“Vincent Barletta’s new book is fascinating and detailed. It moves beyond established theories of imperial reason to argue that Europe’s imperial adventure, deployed and theorized by means of Alexandrian myth and history, is in fact inseparable from a deep unease associated with the search for identity through the mediation of the Other. Perhaps this unease, which Emmanuel Levinas has presented as a transcendental condition of selfhood, shapes the nations of the Iberian Peninsula in particularly important ways and reveals their special fragility as human communities whose constitution cannot be separated from a relation with Islam. This book, elegant and profound, is a necessary contribution that works to uncover cultural strata that precede the imperial period described by Tzvetan Todorov while offering elements for a comparative study of empire that goes well beyond the current work of Anthony Pagden.”

José Luis Berlanga Villacañas, Universidad Complutense, Spain

“A work of sound scholarship and striking erudition, broad in scope and of remarkable depth and originality, Death in Babylon is a beautifully written book, clear yet complex, subtle yet convincing.”

E. Michael Gerli, University of Virginia