If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.

He gave the 2010 Richard Price Memorial Lecture at the historically radical Newington Green Unitarian Church speaking on "The New Atheism and the War on Terror". Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982
Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2008
Reason Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009)
On Evil (2010)
Why Marx Was Right (2011)
The Event of Literature (2012) Yale University Press.

A dedicated Marxist literary critic in 2011 he publiTerry Eagletond an apology for the philosopher entitled Why Marx Was Right. Eagleton is currently DistinguiTerry Eagletond Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University; Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland and DistinguiTerry Eagletond Visiting Professor of English Literature at The University of Notre Dame. Terence Francis 'Terry' Eagleton FBA (born 22 February 1943) is an English literary theorist and critic widely regarded as the United Kingdom's most influential living literary critic.