Table Of ContentTROUBLE WITH
STRANGERS
Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics Ter r y Eagleton
© 2009 Terry Eagleton. ISBN: 978-1-405-18572-1
In memory of Charles Swann
Endless kindness, endless courage
T R O U B L E W I T H
STRANGERS
A Study of Ethics
(cid:2)(cid:3)
TERRY EAGLETON
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition fi rst published 2009
© 2009 Terry Eagleton
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eagleton, Terry, 1943–
Trouble with strangers : a study of ethics / Terry Eagleton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-8572-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4051-8573-8 (hardcover : alk.
paper) 1. Ethics. I. Title.
BJ1012.E23 2008
170—dc22
2008011376
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Contents
Preface vi
PART I THE INSISTENCE OF THE IMAGINARY 1
Introduction: The Mirror Stage 1
1 Sentiment and Sensibility 12
2 Francis Hutcheson and David Hume 29
3 Edmund Burke and Adam Smith 62
PART II THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SYMBOLIC 83
Introduction: The Symbolic Order 83
4 Spinoza and the Death of Desire 91
5 Kant and the Moral Law 101
6 Law and Desire in Measure for Measure 130
PART III THE REIGN OF THE REAL 139
Introduction: Pure Desire 139
7 Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche 154
8 Fictions of the Real 180
9 Levinas, Derrida and Badiou 223
10 The Banality of Goodness 273
Conclusion 317
Index 327
Preface
The argument of this book is fairly straightforward. It consists in the claim
that most ethical theories can be assigned to one of Jacques Lacan’s three
psychoanalytical categories of the imaginary, the symbolic and the Real, or
to some combination of the three. Using these registers rather broadly, I
try to weight the strengths of each of these types of ethical thought along-
side their defects, and to contrast them with what seems to me the richer
ethics of socialism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
Some of my friends and readers will be dismayed to see me wasting my
time yet again on theology. It is true that religion has proved one of the
most noxious institutions of human history; but that squalid tale of oppres-
sion and superstition stands under the judgement of the version of
Christianity advanced in this book. It is a paradox of our times that while
it has bred various lethal brands of religious fundamentalism, it has also
given birth to a current of radical theology – one which, ironically, repre-
sents one of the few surviving enclaves of materialist thought in these
politically patchy times, and which is often more revolutionary in its politi-
cal implications than much secular leftist thought. It may well be a dismal
sign of the times that it is to the science of God, of all things, that we must
look for such subversive insights. But there is no reason to look a gift horse
in the mouth.
‘If a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on
Ethics,’ comments Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘this book would, with an explo-
sion, destroy all the other books in the world.’1 I am pained to report that
when I glanced up from the last sentence of my text, the volumes on my
bookshelves were still intact. I trust, even so, that this work makes an
original contribution to ethical theory, if only because few such studies
investigate both Hume and Levinas, Burke and Badiou. My hope is that
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Lecture on Ethics’, Philosophical Review, 74 (January 1965), p. 7.
Preface vii
the book will be disliked by Anglo-Saxon philosophers for taking Parisians
seriously, and scorned by Parisians for fi nding something of value in
English thought. As ever, my philosophical minders, Peter Dews, Simon
Critchley, Peter Sedgwick and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, have rescued a rank amateur
from some of his customary errors and howlers, and I appreciate their
kindness in taking the trouble to do so.
In case anyone assumes that only those of impeachable moral stature
have the authority to write on ethics, I can only recall, mutatis mutandis,
Marx’s comments on his own labours, when he remarked that nobody had
written so much on money and had so little.
TE
Dublin, 2007
PART I
THE INSISTENCE OF
THE IMAGINARY
Introduction: The Mirror Stage
No piece of leftist cultural criticism of the 1970s and 1980s seemed com-
plete without an account of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage –
that moment in the development of a small child when, contemplating its
own refl ection in a mirror, it delights in the magical correspondence
between its own movements and those of the image before its eyes.1 Magical
correspondences and miraculous affi nities are the stuff of myth; and if
Lacan’s essay ‘The Mirror Stage’ investigated such a myth, it rapidly became
one in its own right. The boundaries between reality and make-believe, so
Lacan argues, are blurred in this early phase: the ego, our window on the
so-called real world, is really a kind of fi ction, while the child before the
mirror is said to treat its image as real even though it knows it to be illusory.
A similar ambiguity applies to the word ‘imaginary’, which for Lacan
means ‘pertaining to an image’ rather than fantastic or unreal, yet which
(like the theory of ideology which Louis Althusser was famously to derive
from it) involves delusion and deception even so.
In a mirroring kind of way, the fi ctional or real-life status of Lacan’s
argument itself came into question. Was the mirror stage meant to be
literal or metaphorical? Was this most mandarin of French intellectuals
really talking about something as embarrassingly empirical as toddlers?
How on earth could one actually know what a child might experience in
this situation? What – to raise the kind of commonsensical objection of
which only the English are capable – about societies which did not enjoy
the privilege of possessing mirrors? Would ponds or rivers do just as well?
1 See ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience’, in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London, 1977).
Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics Ter r y Eagleton
© 2009 Terry Eagleton. ISBN: 978-1-405-18572-1
2 PART I THE INSISTENCE OF THE IMAGINARY
Or is the true mirror of the child its parent or carer, who by investing
different parts of its body (face, orifi ces, etc.) with variable degrees of
intensity, builds up for the infant a somatic self-portrait? Are our bodies,
like our desire, constituted by the Other? How odd, in any case, that
such a momentous piece of theorising should be based on that most
fi ctive and primitive of all human activities, play and play-acting! Play-
acting, to be sure, as well as play – for the child jubilantly imitating its own
motions in the mirror is a mimic, a miniscule magician who can alter
reality simply by raising his hand, an actor performing before an apprecia-
tive audience of one, a pocket-sized artist who revels in his ability to shape
and transform his product at the fl ick of a fi nger or the turn of a head. To
perform in front of a mirror involves a kind of infi nite regress or mise en
abyme, as the Gestalt in the glass beams approvingly at the child’s endeav-
ours, thus provoking his smile, which in turn cues another supportive
sign of delight from the refl ection, and so on. We shall see something
of the same dialectic later, in – of all things – eighteenth-century moral
philosophy.
It was not, to be sure, as though the cultural theorists of the time were
particularly enthralled by the topic of child development. The importance
of Lacan’s lecture lay in its illustration of the imaginary – that strange realm
of the human psyche in which subjects and objects (if we can even speak
of such a division at this early point) appear constantly to exchange places
and live each other’s lives. In this play of projecting and refl ecting, things
seem to pass in and out of each other without mediation, feel one another
from the inside with all the sensuous immediacy with which they experi-
ence their own interiors. It is as though you can put yourself in the
very place from which you are being observed, or see yourself at the same
time from the inside and outside. Psychology is only just beginning to
understand the neural mechanisms by which a very small infant can play-
fully imitate an adult’s facial expression, in a complex set of refl ections
from outside to inside to outside again.2 As Maurice Merleau-Ponty
writes:
A baby of fi fteen months opens its mouth if I playfully take one of its
fi ngers between my teeth and pretend to bite it. And yet it has scarcely
looked at its face in a glass, and its teeth are not in any case like mine.
The fact is that its own mouth and teeth, as it feels them from the inside,
are immediately, for it, an apparatus to bite with, and my jaw, as the
2 See Sandra Blakeslee, ‘Cells That Read Minds’, New York Times, 10 January 2006.
Introduction: The Mirror Stage 3
baby sees it from the outside, is immediately, for it, capable of the same
intentions.3
The imaginary is a realm in which things give us back ourselves, if only we
had a determinate enough self to appreciate it. It is a prelapsarian domain,
in which knowledge is as swift and sure as a sensation.
In this peculiar confi guration of psychic space, where there is as yet no
clearly organised ego or centre of consciousness, there can be no genuine
otherness. My interiority is somehow ‘out there’, as one phenomenon
among others, while whatever is out there is on intimate terms with me,
part of my inner stuff. Yet I also feel my inner life as alien and estranged,
as though a piece of my selfhood has been captivated by an image and
reifi ed by it. This image seems able to exert a power over me which both
does and does not spring from myself. In the domain of the imaginary,
then, it is not apparent whether I am myself or another, inside or outside
myself, behind or before the mirror. One can imagine this as capturing
something of the experience of the small infant nursed by its mother, who
uses her breast as though it were its own organ; but it is also, as far as
objects which are ambiguously inside and outside us goes, a matter of those
‘part-objects’, bits of the body extruded into the external world (faeces,
breast milk and the like), which Melanie Klein portrays as transitional
between self and other, subject and object, and which Lacan himself
describes as the very stuff, lining or imaginary fi lling of the human
subject.
This is why the imaginary involves what is technically known as transi-
tivism, in which, as in some primitive bond of sympathy, a small child may
cry when another child takes a tumble, or claim to have been struck himself
when he strikes a companion. The eighteenth-century philosopher Adam
Smith is much taken with this phenomenon, writing as he does in his
Theory of Moral Sentiments of how, ‘when we see a stroke aimed and just
ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink
and draw back our own leg or our own arm’. Transitivism is just a pecu-
liarly graphic instance of sympathetic mimicry as such, which remains to
some extent a bodily affair even for those who have managed to travel
beyond the seductions of the mirror stage. This is why smiling is conta-
gious, or why, as Smith observes, ‘the mob, when they are gazing at a
dancer on a slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own
bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do
3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London, 1966), p. 352.
