Trouble with Strangers
A Study of Ethics
1. Edition September 2008
360 Pages, Hardcover
Monograph
Short Description
Trouble With Strangers represents a groundbreaking intervention in ethics by one of the world's most important theoreticians. It is written with Terry Eagleton's usual wit, panache, and uncanny ability to summarize and criticize otherwise complex philosophical and theoretical conversations.
Eagleton breaks down ethical theories into three psychoanalytic categories of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, and applies this analysis to discussions of the work of central figures like Hutcheson, Kant, and Spinoza, as well as fascinating interpretations of Shakespeare. He also engages with contemporary continental ethics, particularly Levinas and Badiou, and goes on to examine the relation of ethics to politics.
This is a must-have book for all readers of philosophy and theory, and anyone who has an interest in the important contemporary work of Terry Eagleton.
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 Zizek, 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.
Part 1: The Insistence of the Imaginary.
Introduction: The Mirror Stage.
1: Sentiment and Sensibility.
2: Francis Hutcheson and David Hume.
3: Edmund Burke and Adam Smith.
Part 2: The Sovereignty of the Symbolic.
Introduction: The Symbolic Order.
4: Spinoza and the Death of Desire.
5: Kant and the Moral Law.
6: Law and Desire in Measure for Measure.
Part 3: The Reign of the Real.
Introduction: Pure Desire.
7: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
8: Fictions of the Real.
9: Levinas, Derrida and Badiou.
10: The Banality of Goodness.
Conclusion.
Index