Can we truly claim that metaphysics is over? Through a close reading of Levinas's masterpiece Totality and Infinity and a careful elaboration of Levinas's concept of the "nocturnal event" that surpasses the light of understanding, Raoul Moati opens the possibility of a revival of metaphysics after the "end of metaphysics." Reviews "What Moati shows--and this is highly original and convincing--is that Levinas's masterpiece, Totality and Infinity, offers an ontology that is also fully an ethics. Moati makes us read Levinas differently: Thanks to him, we understand that Totality and Infinity, far from being simply a 'Jewish' rewriting of Heidegger's Being and Time, finds its proper place near Spinoza's Ethics. Levinas and the Night of Being is a remarkable feat of philosophical exegesis doubling as the consistent re-creation of a whole conceptual universe." --Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania "Raoul Moati's Levinas and the Night of Being represents a turning point in Levinasian exegesis. . . . Moati departs from the teleological illusion of reading Levinas's early works against the backdrop of the late material--as if the 'truth' of the former somehow lies hidden within the latter. Against this tendency, Moati rather simply takes up Totality and Infinity and reads it for itself. . . . Moati recognizes the irreducible originality of a project from which we may garner certain insights that are to some extent lost with Otherwise Than Being." --from Jocelyn Benoist's Foreword About the Author Raoul Moati is an Assistant Professor of Continental Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Derrida/Searle: Deconstruction and Ordinary Language. |