The Wisdom of Love (Texts and Contexts) - Tapa dura

"Alain Finkielkraut is a French thinker and social critic who, while taking a position in the political center, says unexpected things... He is a writer who can sear with a bulletlike condemnation... This Frenchman's ideas and exuberant writing contribute richly to the debate over what to do with a global-market dominated world approaching century's end. And the reader's bonus is a model of love in the next century, a complex and marvelous one."--Washington Times. "There are many pleasant surprises among Finkielkraut's short and unusual readings ... The adventure is well worth the effort."--The Boston Book Review.

"The Wisdom of Love" examines the seemingly contradictory claims of universalism and partisanship for the ethnic or racial Other. In discussions of topics ranging from the work of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s to the contending positions of Right and Left in the recent culture wars in Europe and the Americas, Finkielkraut cautions against both an unreflective universalism and an equally inflexible advocacy of the Other. He argues instead that genuine respect for the Other is inseparable from calls for universal justice and equality.Rather than being opposites, otherness and universalism are, for Finkielkraut, inextricably bound to one another. Kevin O'Neill is an associate professor of French at the University of Colorado at Denver. He is cotranslator, with David Suchoff, of Alain Finkielkraut's "The Imaginary Jew", also available in a Bison Books edition. David Suchoff is an associate professor of English at Colby College. He is the author of "Critical Theory and the Novel: Mass Society and Cultural Criticism in Dickens, Melville and Kafka".