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.

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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.

Leseprobe

Preface. 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