Alphonso Lingis

• Pennsylvania State University

Jean-Luc Nancy opposes myth and literature. Herder, Schlegel, Schelling, and Bachofen elaborated the modern understanding of myth. Myth, created by the community, depicts and found community as communion of humans with one another, with the dead, with ancestors and with gods, with other species of animals, communication, communion with nature and...

Critical study of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas

In 1585 Spanish founded a permanent settlement in North America, in St Augustine, Florida, and in 1607 English founded a colony in Jamestown, Virginia. A million colonists had arrived by the time the 13 colonies declared independence in 1775, and in the next century some 40 million more people, half of them indentured servants or convicts, half a m...

The Work of Reconciliation In the last 60 years civil war has been by far the most destructive form of violent military conflict. About 40% of countries with a population of at least half a million have suffered civil war. There are today fifty-seven civil wars being waged. Of the 103 countries that experienced civil war between 1945-2009, 59 suff...

Love Love? The central case is the love of a human for a human, an adult for an adult. And love of parents for their children, children for their parents. Rooted in evolutionary biology. But love-of nature? Of what is most non-human, alien? Nature, the trees, the spiders and raccoons, the seagulls, the mountains, the stars-all that everywhere indif...

It was in Falmouth, Cornwall, at the 2015 meeting of the Association for Medical Humanities. I met Martin the first morning, at breakfast. He sat down and immediately engaged conversation, eager to know us. His lean narrow face with strong nose are adult, looking strong in the ways of the world, but his big darting eyes, wide mouth open in ready gr...

A philosopher whose work has taken him around the world and through the world many times, muses about his friend Ken, Mongolia, the cold war, visions and more.

Psychoanalysis appears to intellectual historians and anthropologists as a general theory of dreams, trances, hallucinations, and certain physical symptoms that derives from nineteenth-century German Romanticism and arrogates scientificity to itself. It embodies a further stage of metaphysical subjectivism, attributing what is seen in dreams, tranc...

What is given in observation? A basic tenet of empirical science is that reliable knowledge results from observation, with natural perception and with refined instruments, which is repeatable and verifiable by impartial observers in standard conditions. An observer’s observation, in the first-person singular, is then equivalent and interchangeable...

How is anxiety the source of knowledge? How can Heidegger identify death as nothingness? How does anxiety engender resoluteness?.

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-terms are not first comparative; the meaning of the positive, affirmative terms is inward....

The essay grants Martin Heidegger's understanding of human existence as building a dwelling that embodies and discloses the surrounding world – equally required as an extension of building. Moving through the various layers of human dwellings, from huts through mansions, to high rises and gated communities, we think that humans are the privileged s...

Each year I easily found a student to housesit the birds and fish when I went off somewhere for the summer. Back in the sixties, one September when I got back I found that the student who had stayed there had painted some delicate psychedelic arabesques on the blue wall of the small upstairs bedroom. The following September when I got back I saw th...

Lietuvių kilmės žymaus JAV filosofo pranešimas. skaitytas Lietuvos filosofų draugijos konferencijoje „Tapatybės sklaida ir ribos”, vykusioje 2001 m. balandžio 27-28 d. Vilniuje. Vertė Vygandas Aleksandravičius.

In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation Gilles Deleuze undertook a detailed analysis of one artist's paintings to show us what they do, and how. Deleuze found in Francis Bacon's art a vision close to some of the conceptions he and Félix Guattari had put forth in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The concepts they had elaborated guide him to understand...

Anthropology as a Natural Science Clifford Geertz’s Extrinsic Theory of the Mind Abstract 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 co...

On 3 October 2012, Alphonso Lingis, a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the University of Manitoba, participated in an open three-hour interview with Mosaic and a number of invited student and faculty participants. The following is a condensed transcription of that memorable conversation.

On 2 October 2012, Alphonso Lingis delivered the following as a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer public address held at the University of Manitoba and initiated by Mosaic. We are pleased and honoured to publish the address in this Lingis feature issue.

Dignity is not a word we use much. We do talk about people who behave with dignity in certain situations, with the composure and assurance that formal and ceremonial occasions require. It is especially during the ordeal of dying that we speak of dignity and honor it. The dying one is dying; he or she is not reaching for dignity; dignity is not his...

Antony Gormley's sculptures do not depict bodies in narrative positions and rhetorical gestures. Instead, they present the inner space of the body and induce in the viewer both an awareness of the inner space of the works and an awareness of the inner space of his or her own body.

In the Gobi Desert, the Bolivian Altiplano, the Colca Canyon, in Antarctica, in a stretch of wasteland come upon when we were driving to a distant city, we have found ourselves in uninhabited and uninhabitable landscapes that open us to eons of geological time. The evolution and endurance of the human species with its capacities and ambitions to un...

We find ourselves summoned forth by the earth, the light, water, and fire; we find ourselves directed by the things about us. Things lure us, provoke us, direct us, charm, or hex us. Animism and fetishism designate two different ways we have understood these experiences. Although a specific form of animism has come to dominate in our art and episte...

Emmanuel Levinas locates the ethical experience neither in the rationality of the social regulation of behavior, nor in the imperative for rationality internal to the mind, but in an event, a specific form of encounter among humans: when I find another facing me. He or she who faces me is not simply exposing himself or herself to me as an object of...

The ethical experience is to find that there are things that I am not causally determined, but obligated, to say and to do. Emmanuel Levinas locates this experience not in the perception of the order of nature or of society, nor in the intuition of the imperative of reason within my mind, but in the encounter with appeals and demands addressed to m...

Collective performances cannot be understood only from the intentions of the organizers, participants and bystanders, and from their historical, political, economic and ideological contexts. Cultural performances close in on themselves and evolve with their own logic: that of ceremony and festival in which their own scenes of splendour, dance and w...

For Martin Heidegger the death that comes singularly for each of us summons us to exist on our own and speak in our own name. But Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari argue that it is a specific social machinery that summons us to speak in our own name and answer for what we do and are. This summons is a death sentence. They enjoin us to flee this sub...

Through words and gestures we communicate with one another about the outlying environment, and we also form representations of one another. But we also make contact with one another. Through tact we make contact with the anxieties, rage, shame, shyness, and secrecy of another. In caresses we make contact with the pleasure of the other. Our caresses...

The astonishing advances made in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry in recent decades has brought new understanding to the internal constituents of living organisms and their evolution. The behaviors of protein molecules, DNA, chromosomes, enzymes, and the processes that distribute nutrients to cells have become intelligible. Evolutionary bio...

"The Torturers and Their Public": From ancient times art has glorified warriors and war. From Goya's "The Disasters of War" to the photographs of Nazi concentration camps and Abu Ghraib, art has exhibited the slaughter and torture involved in modern wars. This essay addresses the fact that the photographs of Abu Ghraib did not undermine the policy...

This chapter attempts to explain the birth of philosophy itself, claiming that until the Greek philosophers, people justified their actions as mere traditions or supposed orders from a deity. The philosopher, by contrast, appeals to universal truths that can be understood by anyone from any culture. However, as the chapter emphasizes at length, the...

The first chapter of this book is devoted to Freud's metapsychology. Drive, in Freud, is the elementary unit of psychical motive force; it is the innate tendency of an organism to reduce the energy it accumulates as a result of external stimulus, to discharge it through a motor response. Some of these drives function to preserve the organism. But o...

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. The recognition of the importance does not derive from any justificatory...

We live in a world where there are six billion similar beings of our species. Our bodies have been conceived and grown in the bodies of others, and our children grow in our own bodies. We have learned to mobilize our limbs, to shape and release feelings, we have indeed caught on how to focus our eyes and see things from others. We have acquired tho...

Although philosophers such as Edmund Husserl argued that humanity as one community develops in the measure that humans practice rational discourse, in fact we recognize and are drawn to one another in laughter and tears, and in trust. In trust one adheres to something, one sees only partially or unclearly, or understands only vaguely or ambiguously...

Psychoanalysis has taken over the whole domain of childhood fantasies and subjected them to what it takes to be scientific scrutiny. Its interpretation presupposes that they have meaning. But the fantasies of infancy, prior to the acquisition of language, have no conceptual meaning. How should they be described? Is not the question of how they acqu...

Emmanuel Levinas sets up alterity as a fundamental ontological category, irreducible to being and nothingess. There are two difficulties in understanding this ontological alterity. On the one hand, Levinas formulates it with negative terms - infinition, abstraction, ab-solutenes, trace of a past that has never been present. On the other hand, Levin...

In every generation there is a compulsion, in people of robust health, to go wander in regions of polluted air and water, meager food, filth, and disease. There is a compulsion to go to regions inhospitable to human life-jungle and desert and tundra, extreme altitudes and polar icescapes. There is a compulsion to go dwell among the plague ridden, w...

Words resonate in the air, in the space above the floor, between chairs, walls, trees. They direct our attention to items on the menu, window displays in the stores along the street, the rain clouds above. They are orders, directives. They also evoke and connect with things and events beyond the room, the street, the landscape that we see and deal...

In Jordan there is an ancient site in a hollow opened by ancient earthquakes and now entered through a narrow gorge, where the mountain walls have been carved in gigantic facades. It is one of the most astonishing sights eyes can see. It was created by a Nabatean kingdom of which very little is known. It supplies an experience for a reflection on t...

Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 106-113 One dies as one dies—as anyone, everyone dies, as all that lives dies. Do we not know that when we lie dying—when, bedridden, hospitalized, removed from our home and workplace, we no longer exercise our skills, launch initiatives, are depersonalized, and can do nothing but wait for the end in increasing passivity and...

Distinguant la definition du bien comme instrument et la definition du bien intrinseque comme affirmation de la dignite, l'A. etudie la conception de la dignite developpee par S. Zizeck en termes d'espace fantaisiste (fantasy space), au sein duquel l'individu reorganise son environnement en un systeme de signification qui delimite son mythe prive....

For Emmanuel Levinas objectivity is intersubjectively constituted. But this intersubjectivity is not, as in Merleau-Ponty, the intercorporeality of perceivers nor, as in Heidegger, the active correlation of practical agents. It has an ethical structure; it is the presence, to each cognitive subject, of others who contest and judge him. But does not...

Slavoj Žižek proposed an ethic of respect for the fantasy space of another. Under "fantasy" Jacques Lacan borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss the notion of a "private myth." But this fantasy is, Žižek says, illusionary, fragile, and helpless. Fantasy is the way everyone, each in a particular way, conceals the impasse of his desire. Psychoanalytic pra...

symploke 6.1 (1998) 56-71 Sea anemones are animate chrysanthemums made of tentacles. Without sense organs, without a nervous system, they are all skin, with but one orifice that serves as mouth, anus, and vagina. Inside, their skin contains little marshes of algae, ocean plantlets of a species that has come to live only in them. The tentacles of th...

Definissant la conception substantielle des choses a travers l'argument aristotelicien de l'artisan et l'histoire de la production technologique des objets, l'A. examine l'ontologie rationnelle du monde pratique et de l'usage developpee par Heidegger dans «Etre et temps», ainsi que sa critique phenomenologique etablie par Levinas a partir de l'idee...

Why should we not be scattered, schizy, two-faced, three-roled, multiple-personalitied-why should we be "together"? Why should where there was id, there be ego? Why is the single-minded, concentrated, poise of the athlete-the diver on the springboard, the batter up, the champion sprinter-the character that we are supposed to learn from sports and w...

Why does lust demand beauty? How does it differ from functional beauty and from the beauty of what is purposive without definable purpose? Does eroticism really aim at visions of immortality ? How does erotic craving differ from the cognitive or practical intentions that aim at objects or objectives ? What is the difference between sexual satisfact...

Etude de la peur de la mort parmi les especes du monde naturel et chez l'homme qui, ayant acquis une identite individuelle et une capacite de travail orientees vers l'avenir, se heurte a l'horreur du neant. L'A. montre qu'il existe une certaine joie de mourir liee au sentiment de la delivrance ou de la liberation heroique des larmes par le rire

Against the Husserlian schema of levels, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time 1 sets out to conceive understanding, feeling, and action as elements of a structural whole, and sets out to conceive this structural whole in its relationship with the environment as a world, the world. There is a diplopia in Heidegger’s holistic accounts of the world. On t...

"Enlightenment ideals of a society rooted in liberationist reason and morality were trampled in the wake of the savagery of the Second World War. That era's union of cold technology and ancient hatreds gave rise to a dark, alternative reason--an ethic that was value-free and indifferent with regard to virtue and vice, freedom, and slavery. In a wor...