As much as they purport to be polar opposites, right and wrong have long been confused. The divide between the two, and our seemingly instinctual need to define and emphasize that divide, belie a much closer link. In his latest book, SUNY Buffalo professor William Egginton works to bring the ends of the ethical spectrum closer together. That is not to say he argues against distinction between the two. Rather, he highlights the mutually definitive nature of right and wrong and explores an ethics that is ineluctably self-reflexive.

Perversity and Ethics begins with a well-chosen anecdote--the story of Eve and her apple. Eve lacks what Egginton terms the "ethical fault-line," or, "a rift at the core of identity that drafts the blueprint for the moral self and orients the self's desire." In other words, Eve is a pre-moral being who cannot fathom the difference between right and wrong without some sense of what each constitutes. She is in a vacuum, a sphere where no ethical paradigm is in place; it is that construction of rights and wrongs that all of us humans outside of Eden take for an internal compass. And to have any sense of North, we must first have some sense of South.

Drawing richly on psychoanalysis and Lacanian philosophy, Egginton explores the parallel structures of the perverse and the moral, thereby assessing the implications of what amounts to a philosophical version of the chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Two ambitious applications follow the author's initial analyses, as he relates his "fault-line" idea first to theology and then to gender theory. While enriching, the abundant allusions to various philosophical authorities that appear in both are also likely to confuse. This over-eagerness, however, does not significantly detract from the work's intellectual merits. In total, Perversity and Ethics is a dense, thoughtful, and provocative look at the roots of right and wrong in today's moralizing world.

Richard Solash is an English concentrator and a member of the class of 2007. He recommends The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne.