Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #241661 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 360 pages

Review
“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)

From the Back Cover
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.

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.

Customer Reviews

Psychoanalysis and Christianity
This highly original study of ethics approaches the subject through the lens of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. The study engages with the whole breadth of modern Western ethical thought through a division of positions into Lacans' categories of the Imiginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. It is extremely clear and meticulous, yet fluid, in this structuring of positions and is also conciliatory to the non-Lacanian reader. The depth of Eagleton's literary knowledge is also a unique resource which is used to expand and humanise philosophical theory.

Eagleton's ethical position courts both the Symbolic and the Real and is derived from a refreshing and challenging approach to the Christian tradition (for an atheist like myself). While his Marxist side helps to traverse the tightrope of identity/difference, universal/particular. But as he concedes, Psychoanalysis and Chrisitiantiy may both not be true...

Criticisms are typically amusing and acerbic. For example Derrida's ethics are dispatched as 'pedestrian' and Levinas is shown to be 'far too deep a thinker' . It is extremely refreshing to read a critic of poststructuralism who has actually understood and truly engaged with the literature and the ethical quandary in which it finds itself due to the legacies of Auschwitz and the Gulags.

The book is an absolute joy to read due to Eagleton's inimitable wit and ability to cut straight to the core of some of the more inpenetrable philosophers and texts. A real step above something like Slavoj Zizek's new book 'In Defence of Lost Causes'; highly recommended!