Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction

   • Ben Ware

   Pages 1-6

3. Right in Front of Our Eyes: Aspect-Perception, Ethics and the Utopian Imagination in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

   • Ben Ware

   Pages 7-35

4. Johannes de Silentio and the Art of Subtraction: From Voice to Love in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

   • Ben Ware

   Pages 37-66

5. Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism: On Beckett’s Endgame

   • Ben Ware

   Pages 67-90

6. Living Wrong Life Rightly: Kant avec Marx

   • Ben Ware

   Pages 91-121

7. Absence, Perversion and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis Revisited: A Reading of Henry James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle’

   • Ben Ware

   Pages 123-160

8. Back Matter

   Pages 161-186

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In this groundbreaking new study, Ben Ware carries out a bold reassessment of the relationship between modernism and ethics, arguing that modernist literature and philosophy offer more than simply a snapshot of the moral conflicts of the past: they provide a crucial point of reference for today’s emancipatory struggles. Modernism in this assessment is characterized not only by a concern with language and aesthetic creativity, but also by a preoccupation with the question of how to live. Investigating ethical ideas in Wittgenstein, Beckett, Kierkegaard, Kant, Cavell, Marx, Henry James and Lacan, Ware demonstrates how these thinkers can bring us to a new understanding of a constellation of issues which contemporary radical thought must re-visit: utopia, repetition, perfectionism, subtraction, negativity, critique, absence, duty, revolution and political love. The result is a timely and provocative intervention, which re-draws the boundaries for future debates on the ethics and politics of modernism.

• Kierkegaard
• Wittgenstein
• Marxism
• contemporary critical theory
• Beckett
• Endgame
• Philosophical Investigations

“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 theUniversity of Chichester)

• University of London , LONDON, United Kingdom

  Ben Ware

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.

Policies and ethics