Theory is not dead.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of Jacques Derrida, who, for a generation of brilliant French philosophers and critics, was the last man standing until October 9, when the president of France, Chirac, announced Derrida's final exit at the age of 74. Born in Algeria, educated in France and the U.S., Derrida had been the leading theorist of deconstructionism, a school of thought that attempted to denaturalize many of the hierarchies that Western philosophy and culture conceived as natural. Despite their difficulty, Derrida's books were hugely influential. And as a 20th-century French intellectual movement, deconstructionism is only second in popularity to existentialism.

A few years ago, the era of thought that was inaugurated by French structuralists in the mid '60s and closed by Anglo-American Marxists in the early '80s, lost another leading figure, Edward Said, whose book Orientalism stands as one of the highest accomplishments of a branch of cultural theory called post-colonialism. Now, there is no one left to die. Space has been cleared for something new, but no one knows exactly what shape it will take, or in which direction contemporary critical thought will go.

British-born professor Terry Eagleton, one of two Anglo-American Marxists who closed that ebullient period of critical thinking, published a 1983 bestseller, Literary Theory: An Introduction, that ordered and explained in very plain language the complex intellectual movements that became the bedrock of cultural theory--formalism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. More than 20 years later, Eagelton, now 61, has published After Theory, a sequel to his great success that attempts to determine the course that will follow the golden age of Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. But the title of Eagleton's new book is very misleading. It implies that the production of philosophical, historical, and analytical texts that defined the late-20th-century practice of cultural theory has stopped, that the factory has been shut down, and that if you want work you must look elsewhere. And further, the book suggests that those who read it will be lead to this elsewhere--the new locus of philosophical production.

But this is not at all the content of the book. Indeed, as Eagleton points out, theory is more productive today than ever before; there's lots of work to be done by all. What upsets him is the substance of what is being produced. "In some cultural circles," he writes early in After Theory, "the politics of masturbation exert far more fascination than politics of the Middle East. Socialism has lost out to sadomasochism. Among students of culture, the body is an immensely fashionable topic, but it is usually the erotic body, not the famished one. There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in laboring ones."

Eagleton believes that cultural theory has lost direction, that it's transforming a grand tradition of critical thinking into pure garbage. The work of today's scholars and students has no moral motive and is thoroughly decadent. This is Eagleton's portrait of the present condition of theory: "Quietly-spoken middle-class students huddled diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies." But what does he offer as an alternative to this imagined intellectual wasteland? Not a future but a return--not just to "the golden age of cultural theory," which he suspects is somewhat responsible for this general decline into hedonism (to complain about the popularity of sadomasochism in graduate papers is to indirectly complain about the popularity of Foucault in the university system). Eagleton wants us to get back into the church, and relearn Christian values. This is the substance of his book, which is why one of its brightest reviews was published by Christianity Today.

Eagleton also encourages us to rebuild the big concepts that were deconstructed by, among others, Derrida and his followers. On the strength of his being Britain's foremost literary critic, he attempts to push morality, metaphysics, objectivity, and historical progress back to the center of a debate that has been dominated by the logic of postmodernism. Eagleton is still a committed Marxist, but his tone has been diluted by, of all things, theology. In the second and weaker part of his book, Eagleton describes, in the manner of a priest, how humans can be good, moral, and live in ways that are meaningful. Again and again, he advocates the resurrection of basic bourgeois humanistic/Judeo-Christian values. The big problem with all of this is Eagleton has forgotten that many of these values (though not all) were actually obstacles to progressive thinking. For many of us, these are not the worst of times but the best--as far as theory is concerned, anyway. If time travel were possible, Africans who lived during the peak of European theology and enlightenment would be immigrating en masse to the present age where graduate students write papers about Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, and Oprah Winfrey.

Many of us don't want to go back. What we want are new tools for the future. And many of those tools are better made from the materials in Of Grammatology (Derrida's most celebrated book) than Confessions (a book by the Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, who has evidently inspired Eagleton to read lots of Aristotle).

In the last section of After Theory, Eagleton takes a swipe at Derrida, which, judging from the dead philosopher's obituaries in many of the big American papers last week, is the a fashionable thing to do. Eagleton writes: "For Jacques Derrida, ethics is a matter of absolute of decisions--decisions that are vital and necessary but also utterly 'impossible,' which fall outside norms, forms of knowledge and modes of conceptualization. One can only hope that he is not on the jury when one's case comes up in court." But in Literary Theory, Eagleton offered Derrida a well-deserved handshake: "Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force."

It is for this very reason that there are more on the right who detest Derrida than on the left. Derrida's enemy is my enemy.