The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas Book

Emmanucl Levinas is best known for having reintroduced the question of ethics into the Continental philosophical tradition. In The Metaphysics of Love, however, Stella Sandford argues that an over-emphasis on ethics in the reception of Levinas's thought has conccaled the basis and the details of his philosophical project. The Metaphysics of Love traces Levinas's philosophy through a detailed discussion of the neglected Levinasian themes of cros, sexual difference, the 'feminine' maternity, fecundity, paternity and fraternity, demonstrating the ultimate impossibility of his metaphysical enterprise. Arguing against this attempt to deploy phenomenology in the service of a metaphysics of transcendence, Sandford's book is at the same time a powerful feminist critique of both Levinas's gendered philosophical categories and the attempt to reclaim aspects of his philosophy for feminist theory.Read More