Trouble with Strangers

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 viPart I the Insistence of the Imaginary 1Introduction: The Mirror Stage 11 Sentiment and Sensibility 122 Francis Hutcheson and David Hume 293 Edmund Burke and Adam Smith 62Part II the Sovereignty of the Symbolic 83Introduction: The Symbolic Order 834 Spinoza and the Death of Desire 915 Kant and the Moral Law 1016 Law and Desire in Measure for Measure 130Part III the Reign of the Real 139Introduction: Pure Desire 1397 Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche 1548 Fictions of the Real 1809 Levinas, Derrida and Badiou 22310 The Banality of Goodness 273Conclusion 317Index 327

"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)