Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas - Hardcover

"'A long anticipated and extremely well executed book that will significantly change the way in which Levinas's work is reviewed' Simon Critchley, University of Essex; 'An astonishing achievement...this controversial book requires all of us to re-read Levinas' John Llewelyn, University of Edinburgh"

Emmanuel 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 covered over both the basis and the details of his philosophical project--a metaphysics which affirms the necessity to think of an unqualified transcendence as a first principle.

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 this philosophy for feminist theory.