Description
Book SynopsisTrouble 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.
Trade Review"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)
Table of ContentsPreface 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
