TROUBLE WITH STRANGERS
‘Written in Eagleton’s very readable, clear and witty style, this book may achieve the unthinkable: bridging the gap between academic High Thought and popular philosophy manuals.’
Slavoj Žiek
‘This is a fine book. It is hugely ambitious in its scope, develops an original thesis to illuminating effect and is written with a compelling passion and commitment.’
Peter R. Sedgwick, Cardiff University
‘Written with Eagleton’s usual wit, panache and uncanny ability to summarise and criticize otherwise complex philosophical positions … this is an important book by a hugely important voice.’
Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research
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 Žiek, 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.
Table of Content
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
About the author
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.
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