Materialism .. in memory of Leo Baile

The book "Materiality" by Terry Eagleton is a book about the body, among other things, but (or at least that is what I wholeheartedly hope) it is not a body of the current popular type in cultural studies, which has become, as a subject of discussion, a narrow, exclusionary, and monotonously repetitive body. There, then, is an implicit polemical subject for study that seeks to examine patterns of creation in humans, which the traditional postmodern school has set aside fundamentally, and which, among other things, applies to all human bodies regardless of gender and ethnicity, for example. I believe that this shameless universality will prove to be sufficiently scandalous in the eyes of contemporary cultural discourse regulators. It seems that graduate students around the world these days, who are not working on stories about vampires or graphic novels, are working on the body but in ways that exclude viable approaches to it. As usual, those who praise universal totality are remarkably unaware of how much their preferred terms overlook. Cultural studies mostly concern itself with ethnic bodies, gendered, deviant, hungry, constructed, aged, decorated, disabled, cybernetic, biological, political — the body as a site of gendered perspective, a site of pleasure or pain, inscribed with power, discipline, or desire. The human body that we deal with in this book is, in contrast, a primitive type of body. It is not primarily a cultural construct, but what is said about it is valid in Cambodia as much as in Chatham (London), valid for Belgian females as much as for Sri Lankan males. And if it is valid for Hillary Clinton, it is equally valid for Cesaro. Those dogmatic postmodernists, who surprisingly hold all universal claims to be unjust except for that specific universal claim, are the ones most likely to be provoked by such an approach. Cultural studies have produced valuable insights into understanding the body, but they seem somewhat unaware of their own repressive history in this regard. One of the main sources of the subject is Michel Foucault’s work, which also indicates the emergence of a crisis on the revolutionary left after the late sixties. During that period, it appeared that certain forms of radical politics, the most ambitious ones, faltered after being confronted by strong right-wing forces, and that historical materialism began to give way to cultural materialism, and that interest in the body started to gain strength. If that challenged leftist politics that excessively distanced itself intellectually from the senses, it also played a role in displacing it. So, this body, precisely like any idol, comes to fill a gap. Some leading feminist currents kept the relationship between the body and socialist politics on the political agenda, but by the 1980s, the talk of socialism receded in favor of discussions about sexuality. A cultural left, mostly silent and shameless about capitalism, raised its voice increasingly on the issue of the physical. But later, when we examine Marx’s work, we will see that the two should not be considered alternatives to each other. I am grateful to anonymous readers who left valuable comments on an earlier draft of this book, especially for the harsh suggestion made by one of them that the first forty pages be deleted. I believe that the work greatly benefited from this cut. Rachel Lonsdale, editor of my works at Yale University Press, has now taken charge, carefully overseeing the printing of six of my books with exceptional vigilance to detect any loose expressions and structural disintegration. She is the best editor and I owe her a deep debt of gratitude.