At times, Terry Eagleton's insistent irony can slide from amusing to tiresome, and his penchant for heavy-handed dismissals strike me as awfully clumsy. But then he writes a passage like this, and I remember in a burgeoning giddiness, why it is that I read him.

From the Illusions of Postmodernism:

"Is the capitalist system progressive? The only reasonable answer is a firm yes and no. On the one hand, Marx’s praise for capitalism is surely well justified. Capitalism, as he never tires of arguing, is the most dynamic, revolutionary, transgressive social system known to history, one which melts away barriers, deconstructs oppositions, pitches diverse life-forms promiscuously together and unleashes an infinity of desire. Typified by surplus and excess, constantly overriding the measure, it is a mode of production which breeds a hitherto undreamt-of wealth of human energies, bringing the individual to a peak of subtle complexity. As the greatest accumulation of productive forces which history has ever witnessed, it is capitalism which for the first time makes feasible the dream of a social order free of want and toil. As the first truly global mode of production, it uproots all parochial obstacles to human communication and lays down the conditions for international community. Its political ideals—freedom, justice, self-determination, equality of opportunity—outshine, in principle at least, almost all previous ideologies in the depth of their humanism and the universality of their scope.
All of this, of course, is bought at the most terrible cost. This dynamic, exuberant release of potential is also one long unspeakable human tragedy, in which powers are crippled and squandered, lives crushed and blighted, and the great majority of men and women condemned to fruitless labor for the profit of a few. Capitalism is most certainly a progressive system, and is just as certainly nothing of the kind… The image which Marxism offers of capitalism is that of a system frozen in its fixed modes of representation, yet mobilizing a desire which overturns all representation; which gives birth to a great carnival of difference, inversion, transgression, while never ceasing to be rigidly self-identical; which reproduces itself by a rigorously quantified exchange of commodities which are spectral and elusive, incarnate conundrums of presence and absence; which constantly conjures material inequality out of abstract equality; which is need of an authority it continually flouts, and of immutable foundations it threatens to kick away; and which ceaselessly presses up against its own limits and nourishes its own antagonists."