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Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics
TROUBLE WITH STRANGERS ‘Written in Eagleton’s very readable, clear and witty style, this book may achieve the bridging the gap between academic High Thought and popular philosophy manuals.’
Slavoj Žižek ‘This is a fine book. It is hugely ambitious in its scope, develops an original thesis to illuminating effect and is written with a compelling passion and commitment.’
Peter R. Sedgwick, Cardiff University ‘Written with Eagleton’s usual wit, panache and uncanny ability to summarise and criticize otherwise complex philosophical positions ... this is an important book by a hugely important voice.’
Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research 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.
Slavoj Žižek ‘This is a fine book. It is hugely ambitious in its scope, develops an original thesis to illuminating effect and is written with a compelling passion and commitment.’
Peter R. Sedgwick, Cardiff University ‘Written with Eagleton’s usual wit, panache and uncanny ability to summarise and criticize otherwise complex philosophical positions ... this is an important book by a hugely important voice.’
Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research 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.
368 pages, Paperback
First published September 12, 2008
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About the author
Terry Eagleton
160 books1,281 followersWidely regarded as England's most influential living literary critic & theorist, Dr. Terry Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and as Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was Thomas Warton Prof. of English Literature at the University of Oxford ('92-01) & John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester 'til '08. He returned to the University of Notre Dame in the Autumn '09 semester as Distinguished Visitor in the English Department.
He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96).
He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.
He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96).
He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.
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August 8, 2012
What is Lacan on about?
Recently I noticed that my friend Sarah had Terry Eagleton’s book “Trouble With Strangers” on her shelf. In it, Eagleton sets out to critique the history of ethics from within the framework of Jacques Lacan’s model of the development of the self / subject. Being interested in both Eagleton and Lacan I asked Sarah if I could borrow it: she had not read it herself yet, but kindly agreed on condition that I evaluated the text for her.
Hence this piece of writing.
Eagleton’s book is divided into three sections to reflect the three key orders of the Lacanian self:
- The Imaginary
- The Symbolic
- The Real
He starts with an “explanation” of each of these domains but, unusually for Eagleton who is usually so clear and precise, these sections are a bit of a struggle. Lacan’s writings - “Ecrits” - are notoriously difficult, metaphoric, poetic (he said they were not meant to be understood rationally - more on this later!) - so maybe the first step should be to attempt to unpack what Lacan’s talking about with these categories.
Lacan (1901-1981) was a Freudian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist whose insights came from combining Freud with Ferdinand Saussure the key figure in the significance of language, linguistics and the symbolic nature of signs - semiotics. But that’s not important. (Saussure’s an interesting character [1857-1913]. He published NOTHING in his lifetime, but look at any anthology of writing on critical theory, cultural studies, semiotics and they will all start with a chapter on Saussure!)
Having three wee grandchildren around a lot while I’ve been reading Lacan has been very stimulating for me. Lacan says the child is born into this world of non-language - an experience which it is virtually impossible for us to comprehend: try having NO ideas or concepts! There is no inside or outside to the self. The child doesn’t know where they end and where the mother begins or the rest of the “outside” environment. It’s just one big rammy. This is the realm of “The Imaginary.” It’s the time of the body. Google “Lacan mirror” and read his thoughts on the key moment of the baby recognising themself in a mirror. (I’ve been watching Vinny play for ages with his mirror!) Very interesting stuff about how our miscrecognition of a more powerful, competent self in the mirror constructs a duality of feeling in the ego.)
Anyway, we are now born. We are an organism. But our task is to become a person. A self. (Poststructuralists call it a “Subject” because as we will see they want to stress that this work is “imposed” on us from external forces). So how do we become “ourself”? How do we enter into personhood? How is the poststructuralist subject constructed? We do this as we internalize the culture that surrounds us and as we learn LANGUAGE. This is all very well and good and makes sense so far. Wee Vinny makes sense of his face as his dad points out, “There’s your nose, Vin! Aw! yer wee rosy cheeks!” etc. Islay realises she’s comforted when she’s able to call for her dummy. So, common sense would suggest that language is the key to making order out of the chaos of The Imaginary realm. And with a bit of thought we could see that the acquiring of cultural “norms” could be similarly helpful in making sense of the world. (But - you can see where we’re going here, cant you...! Cracks beginning to appear!!)
This is where Saussure comes in. There are a couple of problematic things about language. Firstly, it exists before we do. The baby is born into a world where language already exists. We don’t choose our own private language - we have no choice. Secondly, Saussure argues, language is differential, not referential. Key. Is he right? Words and their meanings are defined by comparing and contrasting their meanings to one another. So (in a ridiculously simplified example) a horse is like a cow (4 legs, big, hairy, eats grass, etc) but is different because one’s got horns and there’s different bits here and there. Make sense? Or... the arguments we might have with a pal about whether the sea looks blue or green in a certain light. So we refine the language with qualifiers - “light”-blue, “greeny”-blue; or new categories - “turquoise”, “cobalt”, etc. Saussure’s idea however is taken by Lacan (and also by Derrida) that we can never pin down the actual thing itself; never say what we really want to say. Language is a moveable, slippy area that can always shift under our feet. I guess that’s why we talk so much to try to explain exactly, and why politicians gab on for so long being interrogated by Jeremy Paxman. It’s almost like Lacan sees language as a curtain that veils us from what we really want to experience. Language as an enemy that Orders what we are allowed to talk about... but never actually lets us get to the truth of the matter.
Anyway, this is what Lacan means by entering The Symbolic Order. We do so by learning language (- how to speak -) and cultural codes (- how to behave.) Lacan calls language the Other (capital O!) because it is always distant from us. It is imposed upon us by other people, who in turn had the Other imposed upon them; and it only allows us to speak (and therefore have concepts about) what it has words (“signifiers”) for. We don’t make language: it makes us. We can only think about what it lets us.
Lacan claims that there is a huge residue of experience from The Imaginary for which the Symbolic Order has no signifiers - no words to explain and that this residue is repressed, inaccessible and not able to be spoken. He calls this order “The Real” or the impossible - similar to Freud’s unconscious. It is the language which cannot be spoken because there are no words for it. (Lacan famously claimed therefore that the unconscious is structured like a language.) The Real however demands to speak to us, but having no words disrupts our perceived “real” world in the usual Freudian tugs on our cuff - dreams, jokes, puns, illnesses - and, particularly for Lacan, unspoken and unspeakable yearning Desire for the unnameable thing that has been lost. Unspeakable dissatisfaction is the nature of Man. (I guess that’s why Lacan resonates so much with continental philosophers.) It certainly seems to chime with my own experience: is this why I spent so many hours moodily tramping through the melancholy woods of Pollok? Is this why I was drawn to the lugubrious Wordsworth and the desperate Hardy? Is this why I persisted with aching fingers to stumble through The Paul Simon Songbook? Is this why our Joe still supports Aberdeen? Quite possibly yes. And you went through this stuff too, didn’t you? Lacan says it’s a life’s work - not just for troubled adolescents. It probably explains why Black Jack bought that big Harley Davidson. He knew he wanted something, but couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
A DIGRESSION
I had an interesting dream after reading some Lacan for the first time a few years ago. In my dream I was walking past The Argyle Arcade with my wife and daughter when we met our friend Hassim. We followed him up a stair above Sloane’s and I looked out through a window and found a part of Glasgow I didn’t know existed. It was old. There was a large Jacobean building. I climbed through and started exploring. Eventually we found ourselves on a cobbled street, strewn with grain where carthorses had been feeding from their nosebags. I recognised a building and we went in. I knew it as the grainstore where my sister and I had been brought with my mother when we were kids. As I stood in this old dark domed shop, I said to Rachel, “This is the place where all my dreams and longings come from.” I realised I was in my mother’s womb and woke up, feeling extremely happy!
So, in Lacan’s world, we are created by language. We can be certain of nothing beyond language. And as we have seen, language is a slippy untrustworthy terrain. This is why his own writing is difficult. Ordinary language for him is almost an enemy - which will not allow him to express The Real: it is only by using non-rational “thought?” / utterances that we can catch a glimpse of the subconscious urges.
The Freudian Forbidding Father is replaced in Lacan with the Symbolic Order of language and culture which tell us “NO!” - how we mustn’t behave. Forget the blissful Imaginary order, the mother, the womb, the unity of the Imaginary; and accept the Name (in French the pun Nom/ Non) of the Father, the Symbolic Order and the cultural “norms” of society - ideology. (Althusser, who I think was actually a patient of Lacan’s at one point, takes Lacan’s thought into the arena of Marxism and structures his theory of ideology around it - how we are constructed by ideology.) This is how the common sense view of language, as a helpful mode of communication, is turned on its head by post-structuralism and is seen as a coercive and repressive structure which shapes the individual into the kind of “subject” which is required by the ideology of power. The rationalist, common-sense, Western view of the free individual who comes into consciousness, masters language and then operates freely and decisively in the world is replaced by a subject whose “consciousness” is a process of having been acted upon by language. Language is our DNA and we can’t get beyond it. The Name of the Father / Symbolic Order/ Other of language is a big stick which controls us: that’s why Derrida describes it as “Phallogocentrism”!
Western metaphysics has traditionally seen meaning as the ground of language, with some big idea containing and validating meaning: God or reason or science. Poststructuralism argues that meaning is just an effect of language, so by doing away with this “transcendental signifier” or “big foundational idea” Derrida and Lacan have undermined metaphysics and the Western philosophical tradition. There is NO truth: there can be NO certainty. Meaning is just a discourse we pass the time with. “In the beginning was the word / logos - and the word was with God and the word WAS God.” So if you have God, then you have a transcendental signifier which makes sense of stuff.
That was Nietzsche’s heartbreak: that for him God was gone - and he knew what that meant.
Enough. I haven’t even touched on why Eagleton consigns Hume, for example, to The Imaginary, Kant to The Symbolic and Kierkegaard to The Real, however my brain is now hurting and I will stop. Sorry, Sarah. Best I can do for now. I know nothing about psychiatry or ethics and therefore would welcome comments about this stuff from folk who do (simply phrased in layperson’s terms please!) Wikipedia’s piece on Lacan concludes with a huge amount of ferociously comic abuse against Lacan - my favourite coming from Dawkins who says: “a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about.”
I don’t know that I’d want to go out boozing with Dawkins, but he can sure fire off a good one-liner.
What is Eagleton on about? (part 2)
OK - having read the rest of the book, let’s try to see what Eagleton is saying.
Hume and the ethics of the Scottish / British Enlightenment are linked to Lacan’s Imaginary because of their “quickness of sympathy” and warm fellow feeling for their fellow man. (Note gender!) But Eagleton critiques this as the egoism of a “Gentleman’s Club” - ultimately “wary of strangers and nervous of the non-identical.” He doesn’t mention it, but I guess at the back of his mind is the fact that the leisure time that allowed the Enlightenment was founded on the slave economies of the Virginia plantations. (But I STILL like Hume! I’m sure he could easily be coaxed out of the Gentleman’s Club!)
Kant and Spinoza are more obviously assigned to the Symbolic Order; Kant’s “thin-blooded” Moral Law moves from the “promptings of the heart” of the Imaginary to cold, “stiff-necked” rational calculation.The human and the body are removed from the equation and ethics and political action are separated into different channels.
Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche - and later Levinas, Derrida and Badiou are the philosophers of the Real. The Real is encountered in situations of apocalyptic extremity: on the gallows or in the Twin Towers or on the Damascus Road. “Death, tragedy, sacrifice, self-dispossession, loss, desire, negativity, impasse and the extreme strangeness of the self.” It is the moment when a person realises they must follow their Desire to the end, no matter the cost. Eagleton uses literary examples: Lacan’s own favourite, Antigone, her face set on burying her brother’s corpse though this has been forbidden on pain of her own death; Shylock demanding his bond / justice / flesh; Eddie Carbone dying, unable to “settle for half” in “A View from the Bridge”; Heathcliff and Cathy, destroyed by their desire for one another; Wordsworth projected by epiphany beyond Nature and into Infinity. Though intriguing I found the extremity of language used here SO emotive that I felt uncomfortable about this being the experience of MOST people’s lives. For example:
“Tragedy chastens the hubris of those whose reach exceeds their grasp, undoing their insane presumption, stripping them of their selfhood and ushering them into the ghastly presence of the Real. Yet if these figures can gaze at the monstrosity of their condition without being struck blind or turned to stone, seeing in the mirror of themselves not an imaginary alter ego but a loathsome outcast, it is possible that the immeasurable power which allows them to acknowledge this thing of darkness as their own is also one which can bear them beyond the bleached bones and crushed skulls of those who have gone before them, to the remote domain of what Lacan calls ‘a limitless love’.”
It were as if the world were made up of Shakespearean tragic heroes … so it came as a relief when in the final chapter on “The Banality of Goodness” Eagleton decides that Parisian avant-garde intellectual elitism is not for him and plumps instead for a personal preference of Aristotelian ethics as much closer to the “real-life” socio-political-cultural existence of the common person (though realising the difficulties that such a “common-sense” approach might throw up in a tendency towards uncritical conservatism). A victory for the real over The Real? Eagleton starts to use “Love” a lot here, tracing this ethical strand from Aristotle through Aquinas and on the “less celestial route” through Hegel to Marx. (This in opposition to the “thin,” Pharisaic duty-ethic tradition of Kant through to the post-structuralists, which Eagleton believes has separated ethics from political and social action.)
He finishes his conclusion with an appeal to fellow socialists to renew with vigour the defence of the poor and dispossessed against the ravages of resurgent Capitalism, but persons of faith will be amazed at Eagleton’s bigging-up of Christianity throughout the text, and especially in the concluding sections where he rants like a radical evangelical! Translating the gospel into Laconese he preaches:
“To say that Jesus is the ‘Son’ is to claim that what he is for the Other, known as God, is also what he is for himself. The source of love and the source of his personal existence, are identical. He is at one with the law of the Father, a transparent signifier (or ‘Word’) of it, born wholly of love rather than flesh; and it is because of this faithful identification with the roots of his identity, this refusal to give up on the ground of his being, that he is tortured and murdered… To claim that Jesus is the ‘Son’ of the Father, then, is to say that he is the authentic image of the Father, revealing him as a friend, lover and fellow-victim rather than as a patriarchal Nobodaddy, Satanic judge or bloodthirsty despot ��� it is not that God has a benign presence but also an obscenely sadistic underside, but rather that he is a terrorist of love.”
…and so on and so on! I can see Terry joining the church in a few years time. God help them, because he won’t let them get away with the usual patriarchal body-despising shit that frequently gets peddled!
Thus in his conclusion he argues that, for him, the most practical ethical traditions can be found in Judaeo-Christianity and in socialism. As he says, “In a just social order, each comes to self-fulfillment through and in terms of the self-fulfillment of the others.” As Bruce says, “Nobody wins unless everybody wins.”
Recently I noticed that my friend Sarah had Terry Eagleton’s book “Trouble With Strangers” on her shelf. In it, Eagleton sets out to critique the history of ethics from within the framework of Jacques Lacan’s model of the development of the self / subject. Being interested in both Eagleton and Lacan I asked Sarah if I could borrow it: she had not read it herself yet, but kindly agreed on condition that I evaluated the text for her.
Hence this piece of writing.
Eagleton’s book is divided into three sections to reflect the three key orders of the Lacanian self:
- The Imaginary
- The Symbolic
- The Real
He starts with an “explanation” of each of these domains but, unusually for Eagleton who is usually so clear and precise, these sections are a bit of a struggle. Lacan’s writings - “Ecrits” - are notoriously difficult, metaphoric, poetic (he said they were not meant to be understood rationally - more on this later!) - so maybe the first step should be to attempt to unpack what Lacan’s talking about with these categories.
Lacan (1901-1981) was a Freudian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist whose insights came from combining Freud with Ferdinand Saussure the key figure in the significance of language, linguistics and the symbolic nature of signs - semiotics. But that’s not important. (Saussure’s an interesting character [1857-1913]. He published NOTHING in his lifetime, but look at any anthology of writing on critical theory, cultural studies, semiotics and they will all start with a chapter on Saussure!)
Having three wee grandchildren around a lot while I’ve been reading Lacan has been very stimulating for me. Lacan says the child is born into this world of non-language - an experience which it is virtually impossible for us to comprehend: try having NO ideas or concepts! There is no inside or outside to the self. The child doesn’t know where they end and where the mother begins or the rest of the “outside” environment. It’s just one big rammy. This is the realm of “The Imaginary.” It’s the time of the body. Google “Lacan mirror” and read his thoughts on the key moment of the baby recognising themself in a mirror. (I’ve been watching Vinny play for ages with his mirror!) Very interesting stuff about how our miscrecognition of a more powerful, competent self in the mirror constructs a duality of feeling in the ego.)
Anyway, we are now born. We are an organism. But our task is to become a person. A self. (Poststructuralists call it a “Subject” because as we will see they want to stress that this work is “imposed” on us from external forces). So how do we become “ourself”? How do we enter into personhood? How is the poststructuralist subject constructed? We do this as we internalize the culture that surrounds us and as we learn LANGUAGE. This is all very well and good and makes sense so far. Wee Vinny makes sense of his face as his dad points out, “There’s your nose, Vin! Aw! yer wee rosy cheeks!” etc. Islay realises she’s comforted when she’s able to call for her dummy. So, common sense would suggest that language is the key to making order out of the chaos of The Imaginary realm. And with a bit of thought we could see that the acquiring of cultural “norms” could be similarly helpful in making sense of the world. (But - you can see where we’re going here, cant you...! Cracks beginning to appear!!)
This is where Saussure comes in. There are a couple of problematic things about language. Firstly, it exists before we do. The baby is born into a world where language already exists. We don’t choose our own private language - we have no choice. Secondly, Saussure argues, language is differential, not referential. Key. Is he right? Words and their meanings are defined by comparing and contrasting their meanings to one another. So (in a ridiculously simplified example) a horse is like a cow (4 legs, big, hairy, eats grass, etc) but is different because one’s got horns and there’s different bits here and there. Make sense? Or... the arguments we might have with a pal about whether the sea looks blue or green in a certain light. So we refine the language with qualifiers - “light”-blue, “greeny”-blue; or new categories - “turquoise”, “cobalt”, etc. Saussure’s idea however is taken by Lacan (and also by Derrida) that we can never pin down the actual thing itself; never say what we really want to say. Language is a moveable, slippy area that can always shift under our feet. I guess that’s why we talk so much to try to explain exactly, and why politicians gab on for so long being interrogated by Jeremy Paxman. It’s almost like Lacan sees language as a curtain that veils us from what we really want to experience. Language as an enemy that Orders what we are allowed to talk about... but never actually lets us get to the truth of the matter.
Anyway, this is what Lacan means by entering The Symbolic Order. We do so by learning language (- how to speak -) and cultural codes (- how to behave.) Lacan calls language the Other (capital O!) because it is always distant from us. It is imposed upon us by other people, who in turn had the Other imposed upon them; and it only allows us to speak (and therefore have concepts about) what it has words (“signifiers”) for. We don’t make language: it makes us. We can only think about what it lets us.
Lacan claims that there is a huge residue of experience from The Imaginary for which the Symbolic Order has no signifiers - no words to explain and that this residue is repressed, inaccessible and not able to be spoken. He calls this order “The Real” or the impossible - similar to Freud’s unconscious. It is the language which cannot be spoken because there are no words for it. (Lacan famously claimed therefore that the unconscious is structured like a language.) The Real however demands to speak to us, but having no words disrupts our perceived “real” world in the usual Freudian tugs on our cuff - dreams, jokes, puns, illnesses - and, particularly for Lacan, unspoken and unspeakable yearning Desire for the unnameable thing that has been lost. Unspeakable dissatisfaction is the nature of Man. (I guess that’s why Lacan resonates so much with continental philosophers.) It certainly seems to chime with my own experience: is this why I spent so many hours moodily tramping through the melancholy woods of Pollok? Is this why I was drawn to the lugubrious Wordsworth and the desperate Hardy? Is this why I persisted with aching fingers to stumble through The Paul Simon Songbook? Is this why our Joe still supports Aberdeen? Quite possibly yes. And you went through this stuff too, didn’t you? Lacan says it’s a life’s work - not just for troubled adolescents. It probably explains why Black Jack bought that big Harley Davidson. He knew he wanted something, but couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
A DIGRESSION
I had an interesting dream after reading some Lacan for the first time a few years ago. In my dream I was walking past The Argyle Arcade with my wife and daughter when we met our friend Hassim. We followed him up a stair above Sloane’s and I looked out through a window and found a part of Glasgow I didn’t know existed. It was old. There was a large Jacobean building. I climbed through and started exploring. Eventually we found ourselves on a cobbled street, strewn with grain where carthorses had been feeding from their nosebags. I recognised a building and we went in. I knew it as the grainstore where my sister and I had been brought with my mother when we were kids. As I stood in this old dark domed shop, I said to Rachel, “This is the place where all my dreams and longings come from.” I realised I was in my mother’s womb and woke up, feeling extremely happy!
So, in Lacan’s world, we are created by language. We can be certain of nothing beyond language. And as we have seen, language is a slippy untrustworthy terrain. This is why his own writing is difficult. Ordinary language for him is almost an enemy - which will not allow him to express The Real: it is only by using non-rational “thought?” / utterances that we can catch a glimpse of the subconscious urges.
The Freudian Forbidding Father is replaced in Lacan with the Symbolic Order of language and culture which tell us “NO!” - how we mustn’t behave. Forget the blissful Imaginary order, the mother, the womb, the unity of the Imaginary; and accept the Name (in French the pun Nom/ Non) of the Father, the Symbolic Order and the cultural “norms” of society - ideology. (Althusser, who I think was actually a patient of Lacan’s at one point, takes Lacan’s thought into the arena of Marxism and structures his theory of ideology around it - how we are constructed by ideology.) This is how the common sense view of language, as a helpful mode of communication, is turned on its head by post-structuralism and is seen as a coercive and repressive structure which shapes the individual into the kind of “subject” which is required by the ideology of power. The rationalist, common-sense, Western view of the free individual who comes into consciousness, masters language and then operates freely and decisively in the world is replaced by a subject whose “consciousness” is a process of having been acted upon by language. Language is our DNA and we can’t get beyond it. The Name of the Father / Symbolic Order/ Other of language is a big stick which controls us: that’s why Derrida describes it as “Phallogocentrism”!
Western metaphysics has traditionally seen meaning as the ground of language, with some big idea containing and validating meaning: God or reason or science. Poststructuralism argues that meaning is just an effect of language, so by doing away with this “transcendental signifier” or “big foundational idea” Derrida and Lacan have undermined metaphysics and the Western philosophical tradition. There is NO truth: there can be NO certainty. Meaning is just a discourse we pass the time with. “In the beginning was the word / logos - and the word was with God and the word WAS God.” So if you have God, then you have a transcendental signifier which makes sense of stuff.
That was Nietzsche’s heartbreak: that for him God was gone - and he knew what that meant.
Enough. I haven’t even touched on why Eagleton consigns Hume, for example, to The Imaginary, Kant to The Symbolic and Kierkegaard to The Real, however my brain is now hurting and I will stop. Sorry, Sarah. Best I can do for now. I know nothing about psychiatry or ethics and therefore would welcome comments about this stuff from folk who do (simply phrased in layperson’s terms please!) Wikipedia’s piece on Lacan concludes with a huge amount of ferociously comic abuse against Lacan - my favourite coming from Dawkins who says: “a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about.”
I don’t know that I’d want to go out boozing with Dawkins, but he can sure fire off a good one-liner.
What is Eagleton on about? (part 2)
OK - having read the rest of the book, let’s try to see what Eagleton is saying.
Hume and the ethics of the Scottish / British Enlightenment are linked to Lacan’s Imaginary because of their “quickness of sympathy” and warm fellow feeling for their fellow man. (Note gender!) But Eagleton critiques this as the egoism of a “Gentleman’s Club” - ultimately “wary of strangers and nervous of the non-identical.” He doesn’t mention it, but I guess at the back of his mind is the fact that the leisure time that allowed the Enlightenment was founded on the slave economies of the Virginia plantations. (But I STILL like Hume! I’m sure he could easily be coaxed out of the Gentleman’s Club!)
Kant and Spinoza are more obviously assigned to the Symbolic Order; Kant’s “thin-blooded” Moral Law moves from the “promptings of the heart” of the Imaginary to cold, “stiff-necked” rational calculation.The human and the body are removed from the equation and ethics and political action are separated into different channels.
Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche - and later Levinas, Derrida and Badiou are the philosophers of the Real. The Real is encountered in situations of apocalyptic extremity: on the gallows or in the Twin Towers or on the Damascus Road. “Death, tragedy, sacrifice, self-dispossession, loss, desire, negativity, impasse and the extreme strangeness of the self.” It is the moment when a person realises they must follow their Desire to the end, no matter the cost. Eagleton uses literary examples: Lacan’s own favourite, Antigone, her face set on burying her brother’s corpse though this has been forbidden on pain of her own death; Shylock demanding his bond / justice / flesh; Eddie Carbone dying, unable to “settle for half” in “A View from the Bridge”; Heathcliff and Cathy, destroyed by their desire for one another; Wordsworth projected by epiphany beyond Nature and into Infinity. Though intriguing I found the extremity of language used here SO emotive that I felt uncomfortable about this being the experience of MOST people’s lives. For example:
“Tragedy chastens the hubris of those whose reach exceeds their grasp, undoing their insane presumption, stripping them of their selfhood and ushering them into the ghastly presence of the Real. Yet if these figures can gaze at the monstrosity of their condition without being struck blind or turned to stone, seeing in the mirror of themselves not an imaginary alter ego but a loathsome outcast, it is possible that the immeasurable power which allows them to acknowledge this thing of darkness as their own is also one which can bear them beyond the bleached bones and crushed skulls of those who have gone before them, to the remote domain of what Lacan calls ‘a limitless love’.”
It were as if the world were made up of Shakespearean tragic heroes … so it came as a relief when in the final chapter on “The Banality of Goodness” Eagleton decides that Parisian avant-garde intellectual elitism is not for him and plumps instead for a personal preference of Aristotelian ethics as much closer to the “real-life” socio-political-cultural existence of the common person (though realising the difficulties that such a “common-sense” approach might throw up in a tendency towards uncritical conservatism). A victory for the real over The Real? Eagleton starts to use “Love” a lot here, tracing this ethical strand from Aristotle through Aquinas and on the “less celestial route” through Hegel to Marx. (This in opposition to the “thin,” Pharisaic duty-ethic tradition of Kant through to the post-structuralists, which Eagleton believes has separated ethics from political and social action.)
He finishes his conclusion with an appeal to fellow socialists to renew with vigour the defence of the poor and dispossessed against the ravages of resurgent Capitalism, but persons of faith will be amazed at Eagleton’s bigging-up of Christianity throughout the text, and especially in the concluding sections where he rants like a radical evangelical! Translating the gospel into Laconese he preaches:
“To say that Jesus is the ‘Son’ is to claim that what he is for the Other, known as God, is also what he is for himself. The source of love and the source of his personal existence, are identical. He is at one with the law of the Father, a transparent signifier (or ‘Word’) of it, born wholly of love rather than flesh; and it is because of this faithful identification with the roots of his identity, this refusal to give up on the ground of his being, that he is tortured and murdered… To claim that Jesus is the ‘Son’ of the Father, then, is to say that he is the authentic image of the Father, revealing him as a friend, lover and fellow-victim rather than as a patriarchal Nobodaddy, Satanic judge or bloodthirsty despot ��� it is not that God has a benign presence but also an obscenely sadistic underside, but rather that he is a terrorist of love.”
…and so on and so on! I can see Terry joining the church in a few years time. God help them, because he won’t let them get away with the usual patriarchal body-despising shit that frequently gets peddled!
Thus in his conclusion he argues that, for him, the most practical ethical traditions can be found in Judaeo-Christianity and in socialism. As he says, “In a just social order, each comes to self-fulfillment through and in terms of the self-fulfillment of the others.” As Bruce says, “Nobody wins unless everybody wins.”
July 3, 2020
عرض للنظريات الاخلاقيه من هتشسون وهيوم الى باديو وليفيناس
وكذلك الدور الذي لعبته -ولا تزال- الديانيه اليهيودية المسيحية في الفكر الغربي في مجال نظرية الاخلاق
وقام المؤلف بتقسيمها الى ثلاثة انواع
حسب نظريه لاكان في التحليل النفسي
(الخيالي ، الرمزي ، الواقعي)
الكتاب ممتع حقيقه ويستحق القراءة للمهتم بفلسفة الاخلاق
وكذلك الدور الذي لعبته -ولا تزال- الديانيه اليهيودية المسيحية في الفكر الغربي في مجال نظرية الاخلاق
وقام المؤلف بتقسيمها الى ثلاثة انواع
حسب نظريه لاكان في التحليل النفسي
(الخيالي ، الرمزي ، الواقعي)
الكتاب ممتع حقيقه ويستحق القراءة للمهتم بفلسفة الاخلاق
March 11, 2022
En estos tiempos donde ciertas tendencias cientifistas superfluas confunden moralidad animal y moralidad instintiva con las múltiples posibilidades de la etica humana, y en esta época donde tantos autores creen que solo es válida la moral aristotélica, kantiana y benthamiana, tirando a la basura el vasto dominio inefable de la ética humana, este libro es una joya por su profundidad y síntesis de tan variadas propuestas filosóficas.
Aunque a veces el autor pueda haberse quedado en ciertos aspectos superficiales o polémicos (en lo tocante a las éticas de lo Real), este libro merece una lectura atenta
Aunque a veces el autor pueda haberse quedado en ciertos aspectos superficiales o polémicos (en lo tocante a las éticas de lo Real), este libro merece una lectura atenta
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September 15, 2025كتاب مشكلات مع الغرباء لتيري إيجلتون رحلة فلسفية في معنى الأخلاق حين نواجه “الآخر”، بين عاطفة التعاطف وبرودة الواجب وغموض الرغبة والموت، نص يذكّرنا أن الغريب ليس فقط من يقف أمامنا، بل مرآة تكشف ما نخبئه نحن في دواخلنا، وقراءة تترك الأسئلة أكثر من الإجابات.
" إن الإنسان السعيد هو ذلك الذي استطاع إنجاح المشروع المحفوف بالمخاطر المتعلق بكيف يصبح إنسانًا "
" إن الإنسان السعيد هو ذلك الذي استطاع إنجاح المشروع المحفوف بالمخاطر المتعلق بكيف يصبح إنسانًا "
July 7, 2009
While I assigned most of this book for my ethics class this past semester, I found the part I didn't assign (especially the last chapter entitled 'banality of goodness', which could have also been called the 'ethics of fragility') the best part of the book. Also, I really appreciated how he covers figures like Burke and Hutcheson, as well as Spinoza, Kant, Shakespeare, Derrida and Badiou...
My main critique, which goes for all of Eagleton's work, is that he is fairly short winded and not a close reader on any particular author, just getting to the (usually critical) point he wants to make (which is more often than not an interesting point, but not always accurate)...
My main critique, which goes for all of Eagleton's work, is that he is fairly short winded and not a close reader on any particular author, just getting to the (usually critical) point he wants to make (which is more often than not an interesting point, but not always accurate)...
April 19, 2009
Eagleton doesn't disappoint. This is the most fun I've had reading a book on moral philosophy I've read since John Caputo's Against Ethics.
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