The Metaphysics of Love

Sandford argues that an over-emphasis on ethics in examinations of Levinas' thought has covered over his philosophical project - a metaphysics which affirms the necessity to think of an unqualifed transcendence as a first principle. She also presents a feminist critique.

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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.