Introduction

Abstract

This book has one simple aim: to explore the possibility of living a right life in a wrong world and to assess what light modernist philosophy and literature can shed upon this endeavour. The book does not attempt to provide a unifying ‘theory’ of modernist ethics; nor does it seek to furnish an exhaustive account of modernism’s various ‘ethical turns’ – one might pity anyone who set out to accomplish either of these tasks. Instead the work is best understood as an album of sketches – to use a description from the writings of the later Wittgenstein – which seek to map out a number of hitherto unexamined interactions between modernism, ethics and politics. In each chapter, the attempt is made to demonstrate how a particular philosophical or literary text can, once it has been blasted out of its traditional genre, bring us to a new understanding of an issue (or constellation of issues) which contemporary radical thought must revisit: utopia, repetition, tragedy, critique, absence, negativity, political love.