An important essay by the well-known French biophysicist and philosopher of Algerian origin, this volume offers a meditation on the living that goes beyond biology to cross the sciences of nature, the sciences of man, the experience of Jewish thought, life and death, towards a new knowledge of the world that has to choose: ethics or biology?

The fact that the ‘law of desire’ can only find a limit in the ‘desire for law’ is not just a play on words: it is one of those necessarily equivocal expressions with which language must strive to illuminate the paradoxical structure of ‘moral discourse’.

Vladimir Jankélevitch (1903-1985) taught at the universities of Toulouse, Lille and the Sorbonne. His philosophical works include: H. Bergson, 1931, L'odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling, 1933, Traité des vertus, 1949, Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, 1957, La mort, 1966. A pianist and musicologist, he has written essays on Liszt, Fauré, Debussy and Ravel. Recent translations of La musica e l'ineffabile and La coscienza ebraica have been published in Italian.