Description
Book SynopsisA selection of the writings of Alphonso Lingis, showcasing a unique blend of travelogue, cultural anthropology, and philosophy
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.
Trade Review"Here we find Lingis at his most hopeful, even at times humanistic, but in the most original and compelling ways, without sentimentality or superstition."—Tom Sparrow, from the Introduction
Table of ContentsContents
Editor’s Introduction: A Philosopher of Transience
Part I: Sensing the World
Sensation and Sentiment: On the Meaning of Immanence
Sensuality and Sensitivity
A Phenomenology of Substances
The Elements
The Levels
The Pageantry of Things
The Weight of Reality
Metaphysical Habitats
Part II: Embodied Subjects
Intentionality and Corporeity
I Am a…
Orchids and Muscles
Cause, Choice, Chance
Return of the First Person Singular
Contact
Mortality
Part III: Traveling: Pedagogy of the Other
The Unlived Life Is Not Worth Examining
Lust
Fluid Economy
The Navel of the World
Araouane
Rings
Typhoons
Part IV: Knowledge, Meaning, and Excess
Faces, Idols, Fetishes
The Murmur of the World
The Elemental That Faces
Phantom Equator
Violations
Unknowable Intelligence
Breakout
Wounds and Words
Sacrilege
Part V: How We Get Along and How We Lose
Our Uncertain Compassion
Dignity
Irrevocable Loss
Love Junkies
Truth in Reconciliation
Catastrophic Time
Preface to Trust
War and Splendor
Notes
Index
