Trouble with Strangers

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 Žižek ‘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 Žižek, 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