Levinas and the Night of Being A Guide to Totality and Infinity [Hardcover]

Can we say that metaphysics is over? That we live, as post-phenomenology claims, after end of metaphysics? Through a close reading of Levinas's masterpiece Totality and Infinity, Raoul Moati shows that things are much more complicated.

Totality and Infinity proposes not so much an alternative to Heideggers ontology as a deeper elucidation of the meaning of being beyond Heideggers fundamental ontology. The metaphor of the night becomes crucial in order to explore a nocturnal face of the events of being beyond their ontological reduction to the understanding of being. The deployment of being beyond its intentional or ontological reduction coincides with what Levinas calls nocturnal events. Insofar as the light of understanding hides them, it is only through deformalizing the traditional phenomenological approach to phenomena that Levinas leads us to their exploration and their systematic and mutual implications.

Following Levinas's account of these nocturnal events, Moati elaborates the possibility of what he calls a metaphysics of society that cannot be integrated into the deconstructive grasp of the metaphysics of presence. Ultimately, Levinas and the Night of Being opens the possibility of a revival of metaphysics after the end of metaphysics .

A close reading of Emmanuel Levinass masterpiece Totality and Infinity which leads to a rehabilitation of the Metaphysical question beyond its deconstructive critique during the XXth Century.Raoul Moatis Levinas and the Night of Being represents a turning point in Levinasian exegesis. . . . Moati departs from the teleological illusion of reading Levinass early works against the backdrop of the late materialas 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 tl&