The Secret of All Matter

Terry Eagleton discusses the subject of death as viewed by Postmodernism and capitalism, from his newest book "After Theory" (quoted in the New York Review of Books):

"The body, that inconvenient reminder of mortality, is plucked, pierced, etched, pummelled, pumped up, shrunk and remoulded. Flesh is converted into sign, staving off the moment when it will subside into the sheer pornographic meaninglessness of a corpse. Dead bodies are indecent: they proclaim with embarrassing candor the secret of all matter, that it has no obvious relation to meaning. The momenet of death is the moment when meaning heamorrhages from us.... Capitalism too, for all its crass materialism, is secretly allergic to matter.... For all its love affair with matter, in the shape of Tuscan villas and double brandies, capitalist society harbours a secret hatred of the stuff. It is a culture shot through with fantasy, idealist to its core, powered by a disembodied will which dreams of pounding Nature into pieces."