{"id":13227,"date":"2015-05-31T16:50:22","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T20:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=13227"},"modified":"2015-07-12T13:26:09","modified_gmt":"2015-07-12T17:26:09","slug":"eagleton-trouble-with-strangers-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2015\/05\/31\/eagleton-trouble-with-strangers-1\/","title":{"rendered":"eagleton trouble with strangers 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eagleton, T. Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics<\/em>. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.<\/p>\n

Whereas the angelic,<\/strong> as Milan Kundera argues, are notable for their peculiarly ‘shitless’ discourse, all vapid rhetoric and edifying sentiment, the demonic<\/strong> see nothing around them but shit. Parsons and politicians are angelic, whereas tabloid journalists are demonic. The deominic are not evil, since to be evil entails believing in value if only to negate it. 133<\/p>\n

Angelo’s interview with Isabella is by no means his first encounter with the shattering\u00a0 force of desire, whatever he may suppose himself. On the contrary, the snake was curled up in the garden from the outset. Its deadly venom has infected him already in the form of his pathological will to dominion, within which Freud would doubtless detect the shadow of the death drive<\/span><\/strong>. Angelo represents a pure cult of the superego<\/span><\/strong>, with its lethally aggressive rage for order<\/strong>,<\/p>\n

its neurotic fear that without fine definitions and unimpeachable grounds the world will collapse into chaos<\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Because they are secretly fuelled by the death drive<\/span><\/strong>, the very powers which set out to subdue chaos are secretly in love with it<\/strong>. The urge to order is itself latently anarchic. It is prepared to subjugate the world into sheer nothingness.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The superego as Freud taught, borrows its terrifyingly vindictive force from the unruly id. 136<\/p>\n

This is why Angelo can keel over with scarcely a struggle from ascetic authoritarian to libidinal transgressor<\/strong>. The same goes for the law, or indeed for any system of symbolic exchange.<\/p>\n

Because such symbolic economies are precisely regulated, they tend to stability; but because the rules which regulate them can permutate any one item with another, indifferent to their specific nature<\/span><\/strong>, they can breed an anarchic condition in which every element blurs indiscriminately into every other<\/span><\/strong>,<\/span><\/span> and the system appears to be engaging in transactions purely for their own sake. There is something in the very structure of stability which threatens to subvert it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is most obviously so in the case of the symbolic order<\/span><\/strong>, which in order to work effectively must allow flexible permutations between its various roles,<\/strong> and thus cannot avoid generating the permanent possibility of incest<\/span><\/strong>. Without this monstrous horror at its heart, the system would not be able to operate.\u00a0 137<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eagleton, T. Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Whereas the angelic, as Milan Kundera argues, are notable for their peculiarly ‘shitless’ discourse, all vapid rhetoric and edifying sentiment, the demonic see nothing around them but shit. Parsons and politicians are angelic, whereas tabloid journalists are demonic. The deominic are not evil, … Continue reading “eagleton trouble with strangers 1”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,79,118,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-ethics_real","category-symbolic","category-the-real"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13227"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13298,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13227\/revisions\/13298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}