Trouble With Strangers

In this major new book, Terry Eagleton, one of the world’s greatest cultural theorists, writes with wit, eloquence and clarity on the question of ethics. Providing rare insights into tragedy, politics, literature, morality and religion, Eagleton examines key ethical theories through the framework of Jacques Lacan’s categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, measuring them against the ‘richer’ ethical resources of socialism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

• a major new book from Terry Eagleton, one of the world’s greatest cultural theorists
• investigates ethical theories from Aristotle to Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek
• engages with the whole modern European tradition of thought about ethics
• brings together personal and political ethics and makes a passionate case for political love

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.

Preface.

Part I: 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 II: 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 III: 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.