I hope it won’t be too much of a spoiler to tell you that Terry Eagleton’s new book on ethics ends with an exhortation – a Lacanian psycho-ethical maxim - to ‘Stick to your desire!’ He calls for faith on the political left, a keeping of the faith all the more necessary and urgent since changes in global capitalism have made capital even ‘more predatory’ and have ‘helped to dispirit and deplete the left’ (p326). The political left should stand up to it with ‘the implacable refusal of an Antigone’ and console itself – ‘if it finally fails’ – with ‘the bitter-sweet satisfaction of knowing that it was right all along’.

Things have got a little worse then, this Sophoclean tragedy has deepened towards climax, since Slavoj Žižek finished his The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology (Verso, 1999) ten years ago with a chapter called ‘Whither Oedipus’ and Lacan’s maxim ‘Do not compromise your desire!’ rounded out an exhortation to dare to ‘reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in our era of global capitalism’ (p4). The left is to share Antigone’s fate and escape being buried alive only through suicide? Imagined as the battered and blinded plaything of an implacable fate (global capital), the left can hope for victory only in the jaws of defeat. ‘Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you’ as another radical continental philosopher, Alain Badiou, in his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Verso, 2002), would gloss his compatriot psychoanalyst Lacan’s maxim ‘do not give up on your desire’ (p47). Badiou’s conclusion? ‘Keep going!’

Lacan is important for these thinkers as his work expresses key issues for anyone wanting to ‘keep going’ with the left’s project. His conception of the Other as radical alterity confronting the self in the Symbolic order is a development of Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s thought which took the spirit and the historical specificity out of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic and gave us instead Self and Other ‘trapped in their conflict, and their mutual incomprehension for all time’ (James Heartfield, The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, 2006, p66). This eternal and irresolvable standoff with the signified always already out of reach expressed the ideological stasis of the Cold War of course, but also formed a reaction against the human subject at the heart of the Enlightenment project: the project believed by Adorno, et. al., to be so discredited by the Holocaust. With the defeat of the working class, the Other looms large indeed at the present and the subject is notably absent. People still think and act of course – we have individual subjectivity and our personal histories in that limited and internal sense – but the conception of ourselves as being agents of change - historical subjectivity - is a dead letter. In this context, 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.

Eagleton uses Lacan’s three psychoanalytic orders to structure the book and also to suggest through this ordering (although he stresses the provisionality and limited character of the suggestion) something of a historical progression. The Imaginary in which the child cannot yet recognise itself, or differentiate itself from others, is a prelapsarian, early-capitalist, world of Hume and Smith where we share without greed because I am as much you as me. A world of moral sentiment, fellow feeling and at least the fading memory of a shared community of needs. A world of possibility. We are not yet constituted as commodities, as objects of exchange, by the value relations that make up the Symbolic order of capitalism’s bourgeois highpoint, with its rules, laws, regulations and exchanges, its Kants and Hegels: a world of necessity. The final order, the Real, is not what lies underneath ideological appearance, no transcendent truth here, but represents impossibility as such, the unknowable that is humanity itself, our self-consciousness, and the ‘recalcitrance of the material world’: the world of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer but equally that of Levinas, Derrida and Badiou. It is here, in the Real, that Eagleton tries to find a way out of the impasse of the human subject’s desires, need and wants, its power frustrated by the alienating Other of Capital. Even if this means being desirous onto death.

He has written before (in After Theory, Penguin, 2004) of that universality that cannot be taken away from us and is constituted in our very shared corporeality: in the end we all have our bodies in common. And in Trouble with Strangers, he develops this idea in terms of how it is our bodies in their very common particularity, yes, but a shared particularity, should and could support an ethics of solidarity: the trick is not to try and treat everyone universally, everyone equally, but to attend ‘to the peculiar needs of anyone who happens to come along’. In this sense we can be Good Samaritans: we can attend respectfully to the strange needs of strangers. This opens up a space for him in which politics and ethics can operate: on the ground of identity rather than difference.

But is this enough? Can we really step off the shifting sands of difference onto the firm shores of identity to save ourselves? The young Marx had a more dialectical, a more realistic maybe, view of the problem as expressed in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The human subject exists simultaneously both as ‘commodity man’ and as a ‘rich human being’. As Mészáros explains in Marx’s Theory of Alienation (Merlin Press, 2005), Marx’s rejection of transcendentalism did ‘not carry with it the dismissal of ideality without which no moral system worthy of this name is conceivable’ (p163). Rather he argues that ideality must have a natural basis. Man as a human natural being, a ‘being for himself’, has needs and powers: ‘human fulfilment - the realization of human freedom - cannot be conceived as an abnegation or subjugation of these needs, but only as their properly human gratification’ (p167). That fulfilment is found in that productive labour we must carry out in order to survive. It may seem paradoxical that the necessity of work to avoid death represents the realisation of human freedom but the point is clear in phrases like ‘he made something of his life’.

In terms of the question of ethics as explored by Eagleton, neither the Imaginary nor the Symbolic alone offer an answer. The first says you may, the second says you must not: neither are adequate to the reality that human natural beings are not in themselves good or evil, just human. They are for themselves. Whereas Eagleton retreats to the body to avoid or reconcile the opposition, Marx describes how alienated man ‘becomes an abstract activity [Symbolic] and a stomach [Imaginary]’. The world turns upside down as we labour for the profit of others. We end up feeling ‘free’ in the exercise of our animal functions (in our private lives: drinking; eating; etc) and enslaved in respect of our human functions: at work we can feel like caged animals. Luckily, however, the world does keep on turning, change keeps on happening, and, in addition, we are not blind to our circumstances: we are aware after all that we are not fulfilled. That awareness creates a need within us, a need that demands satisfaction, and needs produce powers…

Thus it is possible still, even today when the left project is certainly more imaginary than real, to continue the process of trying to sidestep alienation through conscious and practical human activity. That means politics of course, but it can be more than the politics of ‘keep going’ or ‘stay true’. Many people, for example, see no contradiction between their moral scapegoating of bankers’ greed to explain the recession and their desire for a fairer world that meets the needs of all. But the business of writing someone off as a greedy animal leaves one stuck in an abstract ethical dualism, proud adherent to a ‘fairness’ that has the lofty moral superiority of a Kantian imperative maybe, but little room for the really human at all. In a time when any form of self-interest is castigated as morally wrong, because it appears to occur at the expense of others, we must hold this up as an abstract absurdity and point out that being human is a matter of fulfilling needs. There is a balance to be maintained between society and the individual, and between production and consumption. This current economic crisis is indeed related to an excess of consumption over production, but a human response is not to consume less: it is to produce more of what we need.

This demands a critical engagement with ideas that seek to limit productive activity and economic growth. A challenge to environmentalism and its false opposition of the natural to the human. A no to calls for restraint, for a new austerity and for frugal sustainable living. To the regulations and risk assessments that hold back development. To the ideas of green ethics, business ethics and corporate social responsibility. These are immediate practical and political issues for anyone interested in questions of human ethics and in this respect it is striking that Eagleton never once mentions environmentalism in Trouble with Strangers. What is this sudden shyness? One minute he is ready to face up to the terrible and impossible dragons of the Real in the guise of a tragic heroine, the next he has nothing to say about the kind of limits – natural ones – that are not impossible at all for human ingenuity to overcome. Even in normal clothes.

The good life for most is a matter of desiring the good, desiring goods. This is not to reduce morality to an Argos catalogue but just to say that material well-being and sufficiency is an important, if not the most important, part of what we would call Good or Right if we wanted to use capitals. Rather than holding on to our desire, indulging in speculative utopianism, we must demand satisfaction. Our first step forwards towards solidarity must be to start being self-ish again.

Read on, Angus Kennedy on morality:
Feeling Solidarity, review of Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?, by Zygmunt Bauman, CW, 30 January 2009