transgressing boundaries in infection. All are “contagion”; our essence (should that word still be legitimate at all) is just another illness. Nietzsche, to be sure, suggests that humanity is a mere rash on the earth. But he is not very pleased with the fact: der Mensch ist (darum) etwas, das über- wendet werden muß. Krell’s book, by contrast, not only shows that the human essence is merely a disease like any other, but in its good humored clarity refuses to even be troubled by this fact. That such an awful truth can be broached with such quiet good humor is, I think, a crucial sign of the times— a sign that we really are beyond modernity, that we have gone someplace where what bothered moderns (including Nietzsche) is quite all right with us. For the good humor, this essential emotional tone, which Krell’s book sustains on every single page, is not his alone. It is, like his insights themselves, wholly, wholesomely, contagious . John McCumber Northwestern University The Demands of Ethical Life: Levinas and Moral Theory Adriaan Peperzak. Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas . Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997. xviii + 248 pp.; and Before Ethics. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998. xvi + 125 pp. The papers in the two collections under review here span some thirty years, from 1969 to the present, though the majority were written and published during the mid-1980s and early 1990s. The rst collection, entitled Beyond, 1 comprises a series of studies treating key themes and texts in the philo- sophy of the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. Although twelve of the fteen essays have been previously published, and over half of these will be well known to anyone currently engaged in Levinas research or scholar- ship, there is still a wealth of fresh insight and analysis to be found here. The centerpiece of the volume is a close reading of chapter one of Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence, in which Peperzak sets out the main problematic and structure of the text. Other essays take up such diverse topics as Levinas’ Judaism, his relation to the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heideg- ger, as well as to Kant and Hegel, his conceptions of responsibility, society, technology, and nature, and the relation between religion and morality. The essays are notable for their uniform clarity of expression and deft presenta- tion of complex points of interpretation, but even more so for the pervasive generosity of spirit that marks Peperzak’s writing both as a commentator and as an original thinker. 264 REVIEW ARTICLES