Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics

This book attempts to isolate the question of ethics in the work of Foucault and Lacan and explores its ramifications and implications for the present day. The author argues that in departing from the piety of moral theory, Foucault and Lacan embark on a strange uncharted voyage through the history of ethical thought, a voyage that takes them through Cynicism and Platonism; Antigone and Socrates; Aristotle, Kant, and Bentham; Nietzsche and Freud. The text attempts to demonstrate that the question of ethics was at once the most difficult and the most intimate question for these two authors, offering a complex point of intersection between them. As such, it argues that it belongs to that great tradition that is concerned with the passion or eros of philosophy and of its `will to truth'. "Truth and Eros" suggests a way of reading Foucault and Lacan as philosophers who re-eroticized the activity of thought in our time, opening new and different spaces for thought and action, offering new types of subjectivity. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of continental philosophy, psychoanalysis and cultural studies.