Papers by Alphonso Lingis
A critical analysis of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
The range of responsibility. The metap... more A critical analysis of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
The range of responsibility. The metaphysics of alterity.
Intersubjectivity as Dependency. Intersubjectivity and objectivity.
Political responsibility. The malice in good deeds.
Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, eds, The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication , 2009
Contact and Communication Fish, insects, mammals, and birds have evolved distinctive colors, patt... more Contact and Communication Fish, insects, mammals, and birds have evolved distinctive colors, patterns, ostentatious decorative fins, tails, antlers, and plumage, and distinctive voices, as diverse as there are species, by which they recognize their own kind. For these animal species, recognition is also attraction; for them to recognize members of their own species is to be drawn to them. Even solitary predatory species do not prey on their own kind (through they may well establish and defend each his or her own territory from others of their kind with violent and even deadly attacks). With humans it may seem that physical shape and voice serve to recognize members of our own species. But the approach of other humans is a territorial encroachment. Instead of being drawn to them, humans have, from time immemorial and to our day, formed themselves into particular groups and regard outside groups with anxiety, distrust, and fear. Culture is the means for us to acquire a particular identity-we identify with one another and against other groups by cultivating distinctive garb, a particular language, distinctive group-affirming performances such as games, dances, and feasts, and a distinctive religion. What breaks out of this group identity and recognizes outsiders as of our kind is for Georges Bataille not rational thought, but laughter and sexual excitement. In a foreign place those with whom we have no language or commitment to ancestors, leaders, or gods in common, with whom we are not engaged in any common practical project, are remote and alien to us. Then something happens-the abrupt breakdown of practical operations, a planned and foreseen outcome that turns out to be unworkable-2 that releases an outbreak of laughter. The laughter rebounds among us and renders us transparent to one another: I see in the one who laughs with me someone of my kind. Distinctive to human mammals is the propensity to become sexually aroused outside of any breeding season and outside of reproductive intent or even possibility. While most humans engage in sexual bonds and commitments with members of their own community and culture, they find themselves erotically aroused by foreigners and outcasts. In witnessing the erotic exhibitionism of courtesans and temple prostitutes, Hollywood celebrities, and idle adolescents in any foreign land, we are aroused and recognize in those aroused about us people like ourselves. This sphere of communication in laughter-and in tears-and in erotic excitement precedes and makes possible communication in rational thought and in practical projects conceived and regulated by rational language, and is not superseded by them. Here communication is recognition of others as of our kind and attraction to them. Laughter and tears give rise to blessings and cursings-the primary form of speech. We gather together to speak of what amuses and what torments us, what we bless and curse. We commonly say that language is a means of communication; through a common language individuals exchange their experiences and insights and build a knowledge that is common. But language continually breaks into diverse tongues and dialects and multiplies technical languages and jargons. And language, Voltaire remarked, could almost be said to have been invented in order that men dissimulate their thoughts. Before the Second World War, in his book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl argued that with rational language and 1 the practical projects it regulates, humans, despite their cultural particularisms, achieve community. Rational thought captures in universal concepts the patterns and events that are observed in the field of perception of individuals, and formulates the relations between things and events in laws and theories open to verification and contestation by anyone, anywhere. The rational individual submits his observations and reasons to the
Articulations of Difference, 1997
At the age of fourteen Jean Genet was placed by the Paris Agency for Wards of the State to work a... more At the age of fourteen Jean Genet was placed by the Paris Agency for Wards of the State to work as guide and secretary for a blind composer of popular songs, René de Buxeuil. It was to be the only time in his life he had regular employment, and it ended after seven months when Buxeuil had Genet arrested for theft and inaugurated his long criminal record. During those seven months, Sartre reports, Genet learned the rules of prosody and rhyme. How did Genet, who had received but six years of grade school education,
Open Journal of Philosophy , 2014
Clifford Geertz set forth interpretative anthropology as a natural science, based on "the extrins... more Clifford Geertz set forth interpretative anthropology as a natural science, based on "the extrinsic theory of the mind." Observation of the use of words and cultural symbols will determine theory meaning. Symbols are models or templates, and enter into the constitution of every perceived object or event we recognize or identify. We do not perceive what others perceive, but what they perceive "with," "by means of," or "through. But the objects and events we or others perceive are already and from the first symbolic. Thoughts and emotions are articulated, generated and regenerated by words and other symbolic objects. Without, or before, words and symbols, there is only general, diffuse, ongoing flow of bodily sensation. This essay criticizes these theses in the light of the philosophy of mind and the phenomenology of perception.
What immense and growing abundance of commodities we see about us, the result of extraordinary te... more What immense and growing abundance of commodities we see about us, the result of extraordinary technological advances in industry driven by information and communications technologies! Manufacture has acquired new and advanced materials, and daily contrives new inventions and devises new products. Biotechnology is increasing food production with genetically altered plants and animals, and soon, meat not taken from butchered animals but grown from stem cells. Production is no longer bounded by the limitations of human labor; electrical and nuclear energy power the machines and robots shape materials and assemble cars, jet airplanes, computers, and soon everything. Nanotechnology is beginning to assemble molecules atom by atom, on the way to manufacture computer circuitry out of sand, gold out of lead, even living cells out of atoms.
Humans build shelters, homes, for themselves, build their own environment and world. Today more t... more Humans build shelters, homes, for themselves, build their own environment and world. Today more than 50% of humanity live in cities and megacities, where nature is subjected and controlled. Yet the project of making a home for oneself is devalued by the increasing mobility of citizens. The project of building up one's own collections of valuables is devaluated by the electronic access to libraries, museums, and music. And there recurs the ancient compulsion to go to nature.
It could be that one discovered something of the nature of philosophical speech years after one h... more It could be that one discovered something of the nature of philosophical speech years after one had been " doing " philosophy. It could be that what one understood in chance encounters that reverberated deep one comes to think one had somehow understood from the beginning. Philosophy is abstract and universal speech. It is speech that is not clothed, armed, invested with the authority of a particular god, ancestor, institution, speech that does not program operations and produce results, speech barren and destitute. It is speech that is destined for all, speech that subjects whatever it says to the contestation of anyone from any culture or history or latitude, accepts any stranger as its judge. To speak is to speak to someone, to answer for his ignorance, lacks, destitution. To speak is also to speak in the place of another; when one speaks to someone one formulates one's own insights in his words, one puts one's own words in his mind. When the other is there and able to speak himself, he listens to the thoughts one formulates for him, and assents to them or contests them or withdraws from them into the silence from which he came. Speech becomes serious when one speaks for those who are not there to assent to or contest what one says in their name—the excluded, the silenced, the tortured, the dead. One will have to hear the assent and the contestation of the most remote silences.
Georges Bataille takes sacrifice to be the most universal and fundamental religious act. He also ... more Georges Bataille takes sacrifice to be the most universal and fundamental religious act. He also finds the compulsion to sacrifice oneself in the writings of the mystics. Interpretative anthropology takes myths and theologies to evoke a cosmic order where explanations for events lie, and where physical pain, personal loss, and worldly defeat are explainable. The sacred realm is taken to found the moral order and explains the corrupt nature of humans. But Bataille finds that the sacred experience affirms the unknowable.
Arouane It was two weeks by camel to get to Arouane and back to Timbuktu; Robin and Ken had to le... more Arouane It was two weeks by camel to get to Arouane and back to Timbuktu; Robin and Ken had to leave Africa before then. Azima, a Tuareg of twenty-five, arranged for a vehicle. Azima was born in Arouane; his family live there. Unschooled, he speaks fluent French and very good English, and, like most people in Mali, four native languages. The driver Izzah arrived with the Land Cruiser the next morningódressed also in a Tuareg blue boubou with a pale blue turban of gossamer-thin fabric on his head, a jovial, stout middle-aged guy with perfect teeth and excellent French, energetic and jovial. He had a lad Mohammed with him identified as his mechanic; during the trip Mohammed also did the cooking. We picked up a middle-aged, lean, always sober, serious, and silent, Arab-looking guy, Amadou, who was to be the guide. We drove through the sand roads of Timbuktu and into desert, scattered with thorn trees and tufts of a grass inedible for camels and goats. The men covered their faces, save for the eyes, with the ends of their turbans, to filter the sandy air. Under the vacant sky the vehicle growled across dunes and hollows, sometimes white with salt. Now and again there were blackened depressions where water had stood. On a crest the vehicle got stuck; Mohammed got out and let some air out of the tires, to increase the area of their traction. After a few hours, we stopped at a small tree, laid out blankets and prepared lunch. We had mangos and dates and dark flat breads. The men cooked lamb and rice over a fire of sticks. I strolled off into the distances. The sands were very fine, yellow beach sand, rippled like the patterns in watered silk. A white mist of salt swirled over the surfaces. Here and there were small fields of black basalt pebbles. The sands too were drifting in sheets, eastward to Niger, Chad, Ethiopia, to eventually silt in the Arabian Sea. We reached whole stretches where not a blade of vegetation was visible. Walking over the sand gave me a hitherto unknown sensation of walking on the surface of reality. In the waves of the Sahara that extended for three and a half million square miles, big as the whole of the United States, I was a water bug held to glide across the surface of a pond. Everywhere else I have walked on this earth, I had been shadowed and enveloped by buildings and trees higher than myself. The presence of a dark depth beneath, that elsewhere the trees sunk their taproots into and in which the dead are buried, was also missing. One is on sand, and below there is sand. Here I could only be buried in sand and disinterred by the winds. The time of human concerns, and that of our own journey, faded out before the presence of geological time, which extended across the crests and hollows drifting under the featureless sky. The horizons that opened unendingly upon flowing desert, the PAGE 5
In the measure that we become intimate with persons, other animals, ecological systems, artworks,... more In the measure that we become intimate with persons, other animals, ecological systems, artworks, or buildings, we develop perceptual and conceptual sensitivity, logical acumen, breadth and depth of comprehension, and the capacity to distinguish the important from the trivial. Understanding is all that.
Martin Heidegger pointed out that in every fear there is the recognition of our vulnerability, ou... more Martin Heidegger pointed out that in every fear there is the recognition of our vulnerability, our mortality, and that anxiety, that feeling of finding ourselves cast adrift, nothing supporting us, nothing to hold on to, is a premonition of what dying will be: a being cast from existence into the void, into nothingness. This termination, he argued, is what gives us and our undertakings determinateness. We live in an environment of implements, paths, and objectives. To live is to see possibilities about us, some brought out by our own projects, others visibly outlined by other agents. But the very multiplicity of possibilities extending indefinitely before us produces inaction: what I can do others can do, have done, will do or might do. What, in the outlying field of possibilities that are possible for anyone, outlines the zone of possibilities that are possible for me is the
Emmanuel Levinas introduced a new conception of sensibility. The primitive form of sensibility is... more Emmanuel Levinas introduced a new conception of sensibility. The primitive form of sensibility is the impersonal vigilance in insomnia that watches the beginningless endless continuity of the night. We awaken to find ourselves in depths of light, colour, sonority, texture, warmth and cold. The sensibility for the sensuous is not a synoptic receptivity for a multiplicity of sense data; instead light, darkness, the chromatic density, sonority, warmth and cold are surfaceless depths in which the sensuous body is immersed. Sensibility is not intentional; it is an involution in depths. Levinas describes the sensible and postural relationship to the supporting depth of the ground. Our life alternates frombetween standing on the ground, establishing a here, and repose and sleep on the ground, giving over to the supporting and sustaining earth the responsibility of maintaining oneself in life. Space is fundamentally structured by the retreat into a sphere of the home, zone of rest and tranquility, and the outlying environment in which we move, supported by the ground that supports the things in their places.
Terns, albatross, gulls, and boobies accept any member of their species on the isolated, predator... more Terns, albatross, gulls, and boobies accept any member of their species on the isolated, predator-free rocky islands where they collect in vast numbers to lay eggs and raise their young. Prairie dogs, frogs, and many species of insects also seem to form undifferentiated multiplicities to which any individuals of these species are attracted. Specific vocalizations-neither messages conveying warnings nor signalling food-convey their species interattraction. A primary interattraction also exists among individuals of the human species. The attraction for one another involves some sort of recognition-which is not a cold intellectual act that identifies individuals as members of the same species on the basis of certain distinctive traits. Nor is it the sort of intellectual operation performed by a biologist who identifies species of frogs by the number and color of the spots. Nor, finally is it simply a recognition that what we perceive resembles us. Already by the age of ten days, when his eyes are not yet focused, an infant recognizes his mother. The infant smiles in response to his mother's smile. It is not that the infant sees the mother's smile, sees the upturned lips in visual space, and interprets them as a sign of benevolence, because he knows that when he feels benevolence he smiles. He is not solving a four-term equation: (my)S/B : (her)S/X. There are in fact two unknowns (my)S=X/B : (her)S/B=X. The infant has not seen his own smile. Identification by perception of similar traits remains derivative when the infant grows up. We can see another person as a whole pattern in visual space; we can explore this pattern from all sides by walking about it. But we see only fragments of ourselves-the lower part of our front side only. In reality, we see and recognize another less by the outlines than by the inner lines of their bodies. We recognize our acquaintances at distances too great to discern their complexions and the shapes of their bodies, by the inner diagrams of their gait and of their gestures. And we cannot see our own gait-not even in a mirror. For an infant to recognize his mother as one like himself is to feel a current of benevolence invading him. This benevolence is not simply a state in the privacy of a mind; it acts as an attraction of mother to child and of child to mother that induces corresponding motor diagrams in each, induces the facial movement of the mother on the infant. In the attraction they become alike. Laughter ripples from an infant during the absorption of nourishment or during a warm bath. The excess energy vibrates upon itself in intensity, which is felt in the explosive exuberance of laughter. The mother who laughs with her infant also feels a surplus energy over and beyond what is necessary to hold the infant at her breast and produce the milk; she laughs and swings the baby back and forth, she gets up and dances
Justice is such an elusive thing to get any kind of concrete idea of. In fact it seems to be a no... more Justice is such an elusive thing to get any kind of concrete idea of. In fact it seems to be a notion marginally invoked, almost never at the center of any discussion. One first talks about how a system works, a particular kind of market economy, the assignment of values to abstract things like intellectual property, the kinds and availability of education and health care, access to and manipulation of the organs of information and the expression of opinion, the different migrations of peoples into a region and the different economic niches the various ethnic groups have come to occupy. Justice seems to be both marginal and for tomorrow; something to keep in mind somehow as the present economic and technological situation works itself out or evolves. And then, one day, you see justice, it materializes in front of your eyes. The day before I had been released from the hospital in Rio de Janeiro; I got up just before sunrise and decided to go out for a little walk down the Promenade of Avenida Atlantica in Copacabana where I was staying. I took my wallet, thinking I would treat myself to a good breakfast at the Meridien Hotel three blocks up. I was shuffling along bent over due to the sutures. Senhor, que horas s‚o? I heard. I looked up, an adolescent kid was pointing to his wrist and asking the time. I looked at my watch; it was 6, and then suddenly I knew what was going to happen. Five or six of them closed in; I thought to protect my sutured abdomen and sunk to the sidewalk, trying to close my body upon itself. One of them held a knife to my throat. I really did not feel them taking my watch and clearing my pockets. Then they pulled back. As I started to get up again, one of them tossed me my hotel key before prancing off. They crossed the avenue and vanished into the city. The timing, the rhythm of the act seemed flawless to me, certainly more interesting than any play in a football field watched from the bleachers. It was like a well-choreographed scene in a cabaret, the actors appearing from backstage, closing in about the gleaming prop or fetish, the knife, the group unfolding and vanishing without missing a beat. The question itself was part of the scenario, as I felt as soon as I looked at my watch to answer it-Who after all is strolling along the sea at daybreak and wants to know exactly what time it is? The kid meant: Hey mister you got a fine watch there! There was also something erotic in the whole play. Nobody walks Copacabana beach at any hour of the day or night with anything but lust in his or her heart. It just isn't possible, the most serious joggers cast prurient glances at one another's sweat-molded shorts as they pass one another. I had had glimpses only of the face of the one who asked me the time and of the other who held the knife to my throat, both had big gleaming eyes; the others had blankets like capes about them, no doubt had spent the night sleeping on the beach. Keeping my eyes fixed on the phallic knife at my throat, they, reduced erotically to gleaming eyes and blankets, had taken my watch and wallet with fingers light as caresses. While it was happening, I was intensely aware of the stylized perfection of the operation and its erotic pulse. But as soon as it happened another idea completely
The Sacred Stone Near Jogjakarta a farmer I had come to know gave me a stone axe as old as the Ja... more The Sacred Stone Near Jogjakarta a farmer I had come to know gave me a stone axe as old as the Java man. I marveled over the precise binding of rattan that held the blade to the handle, and over the so painstakingly sought-out jasper-blue stone of the blade whose form was perfectly symmetrical and whose surfaces were polished like the facets of a jewel. There was not a chip on the sharp edges of the blade: this axe had never been used. It had been a ceremonial axe, made for a gift to the spirits of earth and forest. Touching the wood handle and rattan binding, I discovered they had the grain and the strands, but no longer the substance, of wood and rattan: the stone axe was petrified. Drawn from the earth and forest and shaped by hands at the dawn of human time, the earth and forest had covered it over, and made it yet more enchanted. As much as I marveled over the work of an aboriginal artisan, I marveled yet more over the magic of the rock strata that had reclaimed and transfigured it. A cult object, a sacred object, that belonged to a sacred personage. I know, can know nothing whatever of the processions and the rites in which this stone axe figured, can recover no afterimage of the titanic or demonic figures that appeared in the visions and trances of that religion.
We see that our words quicken, shock, energize, stun, excite, support, offend, and wound those wi... more We see that our words quicken, shock, energize, stun, excite, support, offend, and wound those with whom we speak. Our words also focus, fortify, hearten, embolden, agitate weary, stupefy, and distress our carnal substance. Friedrich Nietzsche said that value-
An artist compulsion in evolution has produced the brilliant colors and fanciful designs of coral... more An artist compulsion in evolution has produced the brilliant colors and fanciful designs of coral fish and butterflies, the iridescent colors and the fancifully shaped crests and tails of birds. Many mammals have highly decorative elaborations of head and rump--the antlers of elk, the coiled horns of mountain sheep, the manes of zebras and lions, the white tails of deer, the brilliantly colored rumps of baboons. The purely decorative hair of horses' manes grows to a certain length; the decorative hair of our heads, unlike the hair of our armpits and our pubic hair, keeps on growing.
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Papers by Alphonso Lingis
The range of responsibility. The metaphysics of alterity.
Intersubjectivity as Dependency. Intersubjectivity and objectivity.
Political responsibility. The malice in good deeds.
The range of responsibility. The metaphysics of alterity.
Intersubjectivity as Dependency. Intersubjectivity and objectivity.
Political responsibility. The malice in good deeds.