Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Right in Front of Our Eyes: Aspect-Perception, Ethics and the Utopian Imagination in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.- Chapter 3. Johannes de Silentio and the Art of Subtraction: From Voice to Love in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.- Chapter 4. Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism: On Beckett’s Endgame.- Chapter 5. Living Wrong Life Rightly: Kant avec Marx.- Chapter 6. Absence, Perversion and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis Revisited: A Reading of Henry James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle’.- Bibliography.- Index. 

Promotional Information

"Ware's sketches of an endangered ethical landscape are urgent and timely reminders of the importance of ethical reasoning as much for politics as for personal conduct but above all for the difficult terrain that lies between them." (Howard Caygill, Kingston University London, UK) "Ethics is a much abused and over-used word at the moment. Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination restores to ethics its political dimension as a challenge to the damaged lives we live under capitalism. In a series of admirably elegant readings, ranging across literature and philosophy, from Kierkegaard to Marx, Henry James to Samuel Beckett, Ben Ware reveals the ethical moment of negativity: the possibility of thinking the collective dimension of life. Resisting the narcissism of our times, this book powerfully restates the necessity of critique as a means to repair our damaged language and so to start to repair our damaged world." (Benjamin Noys, Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester)

About the Author

Ben Ware is author of Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the 'Tractatus' and Modernism (2015). He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and at Kingston University, UK.