Twenty-first century Eagleton at times resembles the Dionysian persona he presented in Holy Terror, published in 2005, as the very embodiment of the Lacanian Real—excessive, sulphurous, unstaunchable. Revelling in the further release from polite dialogue that his ‘theological turn’ appears to bestow, the author of Reason, Faith, and Revolution plays Hamlet (a favourite Realist) to the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of thin-blooded rationalism (‘Ditchkins’ for short). Momentarily indulging their seeming fellow-feeling, Eagleton ruthlessly exposes the nastiness beneath, resolving on final damage. He first mauled The God Delusion in a review entitled ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mis-punching’, but you would rather avoid Eagleton’s haymakers than Dawkins’s fisticuffs. The recent writings overlap heavily, such that Trouble with Strangers might be thought only to aggregate themes from the two books mentioned, plus those from two better ones—the bristlingly insightful Sweet Violence (2003), and the satisfyingly armchaired Meaning of Life (2007). But more than the compilation effect, it is the internal agonistics of Trouble with Strangers that makes it both thoroughly absorbing and uneven in every sense. Organized by core Lacanian notions, which it clinically deconstructs, and alternating considered assessment with blasts of non-negotiable ‘Christian’ declaration, Strangers yields an amalgam that seems destined—perhaps designed—not to set. For all his formidable assuredness, Eagleton’s reflections on the loops that bind metaphysics, ethics, religion and politics are still very much in process.

In process, but not exactly in progress. The ‘ethics of socialism’, specified in the preface as one of the two main sources and goals of the enquiry, occupies only a handful of cursory sentences, some of them questionable—is socialism really about ‘solidarity with failure’, for example? The intention may be there, but it cannot be developed until Eagleton’s particular version of post-secularism—he does not use this term—has been talked out. According to this, a certain kind of secularist Marxism has gone, leaving us with two completely gutless alternatives: liberal rationalism and culturalist postmodernism. This spells good news for global capitalism, which rapaciously both promotes and devours such untroubling sensibilities. Progressive politics must therefore be re-imagined in the shape of a truly redemptive radicalism, its prerequisite energy stemming chiefly from the Christian preparedness for loving collective and subjective transfiguration. In order to access this last hope and opportunity, we need to see, unflinchingly, that there is nothing essentially progressive or self-sufficient about human society; that just as recto stands to verso, so virtuous sociability surfaces a void of disappointment, lack and despair. Insofar as socialist thought remains in thrall to cerebral universalism, it cannot entertain so dire a predicament from which to re-build. So Eagleton explores instead the promise of distributing moral philosophies into the psychoanalytic categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.

Just heuristically, this is an illuminating strategy, Eagleton helpfully uncoiling that esoteric trinity in ‘characteristically lucid’ style (a phrase that, bafflingly, he twice uses to describe Lacan himself). The machinery swings into gear with an account of eighteenth-century doctrines of sentiment and sympathy, interspersed—as the other parts are—with snapshot variations effortlessly drawn from the literary figures of the time; here, the likes of Sterne, Steele, Goldsmith, Richardson. The Imaginary refers to the moment of the ‘mirror phase’, in which, supposedly, the infant comes hazily to consciousness, sensing that its own image, whilst remaining unthought, in-here, and still-as-one with the Mother, is also magically reproduced and recognized ‘out there’. Signifier and signified, self and world, are not yet traumatically prised apart according to the abstract demands of the Symbolic, through which subjectivities come into definition vis-à-vis the impersonal Other—society, language, thought systems, law.

In this light, Eagleton locates Francis Hutcheson’s good-hearted ethics, which required little more than a generous appreciation of our spontaneous divination of good and bad; our possession of an inner, upper moral ‘sense’, different in quality, but hardly in kind, from seeing and smelling. Also to be found in this meditative ‘comfort zone’ is David Hume’s rigorous refusal to ground morality (as well as knowledge) in anything but sense impressions and the more or less vivacious ideas that derive from them. Our learned association of self-interest and companionate concern, for Eagleton’s Hume, should be sufficient to glue the benevolent society together. Adam Smith’s concepts took him beyond his predecessors’ insistence on the immediacy of the moral sentiments. Smithian sympathy involves partial rather than complete identification with the passions of others, across a wider range of subjective states, and his ‘imagination’ incorporates the circumstances of judgement as well as in-your-shoes empathy. Nevertheless, Smith too holds that ethics is basically a matter of ‘emotional transaction’. (Edmund Burke is then said to extend this problematic to politics, hegemony being achieved through ‘imitation and mutual compliance, not precepts’.)

Eagleton accepts that these thinkers were the first to develop a stringently social account of morality, and he knows too that the cloying sentimentalists—especially amongst the Scribblers—must be set apart from the larger Imaginary minds. But even the best of them are only ‘bloodlessly admirable’, because in the last instance they are ‘drearily bourgeois’. Their natural habitat is the coffee house and gentleman’s club, a mutual admiration society in which what is most keenly felt is the need to feel. Such ‘parochial emotionalism’ cannot handle the messiness and opacity of the human body, nor its underlying telos as ‘self-transcending project’. In any case, ‘morality is a matter of what you do, not what you feel’, such that even considerate sympathy ‘has no value in itself’. Contrary to the approbationary warmings of the Georgian philosophical breast, genuine, political love—agape, revolutionary solidarity—is ‘unpleasant, exacting, thankless and ultimately lethal’. It is the distasteful state and plight of the stranger and outcast that constitute the scene of truly moral action, not familiar situations and persons who happen to be friends.

Under the ‘sovereignty’ of the Symbolic, the ‘insistence’ of the Imaginary is held at bay, and ‘the closed sphere of the ego’ opens out into the field of regulated moral inter-subjectivity. It is the job of symbolic thought to endow normative interaction with objectivity and legitimacy, setting its roles and reactions within some universal conditions of possibility and difference. Just about any ‘modern’ theory could be made to fit this bill, and liberalism and utilitarianism are named as major ethical variants; but Eagleton settles on Spinoza and Kant as the quintessential expressions. Then, with striking acuity, Measure for Measure is presented as an escalating set of dilemmas in which the valences of the Symbolic are fatally disturbed by the relentless undertow of the Real. This is because—to generalize across the work—the emancipation and distance that are indeed enabled by the Symbolic order, so that we leave behind Imaginary forms of the ‘addiction to desire’, are themselves conditional upon the repression of sentience, fantasy and dependency. The Symbolic thus entails a profound estrangement of self, a ‘gash in our being’, a mortal contradiction between settled projects and untrammelled desire-for-itself.

Spinoza, Eagleton explains, is ‘the great exponent of rationalist disenchantment’. He positioned men and women unambiguously as part of nature, subject to forces they cannot understand, their sense of freedom illusory, their purposes and consolations finding no confirmation in the grandly ‘externalist’ scheme of things. Whether by way of anthropomorphic projection or by appeal to the will of God, the desperate human concern with values, whilst true to the necessity of our being (self-preserving, self-confirming), misrecognizes the character of being as a whole. To be sure, the point of view of the whole is strictly unattainable, but for Spinoza it can at least be approached through consistent ‘geometric’ reasoning, detaching constantly from the myopia of experience, arriving thereby at a lofty proposition: that the totality of nature’s necessity and the mind of God are one. In this understanding, we become virtuous by rising above the claims of emotional and physical egoism, our tainted moralism overcome by the love of intellect and the nurturing, in a commonwealth of equals, of generous neo-Stoical appreciation.