Now for something completely different. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995) Terry Eagleton confronts the reader with eight essays on Irish culture and society since 1750, offering a comprehensive coverage that moves easily between history, philosophy, literary criticism, cultural theory and, occasionally, abbreviated biography, keeping a thoughtful distance from both nationalist extremism and historical revisionism. I want to discuss the book because in some significant ways it does elude the general criticism of privileging difference, while at the same time slipping into what in my argument are the common faults of denigrating the force of the signifier and giving insufficient attention to subjectivity.