Marx, Freud and Morality

Extract

I said in a previous New Blackfriars (October 1975) that Marxism has had on the whole little to say about morality, because one doesn’t engage in moral debate with men who can only grasp morality in moralistic — and so ideological — fashion. It’s in the provisional silence of those who refuse the term ‘morality’ that, perhaps, something of its true meaning may finally emerge. The condition for the emergence of that discourse is Marxism itself — the theory and practice of political revolution. Until that condition is fulfilled, our ‘moral’ discourse is bound to remain imprisoned within the ideological, that’s to say, that when we speak ‘morally’, we won’t, for much of the time, know what we are meaning. We’ll be in the condition of all those imprisoned within the ideological, who, in the very act of speaking, fail to recognise that they themselves are being ‘spoken’, being constituted, by certain discourses quite independent of themselves, quite concealed from their consciousness, discourses which they betray, despite themselves, in the slips, contradictions, inconsistencies which fissure and deform their speaking. It’s of the essence of the ideological that in speaking, in constituting myself as a subject, I must necessarily repress, remain in ignorance, of the very determinants of my discourse — determinants which are visible only to science, to that science of social formation which is historical materialism, or that science which is psychoanalysis. As ‘I’ speak ‘I’ the coherent historical subject Terry Eagleton, it — the unconscious — speaks through me, constantly disturbing and displacing my discourse.