BiblioVault - Books about Lingis, Alphonso

The First Person Singular

Alphonso Lingis

Northwestern University Press, 2007

Alphonso Lingis’s singular works of philosophy are not so much written as performed, and in The First Person Singular the performance is characteristically brilliant, a consummate act of philosophical reckoning. Lingis’s subject here, aptly enough, is the subject itself, understood not as consciousness but as embodied, impassioned, active being. His book is, at the same time, an elegant cultural analysis of how subjectivity is differently and collectively understood, invested, and situated.

The subject Lingis elaborates in detail is the passionate subject of fantasy, of obsessive commitment, of noble actions, the subject enacting itself through an engagement with others, including animals and natural forces. This is not the linguistic or literary subject posited by structuralism and post-structuralism, nor the rational consciousness posited by post-Enlightenment philosophy. It is rather a being embodied in both a passionate, intensifying activity and a cultural collective made up of embodied others as well as the social rituals and practices that comprise this first person singular.

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Irrevocable

A Philosophy of Mortality

Alphonso Lingis

University of Chicago Press, 2018

In his latest book, the prolific writer and thinker Alphonso Lingis brings interdisciplinarity and lyrical philosophizing to the weight of reality, the weight of things, and the weight of life itself. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, religion, and science, Lingis seeks to uncover what in our reality escapes our attempts at measuring and categorizing. Writing as much from his own experiences and those of others as from his longstanding engagement with phenomenology and existentialism, Irrevocable studies the world in which shadows, reflections, halos, and reverberations count as much as the carpentry of things.

Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, war and disease, the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings, surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs. Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses?

Lingis’s investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds.

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Sade My Neighbor

Pierre Klossowski

Northwestern University Press, 1991

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 world where "the unthinkable" had become reality, it is small wonder that theorists would turn to the writings of a man whose eighteenth-century imagination preceded twentieth-century history in its unbridled exploration of viciousness, perversion, and monstrosity: the Marquis de Sade.

Klossowski was one of the first philosophers in postwar Europe to ask whether Sade's reason, although aberrant and perverted to evil passions, could be taken seriously. Klossowski's seminal work inspired virtually all subsequent study of Sadean thought, including that of de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Bataille, Blanchot, Paulhan, and Lacan.

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Trust

Alphonso Lingis

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Violence and Splendor

Alphonso Lingis

Northwestern University Press, 2011

In subject and method, Alphonso Lingis’s work has always defied easy categorization, largely owing to the interplay of theory and praxis inherent in his research. Violence and Splendor is a series of reflections grouped into five areas of inquiry: “Spaces Within Spaces,” “Snares for the Eyes,” “The Sacred,” “Violence,” and “Splendor.” “Spaces Within Spaces” explores multiple spaces of our lives—the space of nomads, historical space, geological space, the cosmic space of religious ritual, and the metaphysical habitats of inmates of insane asylums. “Snares for the Eyes” analyzes the inner space of our bodies and the inner spaces of things.

“The Sacred” studies the ways death—the death of others and our own death—fascinates and energizes us. It exhibits the glory in violence and sacrilege. The book culminates in “Splendor,” a study of collective performances that create splendor. Concerning itself most immediately with philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, anthropology, and the theory of religion, Violence and Splendor bridges the discourses of continental philosophy and cross-cultural studies. Further drawing insights from both Western and non-Western traditions, it brings such diverse fields as psychology, art and aesthetics, botany, politics, history, zoology, and religious theory into a new and significant dialogue about the nature of humanity.

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The Visible and the Invisible

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Northwestern University Press, 1968

The Visible and the Invisible contains the unfinished manuscript and working notes of the book Merleau-Ponty was writing when he died. The text is devoted to a critical examination of Kantian, Husserlian, Bergsonian, and Sartrean method, followed by the extraordinary "The Intertwining–The Chiasm," that reveals the central pattern of Merleau-Ponty's own thought. The working notes for the book provide the reader with a truly exciting insight into the mind of the philosopher at work as he refines and develops new pivotal concepts.

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