ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ongoing redefinition of Europe which is indirectly moving people toward a radical reassessment of Eliot's significance. In actively seeking to sustain itself—that is, "In compassing material ends"—the hippo must take into account the discrepancies between various points on the compass; he must make compromises in order to respond adequately to the contingent values that operate in disparate locations in social and geographical space. In his engagements with these conflicts, Eliot adopts strategies that place him in a variety of ambivalent relations to the national and institutional structures of liberal democracy. The quantitative aspect of democracy, Derrida argues, stands in close relation to the qualitative pretensions of aristocracy. In its discordant attempts to reject both private emotion and public utility, Eliot's version of poetic professionalism closely resembles the professional ethos of the symbolist avant-garde, and, for that matter, of the avant-garde more generally.
