the way through the fire set by the commodity form to get to communism, meaning Joyce is more Marxist than his Marxist critics, and when Eagleton concludes that earlier essay with some non-answer about existentially living out the contradiction, which I fear might involve placing a bomb where it might kill a baby but also feeling really bad about it Ă la The Battle of Algiers. Leftist critics tell us they need to spend all their time scolding and berating artists for their utopian visions because the utopian vision serves only to pacify the masses, but this would only be persuasive if the masses were otherwise going to rise up, and not only rise up but rise up in a way the leftist professor would approve of, and yet they're simply not going to, and you wouldn't like it if they did; so utopian visions, and the hope that their effects might prove "incalculably diffusive," probably long after we're gone, is all we have to go on. In the meantime, I do agree that the young Joyce's post-Parnellite liberal nationalism remains a viable political position, and so, if that's all Eagleton meant to say, then it's fine with me.
