The Alphonso Lingis Reader

Alphonso Lingis is arguably the most intriguing American philosopher of the past fifty years—a scholar of transience, someone who has visited and revisited more than one hundred countries and has woven this itinerary into his writing and allowed it to give form to his thinking. This book assembles a representative selection of Lingis’s work to give readers a thorough sense of his methodology and vision, the diversity of his subject matter, and the unity of his thought. Lingis’s writing evinces the many kinds of knowledge and subtle forces circulating through human communities and their environments. His unique style blends travel writing, cultural anthropology, and personal accounts of his innumerable experiences as an active participant in the adventures and relationships that fill his life. Drawing from countless articles, essays, and interviews published over fifty years, editor Tom Sparrow chose works that follow Lingis’s engaging, often intimate reflections on the body in motion and the myriad influences—social, cultural, aesthetic, libidinal, physical, mythological—that shape and animate it as it moves through the world, among people and places both foreign and domestic, familiar and unknown. In a substantial Introduction, Sparrow provides a biographical, critical, intellectual, and cultural context for reading and appreciating Alphonso Lingis’s work. An extended encounter with the singular philosopher, The Alphonso Lingis Reader conducts us through Lingis’s early writing on phenomenology to his hybrid studies fusing philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, communication theory, aesthetics, and other disciplines, to his original, inspired arguments about everything from knowledge to laughter to death. Contents 6 Editor’s Introduction: A Philosopher of Transience 8 Part I. Sense 20 Sensation and Sentiment: On the Meaning of Immanence 22 The Sensuality and the Sensitivity 32 A Phenomenology of Substances 44 The Elements 62 The Levels 74 The Pageantry of Things 90 The Weight of Reality 96 Metaphysical Habitats 106 Part II. Body 122 Intentionality and Corporeity 124 I Am a ... 138 Orchids and Muscles 148 Cause, Choice, Chance 166 Return of the First Person Singular 178 Contact 188 Mortality 192 Part III. Travel 200 The Unlived Life Is Not Worth Examining 202 Lust 210 Fluid Economy 226 The Navel of the World 254 Araouane 270 Rings 278 Typhoons 288 Part IV. Excess 296 Faces, Idols, Fetishes 298 The Murmur of the World 314 The Elemental That Faces 334 Phantom Equator 348 Violations 362 Unknowable Intelligence 376 Breakout 382 Wounds and Words 392 Sacrilege 400 Part V. Together 408 Our Uncertain Compassion 410 Dignity 420 Irrevocable Loss 424 Love Junkies 438 Truth in Reconciliation 452 Catastrophic Time 466 Trust 480 War and Splendor 486 Notes 498 Publication History 518 "The Alphonso Lingis Reader showcases the philosophical thought and beautiful writing of Alphonso Lingis across his career. Much of his writing is a unique blend of travelogue, cultural anthropology, and philosophy"-- Provided by publisher