Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics

In this ambitious new book, Terry Eagleton, one of the world s greatest cultural theorists, turns his attention to the now much–discussed question of ethics. In a work full of rare insights into tragedy, politics, literature, morality and religion, Eagleton investigates ethical theories from Aristotle to Alain Badiou and Slavoj i ek, weighing the merits and deficiencies of each theory, and measuring them all against the richer ethical resources of socialism and the Judaeo–Christian tradition. In a remarkably original move, he assigns each of the theories he examines to one or other of Jacques Lacan s three psychoanalytical categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, and shows how this can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of an ethics of personal sympathy, an impersonal morality of obligation, and a morality based on death and transformation.

Preface vi

PART I THE INSISTENCE OF THE IMAGINARY 1

Introduction: The Mirror Stage 1

1 Sentiment and Sensibility 12

2 Francis Hutcheson and David Hume 29

3 Edmund Burke and Adam Smith 62

PART II THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SYMBOLIC 83

Introduction: The Symbolic Order 83

4 Spinoza and the Death of Desire 91

5 Kant and the Moral Law 101

6 Law and Desire in Measure for Measure 130

PART III THE REIGN OF THE REAL 139

Introduction: Pure Desire 139

7 Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche 154

8 Fictions of the Real 180

9 Levinas, Derrida and Badiou 223

10 The Banality of Goodness 273

Conclusion 317

Index 327

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include How to Read a Poem (2006), The English Novel (2004), Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003), The Idea of Culture (2000), Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth–Century Ireland (1999), and The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), all published by Wiley–Blackwell.

"In his inimitable way, Eagleton is helping to develop this intriguing scene, and further framings of his thought are keenly anticipated.." ( New Left Review, July – August, 2010)

Readers who know the writers being discussed will enjoy the book. ( Choice, April 2009)

"Eagleton has laboured diligently in tracing the wellsprings of ethics across literature, philosophy, morality and religion. Trouble With Strangers is an engrossing book, peppered with remarkable insights into theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis." (Australian Book Review, March 2009)

"Eagleton is absolutely correct to ask why do we have trouble with strangers? It is to ask, after all, how we might be able to recreate solidarity. And it is in pursuit of this answer that he examines the attempts of moral philosophers to give altruism a firm footing." (Culture Wars, March 2009)

This difficult, highly abstract, yet extremely closely reasoned study touches on so many topics and ideas that the reader may come away from it wondering whether Eagleton has made a convincing argument for his main thesis which is that most ethical theories can be assigned to one of Jacques Lacans three psychoanalytical categories of the imaginary the symbolic and the Real or in some combination of the three. (Library Journal, December 2008)

"Confronted now with Eagleton′s eighth book in 11 years One finds his trademark qualities in abundance: impishness, prodigious breadth of reading, a poacher′s disregard of boundaries and of ′no trespassing′ notices, sublime self–confidence, and an opening up of the heart to old allegiances as sudden as a blow to the chest." (Times Higher Education Supplement, December 2008)