Passion in Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Alphonso Lingis 9781498534673, 9781498534680

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I: Passion in Philosophy
Chapter One: Aconcagua
Chapter Two: Existence in Excess
Chapter Three: Symbiotic Passion in Lingis
Chapter Four: Love and Lust after Levinas and Lingis
Chapter Five: On Alphonso Lingis’s 80th Birthday—A Philosophical Journey
II: Collaborations: Lingis and the Philosophical Tradition
Chapter Six: Collaborations
Chapter Seven: The Importance of Alphonso Lingis in Introducing Emmanuel Levinas to America
Chapter Eight: Alterity after Infinity
Chapter Nine: Resisting Individuality
Chapter Ten: Imperative Innovations
Chapter Eleven: Amor Fati
Works Cited
List of Works by Alphonso Lingis
Index
Contributors

Citation preview

Passion in Philosophy

Passion in Philosophy Essays in Honor of Alphonso Lingis Edited by Randolph C. Wheeler

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lingis, Alphonso, 1933- honouree. | Wheeler, Randolph C., editor. Title: Passion in philosophy : essays in honor of Alphonso Lingis / edited by Randolph Wheeler. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016033984 (print) | LCCN 2016034757 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498534673 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498534680 (Electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Lingis, Alphonso, 1933Classification: LCC B945.L4584 P37 2016 (print) | LCC B945.L4584 (ebook) | DDC 191-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033984 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xi

I: Passion in Philosophy 1

Aconcagua Alphonso Lingis

3

2

Existence in Excess Tom Sparrow

17

3

Symbiotic Passion in Lingis Graham Harman

27

4

Love and Lust after Levinas and Lingis Wolfgang W. Fuchs

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5

On Alphonso Lingis’s 80th Birthday —A Philosophical Journey: From Nowhere to Nowhere John Murungi

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II: Collaborations: Lingis and the Philosophical Tradition 6

Collaborations Alexander E. Hooke

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The Importance of Alphonso Lingis in Introducing Emmanuel Levinas to America Richard I. Sugarman

77

Alterity after Infinity: Interview with Alphonso Lingis (2015) Randolph C. Wheeler

91

8

9

65

Resisting Individuality Emily Anne Parker

105

10 Imperative Innovations Randolph C. Wheeler

119

11 Amor Fati: The Tragic Passion Anne Freire Ashbaugh

135

Works Cited List of Works by Alphonso Lingis

151 155 vii

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Index Contributors

Contents

163 169

Acknowledgments

Among the many people who helped nurture this project from its beginning to its end, I would like to thank Anne Ashbaugh for the original idea of a Festschrift growing out of Towson University’s colloquium in honor of the eightieth anniversary of Al Lingis’s birth, Stephen Scales for organizing the colloquium, Michael Anft for his journalistic expertise and editorial suggestions for the interview, Jeda Taylor for her valuable advice over the years, and Rachel Weydert and Jana Hodges-Kluck at Lexington Books for sharpening the final project.

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This book was originally conceived as a Festschrift growing out of a colloquium hosted in November 2013 by Towson University’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies in honor of the eightieth anniversary of the birth of Alphonso Lingis. The occasion provided us with a chance to revisit his long, substantial views on phenomenology and to be informed with his most current views on passion, a topic not usually seen as warranting philosophical consideration, even in some phenomenological circles. Lingis’s keynote address criticized traditional scientific accounts of the emotions as dividing or disrupting our lives and argued for passion as a unifying force, which invites philosophical exploration. The book’s structure is twofold. First, it is an examination of Lingis’s most recent developments through the topic of passion with essays from some of the most well-established commentators on the work of Lingis. Second, it offers a substantial retrospective on Lingis’s thought in relation to some of the major figures in continental philosophy, namely Levinas, Kant, Heidegger, Butler, Foucault, and Nietzsche, all the while tying into the theme of passion. Written to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of Lingis’s birth, these essays show how Lingis’s thought has not only endured over so many productive decades but also remains vital and even continues to grow. Alphonso Lingis initiates the proceedings himself in the first section and explores the theme of passion in his essay “Aconcagua.” Citing the challenge of climbing the highest mountain in the Western hemisphere as a metaphor for living and thinking existentially, Lingis separates the term passion from the usual scientific understanding of the terms emotion, affect, feeling, sentiment, and mood. What he finds in passion is a self that becomes whole, distinctive, and meaningful in its commitments, as opposed to the objective sense of a self that has some distance from its feelings and emotions. This scientific distance pathologizes the passions. Lingis argues that passion makes us whole, even with conflicting passions. Our exultation in the greatest intensity of conflicting passions is our most truthful state. Tom Sparrow’s “Existence in Excess” finds a primacy of passion in Lingis’s thought. In the way that our passions place the self in a kind of limbo, one cannot speak of the self as active, but neither can the self be regarded as completely in the grip of the other. Taking the long perspecxi

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tive on Lingis’s body of work, Sparrow focuses on Lingis’s original work in Abuses (1994) and Dangerous Emotions (2000), read through the theoretical lens of his early texts, Excesses (1983) and Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985). Sparrow’s view that “affective circuits consolidate our emotions” resonates with Lingis’s that “one lives by giving form to those forces.” Graham Harman’s “Symbiotic Passion in Lingis” finds that for Lingis instead of passions arising from the self, the self arises from the passions. In our passionate wonder in the face of electrical storms or the icescapes of Antarctica, a bond is made between us and them, and we are transformed into something new. Passion requires that we be directly involved in an experience and not just observers of a remarkable event. In “Love and Lust after Levinas and Lingis,” Wolfgang W. Fuchs begins with the analyses of desire in Hegel and Sartre, and goes on to show how first Levinas and then Lingis contribute to this discourse positively through a combined differentiation of desire into love, sexuality, and eroticism. Fuchs, however, concludes that Levinas’s strong understanding of love leaves eroticism unacceptably ambiguous. His own view on great or wild love is distinct from Levinas’s profane sexuality and Lingis’s sacred eroticism. Furthermore, Fuchs claims that Lingis’s affirmative teaching on eroticism seems to allow no distinct ground for understanding love. He concludes that sexuality, eroticism, and love are to be distinguished through differing emphases of the dimensions of temporality. John Murungi brings the first section on passion to a close with “On Alphonso Lingis’s 80th Birthday—A Philosophical Journey: From Nowhere to Nowhere.” Murungi claims that we are in the presence of a consummate thinker in that Lingis understands that philosophy is to be lived outside the walls of the classroom and must journey into the world. The task here is not one of expertise or the production of ideas, but the living of life, as the journey itself is the important thing. By exploring Lingis’s philosophical journey, Murungi brings Lingis’s teaching of passion into relief. Alexander E. Hooke’s “Collaborations” begins the second section of the book on Lingis’s intersection with the tradition. Hooke notes that since Excesses (1983), Lingis has studied a variety of associations, contacts, and encounters that unexpectedly bring individuals together in mundane as well as extraordinary situations. These associations take many forms. Moreover, they are sparked not by announcing or agreeing upon mutual long-term interests, but by shared imperatives or passions. Distinct among these is the sense of collaboration found in Lingis’s writings. His accounts of collaborations—from bodybuilders to artist brothers and political rebels—illuminate for students and scholars new kinds of experiences and research projects while reflecting on traditional philosophical themes such as truth, beauty, and goodness.

Introduction

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Richard I. Sugarman’s contribution, “The Importance of Alphonso Lingis in Introducing Levinas to America,” discusses Lingis’s historical role, one too easily forgotten in light of Lingis’s own ongoing and impressive work. Sugarman finds that Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology of alterity is effectively explained in Lingis’s translator’s introduction to Levinas’s Otherwise than Being. But neither the advanced students of Levinas nor the novice who wants to understand what this most important and original of thinkers should see this meditation by Lingis as a guide to understanding the richly variegated philosophy of Levinas. What Lingis has accomplished is showing why and how Levinas’s phenomenological philosophy of alterity embodies the first challenge to continental philosophy in the twenty-first century. (And on a note of national political interest, in addition to his teaching and scholarly work, Professor Sugarman has served as a senior advisor to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders since 2007.) In “Alterity after Infinity: Interview with Alphonso Lingis (2015)” with Randolph Wheeler, Lingis assesses of some of Levinas’s seminal views, such as the primacy of ethics over religion and what Lingis sees as the philosophical breakthrough in Levinas’s phenomenological account of need, which is no longer seen simply as negativity. In Lingis’s view, Levinas understands that to see what someone needs is already to have a positive sense of what we could do to respond to that need. Lingis, however, offers some criticisms of alterity in Levinas’s claim of the other’s ethical infinity, which Lingis finds to be empirically unsupported. And going beyond Levinas’s restriction of ethics to the human face and God, Lingis extends Levinas’s doctrine of the nonrational ethical appeal of alterity to a number of other our relations in the world, including animals, things, and situations. Emily Anne Parker’s “Resisting Individuality” finds that, in contrast to the tendency to wonder where the powers of bodies are, the readings of disciplinary power by Lingis and Judith Butler explore the implications of his critique of the distinction it presumes between life and body in aiming to punish only life. Unlike Butler, however, Parker finds that Lingis’s reading centers on the inescapable tension in Foucault between life (as body) which is inherently resistant to the norm of “individuality” and disciplinary power which seeks naively to instill this individuality. In her view, Lingis suggests another reading of Foucauldian “life”: as ever-specific materiality subject to an irrevocable variation. Randolph C. Wheeler’s “Imperative Innovations” considers Lingis’s developments in his phenomenological explication and rectification of Kant’s commands begun in The Imperative (1998). There Lingis offered the fundamental insight that subjectivity begins in subjection. With his current explication of passion, Lingis locates the singular unifying force in which subjectivity arises. I am the only one who can respond, and my responsibility stands above that of all the others’. The difference from other accounts of subjectivity is, to put it in a word, passion. Coming full

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circle, Lingis finds imperative joy in “the anxiety and the exhilaration of transgressing the boundaries set by nature and society,” commanding our responses not only to the rational but to irrational imperatives that direct us in life. Anne Ashbaugh’s “Amor Fati: The Tragic Passion” concludes the collaboration of Lingis on passion and his relation to the tradition. Ashbaugh examines the relation of Lingis to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, largely by addressing one of Nietzsche’s great themes: amor fati, the love of fate. She notes that already in 1977, Lingis recognized the affective and tragic dimensions of Nietzsche’s will to power. In this essay, she shows the equally affective and tragic dimensions of Nietzsche’s amor fati, arguing that amor fati is the passion that frees all passion from the ascetic shackles the tradition imposes upon it. We can, in fact, see Lingis’s body of work as an amor fati of the highest philosophical order—passionate thinking infused with phenomenological precision. A glance at the titles of his many books gives us an immediate sense of this unique union. The Apollonian attentiveness of Phenomenological Explanations and The Imperative seems to contrast with the Dionysian vitality of Excesses, Dangerous Emotions, and Violence and Splendor. But all along Lingis has been successfully synthesizing thought and passion, as evidenced by the titles Trust, Contact, The First Person Singular, and The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. That spirit is in evidence in our opening chapter when he observes: “We must trust our joy, for joy is the most truthful state.” In his distinctive way, Lingis continues to rectify the tradition while creating a new one.

I

Passion in Philosophy

ONE Aconcagua Alphonso Lingis

Cerro Aconcagua in the Argentine Andes, rising to 22,837 feet, is the highest mountain in the Americas and the highest mountain outside the Himalayas. 1 It harbors several glaciers, the largest one some ten kilometers long. I trekked its lower reaches and that evening went to a lodge at 3

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its base. At the front desk there was a self-published book entitled Aconcagua, which, after a look at it, I bought and read that evening. The author, Juan Aguilar, is a psychotherapist, based in Buenos Aires. He tells of one of his patients, Miguel, a fifty-one-year-old man, university-educated, married with two children, running a successful real estate business. Miguel did not really suffer from chronic depression, but he complained that meaning had somehow gone out of his life. There were no sexual or emotional problems in his relationship with his wife, but conversation with her went down the familiar paths and sexual intercourse had become routine caresses and strokings with the familiar relief. He had become completely knowledgeable about the real estate business and skilled in dealing with buyers and sellers, but now sales no longer surprised or exhilarated him. He made a lot of money, but spending it no longer brought satisfaction. Improvements to his house, new appliances, a new car: nothing seemed to add anything to his life. “I buy things, spend money, and then don’t see the sense of it,” he said to the therapist. “Buying and selling real estate—does that have some meaning for me, for my life? Having a home, a wife, children—is that what having a life means? Anyhow you don’t really ‘have’ a wife, children; they have their own lives. And I don’t see what that means.” After a long pause, he said, “Everything I say and do responds to what my employees say, what my customers say. After work everything I say and do responds to what my wife says, what my children say, what the neighbors say. Is that all there is?” He had bought some philosophy books. He had taken some philosophy courses in the university, so he felt that he could read and understand them. “But I need guidance,” he told the therapist. “And I need someone to help me connect the ideas of philosophy with my situation.” After a few sessions in which the Juan listened to his patient tell his life and his trouble, he proposed that Miguel climb Aconcagua. He said that he would accompany him. The ascent of Aconcagua by the south face involves routes that are among the most difficult that mountain climbers attempt. But ascent on the north face can be done with normal crampons, ropes, and axes. However, the almost seven kilometers altitude, the extreme cold—the wind chill can drop to -80°F—storm winds, and avalanches make this ascent also dangerous, and Aconcagua has one of the highest mountain death tolls in the world. Juan had twice climbed it, although each time turning back before reaching the summit. Privately he hoped that encouraging his patient would give him the extra drive and he would this time attain the summit. Juan and Miguel set the date in February, midsummer, when Miguel could arrange four weeks’ leave from work. They had four months to prepare, keep to a healthy diet, no alcohol or cigarettes, weight training five days a week, an hour of cardio exercises daily.

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The book recounts the climb. Arrival at the base, days of acclimatization. Then beginning the ascent. Patches of loose rock scree, then firm ice. Refrozen ice lenses, crevasses. The heavy fatigue as the climb rises. Unrelenting howling winds. Juan keeping up a high-spirited demeanor, to support Miguel, but beginning to doubt his own physical stamina. Times when he imagines Miguel injured or collapsing in altitude sickness, his efforts to revive him and descend to safety failing. Thinking of the Hippocratic Oath; first do not harm. Then the day Miguel is gasping for air, his hands immobilized with the cold, stopping, abandoning the climb the rest of the day. Juan anguished wondering what he could possibly be risking Miguel’s life for, risking his own. Looking up to the summit, visible now, but not seeming any closer as they make less distance each day. Then the sky darkens, heavy snowfall, whiteout. They are two days from the summit. The winds hurl against them, they have to crouch and grip on the ice beneath them. The mountainside and the air are clotted with white; the contours of the ice about them bleached out in the white density. They turn back, a crawling descent as the white everywhere darkens to ash grey and night falls. Miguel is hardly responsive; Juan digs alone a snow cave for the night. Four days to descend to the base camp. The book ends without the therapist relating what happened then, in the months and years that followed, without giving an appraisal of Miguel’s subsequent state or recounting what changes he may have made in his life. I found myself strangely gripped by this book in the following days. It unsettled me. Miguel’s despondency and his questions were about meaning, but this therapy did not proceed by interpretation, was no talking cure. It did not show him a meaningful realm to live his life; they went to stay weeks on the brute rocks and ice of the uninhabitable mountain. A domain of grandeur, but also where the human figure and its intentions were reduced to insignificance, forms of rock and formlessness of snow and sky refusing human apprehension, the mountain driving them off. They would be agape with wonder, visions beyond the practicable and comprehensible, beyond what the human mind can imagine. They would be transfixed with anxiety and terror before dangers beyond what means they could have to parry them, suffocated in sullen physical fatigue and prostrate in the lassitude that no longer seeks to resist death. Impassioned states, that totally fill and throb in mind and body, disconnected from, disconnecting the experience and knowledge and enterprises of the past. Not opening upon a future: what was the utility of knowing these extremities of wonder, anxiety, terror, desolation, toxic lassitude? Are these not states that crush people, those who come to psychotherapy

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because grief, rancor, bitterness, jealousy, rage consume them and make them unable to conduct their lives? What are impassioned states? Let us separate the term “passion” from the terms “emotion,” “affect,” “feeling,” “sentiment,” and “mood.” These terms, which gained currency in eighteenth century and have acquired the stamp of objectivity, are now the terms used in psychology, ethics, aesthetics, and legal and political discourse, as well as in evolutionary biology, anthropology, and neurobiology. They belong to a specific kind of analysis and explanation. Feelings or emotions are taken to be psychic reactions to body disturbances caused by things or events that strike one from the outside. They are conceived as transitory events occurring to the self, which subsists behind or beneath them. Feelings and emotions produce bodily reactions, gestures, and expressions, which can be observed by others. But the self distinct from them is taken to be something invisible, unperceivable from the outside, known by only one witness, from within, a sphere of privacy. I have a sense of myself when I take a distance from my feelings, observe them, judge them. The self can manage its feelings and emotions, control them, integrate them with its intentions and projects. Let us note that the sense of the self is not constant. Much of the time the tasks and the implements are laid out before us each day: the toothbrush, razor, and shower in the morning, the bus to work, the tasks laid out in the factory or office. A layout of directives in the things. We do what there is to be done. The postures and manipulations we have picked up from others and pass on to others. In all that we do not have a distinct sense of a self as an individual source of thoughts and decisions. What I will here call “passions” we find in Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Dostoyevsky, Melville, and in a great deal of our literature and cinema. Vehement wonder, lust, rage, courage, or terror, jealousy, grief fill one’s mind and body, swollen with surging energy and heightened sensitivity. All our senses are enflamed. Impassioned states give us the experience of being self-identical and undivided. Mind and body are one. Rage saturates the mind and is felt throughout the body, in the postural axis, in the clenched fists and beating heart, the trembling limbs. Impassioned states are not experienced as events occurring to the self, which would be experienced beneath or above them. Instead, the self arises in the passion, takes form in it. In wonder or in rage the sense of self surges, the self surges, and it is an awestruck or enraged self. In impassioned states the self arises, a force that confronts, makes claims on others and on the world. Passionate outbreaks carve out space and time in distinctive ways. Impassioned wonder, rage, terror, jealousy, and desolate mourning mark

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out a territory where my life and my honor are cut off from what is not mine, where what is deserved is bounded from what is undeserved, where my intimates are separated from strangers. Passionate outbreaks disconnect from the public world and stake out a territory that is my space, my world. And passionate outbreaks structure time in a distinctive way. They do not take place in a never-ending line of time segmented into minutes, hours, and days, nor in the time we experience as stretching back and containing our past actions and encounters and extending forward where foreseen plans and projects are inscribed. Instead the time of an impassioned experience disconnects from the continuum of life and nature. Passion intensely and completely fills a present. In rage or mourning this throbbing present is backed up to what has just happened. What has just happened separates from the continuously passing field. In terror what is just about to happen, what is imminent, rises in high relief before the swollen pressure of the present. 2 In the unending line of the time of nature and society, there disconnects this new structure consisting of the bloated present, the immediate past, and the imminent future. In current language “having an experience” designates something unexpected, intense, and with a limited endurance in which it evolves and comes to an end, such that it gives rise to a narrative. Having an experience is having an impassioned experience, an experience undergone in passion. Observing an event, however unusual, is not having an experience. Awestruck wonder, that state in which our engagement in a practicable field is interrupted and we find ourselves abruptly opened upon regions and events that empty out our chattering mind and disconnect the skills and manipulations of our bodies—wonder is the fundamental impassioned state. Finding oneself, as Immanuel Kant says, beholding massive mountains treading skyward, gorges with raging streams cutting deeper in them, wastelands lying in deep shadow and inviting melancholy meditation. 3 Standing by night on the frozen tundra of the far north, and seeing, high overhead the Northern Lights shimmer in constantly changing colors like great sheer curtains in the black of outer space. One is isolated, in the midst of the raging electrical storm, before the vast inhuman icescape of Antarctica, which fills the whole of space about one. One is exposed, and feels the pounding of life within one’s undivided mind and body. The self is this deep, primal throbbing of life, insistent and indubitable. There is an element of wonder, before the astonishing, the bewildering, the overwhelming, in every passion—in rage, in terror, in grief, in sexual passion. Impassioned lustful love is possessed with the apparition of the unforeseeable, uncomprehendable in another. Erotic passion is high-spirit-

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ed, making claims on the world and on busied and detached others, confident and assertive. Wrath asserts “Me!” and “my people!” before events of the world, in front of others. It proclaims one’s worth and dignity. It gives rise to our primary sense of justice and injustice. We rarely break out in rage before slights to our person or our actions done by people with whom we have no friendship. Our vexation passes; their disparagement is as indifferent to us as they are. But when our most cherished friends and lovers slight us, our wrath asserts how much we care for their regard and how injured we are by their disdain. How awestruck we are before the forces of courage! An individual pits his or her own forces against the hateful machinations of men, against the furies of nature. Impassioned courage fills mind and body as one, the inner voice of prudence and caution is choked. Courage arises in hard compacted energies before threatening forces and unsurveyable menaces, and takes a stand before the intolerable. Fatigue and pain are biological signals that alert us to harm in our organism and motivate us to act to remedy the assault it is suffering. But the awakening of passion also resolves us to endure fatigue and pain. Impassioned obstinacy and courage pit their force against lassitude and pain. The self rises in this obstinacy and courage, severe and bent on triumphing in them. Passionate mourning is not simply an impotent sense of loss. It involves the claim that the loss, of one’s beloved, one’s child, is unjust, unacceptable; it maintains this claim against the fates. It takes courage to mourn passionately. In impassioned fear, terror, we find ourselves before imminent death in battle, in earthquakes, in flaming buildings, or when we are first told that the doctors have identified a disease in its terminal phase. We find ourselves overwhelmed, shattered, paralyzed, but also energized to scream and curse in refusal and to flee. There is some element of terror in impassioned envy, jealousy, and melancholy. A passionate state, which fills mind and body, disconnects from the patterns of the past and blocks foresight of consequences, shuts off the warnings and counsel of prudence and rationality. A passionate state also excludes other passionate states. 4 Rage snuffs out fear; an enraged person is fearless, as military commanders know. But fear can shut off rage; the abrupt appearance of a mighty enemy force provokes flight. Greed shuts out empathy and grief before the misfortune of others, grief over the death of a rich relative. It is striking that impassioned states transform in a certain direction. Terror characteristically passes into shame. Impassioned jealousy turns into rage. Rage often turns into mourning. Impassioned ambition often issues into guilt, although guilt does not typically turn into ambition. Unrequited love curdles into hatred. “In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale . . .

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King Leontes . . . passes from jealousy to rage, from rage to remorse, from remorse to mourning, and, finally, from mourning to wonder.” 5 Let us then separate two realms, the world of passions and the world of emotions. Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles, Shakespeare’s tragedies, Milton, Dostoyevsky show us a world where events are launched, counteracted, redirected, consummated, and consumed in impassioned states. Recent literature such as Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude show the eruption of passions forcing the zigzag lines that plot the lives of individuals and of a community. We today understand and share the passions recounted in Homer; passionate states are transhistorical and transcultural. And we share them with other species, rabbits terrorized by dogs, enraged pheasants defending their chicks against predators, elephants and dolphins that mourn their dead. Humans have always been confident that they recognize and identify impassioned states in other species. The psychology of feelings and emotions constructed by eighteenthcentury philosophers and psychologists fits in with the norms of everyday life in the political economy set up to maximize order and productivity. Albert Hirschman found that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophers declared that a political system must promote avarice, calculus of one’s interests, above all, because avarice blocks out “the interruptive stretches of anger, grief, falling in love, as well as shame, regret, and mourning which are turned to the past.” 6 The writings of these political philosophers forcefully added to the discrediting of the passions. A psychology that would enjoin us to take a distance from passions, view them objectively, from the outside, as others view them, that pathologizes the passions, is in fact assigning priority to everyday life in the political economy set up to maximize order and productivity, making it normative. But then we have to recognize that this life can be emptied by the erosion of meaning. The psychotherapist Juan Aguilar had taken Miguel from a world devoted to order and productivity, where emotions are to be integrated into practical initiatives, supplying them with their energies, to a world of awestruck wonder, terror, and defiant courage. Impassioned states are not reactions proportionate to the situation; they are excessive. Our organisms are material systems in which, through excretion, secretion, evaporation, lacks develop, which are experienced as needs. These open the organism to the outside; its senses scan the environment, and the organism moves to take hold of substances and sustenance to satisfy its needs. The pleasure in needs satisfied closes in on the content in contentment and rest. But our organisms are material systems

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that generate energies, energies in excess of what they require to satisfy their needs. Impassioned outbreaks surge with excess energies generated within. There is the pride of standing forth, the thrill of rushing onward, the melodic movements that pick up the throbbing rhythm of events and landscapes. The surging of excess energies within, felt in exuberance, seeks out the muscle strains and fatigue of hard labor and hard play, which intensify one’s sense of surging energies, one’s sense of oneself. Wrath and terror respond to powerful and unexpected threats to our domain or our life. But awestruck wonder seeks out the grandiose and the terrible, releasing its excess energies without return, gratuitously. High-spiritedness greets the collapse of methodic manipulations, the absurdity of events in human society and in nature, seeks them out to affirm them in peals of laughter. Friedrich Nietzsche separated the surging of excess energies that are used for self-aggrandizement from the joyous exhilaration that releases excess energies without asking anything in return. These last he called the noble moments in life. 7 For Georges Bataille passions arise in the transgression of boundaries and taboos. Nature and society set limits to where we can go and what we can do. Beyond lies the unknown, the unpredictable, danger. Our excess energies drive us to plunge across the boundaries and taboos in exhilaration and anxiety. Anxiety in sensing danger and death. Exhilaration in sensing the surge of superabundant energies within. Passions are made of exhilaration and anxiety. They plunge into the unknown, the unknowable, the unmanipulatable, the unpracticable. 8 In erotic passion we know extreme pleasure and extreme anxiety. Lust is addressed to the other, in whose visible and palpable materiality there stir unknown visions, dreams, longings. Our caressing eyes and hands pass repetitively, aimlessly over the body of another, not gathering information, not knowing what they are seeking. They stir spasms of torment and pleasure in the other’s body. We violate the space of another, break through the identity that others constitute for the other and that the other assumes for him- or herself. We disrobe the other and ourselves, setting aside the protection and uniforms that clothe the body in the posts and functions of productive work and society. Our practical posture collapses, we abandon our limbs and organs to another, abandon dignity and self-respect, and identity. We drift in moaning and sighs, exhalations, the opacity of pleasure and night. La petite mort, the French say. One never regrets having made a fool of oneself for sex or for love. One regrets not having dared. Impassioned states are not simply transitory outbursts; they give rise to passionate attachment to things. Passionate attachments are quite different from the utilitarian attachment to things, or the attachment to things

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for their symbolic value. As passionate attachments, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cite food, for compulsive eaters, bulimics, and anorexics; a dress, lingerie, or shoes for fetishists; a domestic dog or cat. 9 But so many things can function as the point of passionate attachment—a butterfly collection, a cabin in the wilderness, an endangered species of bird, the silverback gorillas of Rwanda, an adopted child, a young man in one’s building in advanced stages of AIDS. One is not merely attached to symbols, but to the dense and enigmatic reality of something alien to oneself. It is striking that passionate attachments are exclusive. Of the hundreds of women one meets over the years, one falls passionately in love with this one. Composing sounds into a music the world has never before heard, putting paints on canvas can appear to a man or a woman worth devoting all one’s energies and resources, all one’s life to. In the attachment to things for their utilitarian function or for their symbolic value, the self asserts its independence and sovereignty. But in passionate attachment the self undergoes metamorphosis. In one’s attachment to a cat or a horse one feels the vital movements of cats or horses within oneself and one senses one’s own sentiments and impulses in cats or horses. A fetishist sees lingerie animated with his voluptuous languor and feels the shimmering sleekness of lingerie in the shifting flesh of his body. A hunter acquires the sharp eyes, wariness, stealth, movement, speed, readiness to spring and race, and the exhilaration of the beast he hunts, which are available for stalking prey but also for gamboling down the hills into the river, dancing, and sexual contests. A mountaineer acquires the hardness, rigor, obstinacy, endurance, and taciturnity of the mountain. In erotic passion one feels oneself existing in the other’s attachment to one, in the sense the other has of one; one becomes his or her lover. And the other feels him- or herself existing in the intensity of the lover’s attachment to him or her, becomes the beloved. Passionate love does not produce communion or fusion, but instead an intense sense of oneself lodged in the other and an intense sense of the other lodged in oneself. The passion discovers ever more enigmas in the object of its attachment, in increasing wonder and beguilement, moves in dread before its or her vulnerability, wrath before what threatens him or her. Ever more vehement passions crowd into it. Friedrich Nietzsche contrasts passionate knowledge (of a woman, a silverback gorilla, a landscape) with the observation that takes a distance from them as objects, the observation we call “objective.” Passionate attachment moves through different passions, each revealing a new perspective and depth. 10 We do not think we know a woman through a series of anatomical, psychological, cultural, sociological observations. We think we do not know a woman until we have melted before her

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kindness and feared her wrath, been anguished before her vulnerability and retreated before her power, been illuminated by her insights and charmed by her foolishness, until she has made us laugh as we have never laughed, made us weep in misery. For impassioned states exclude one another but also attract one another. The self devoted to order and productivity, the prudent and calculating self, seeks to manage its feelings and emotions, control them, integrate them in the service of its practical initiatives. Nietzsche instead envisions a life that would harbor conflicting passions that would intensify and enflame one another. Anyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who thinks of the dreams of his youth, of a lover deprived of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the evening after a battle that has decided nothing but brought him wounds and the loss of his friend. But if one endured, if one could endure this immense sum of grief of all kinds while yet being the hero who, as the second day of battle breaks, welcomes the dawn and his fortune, being a person whose horizon encompasses thousands of years past and future, being the heir of all the nobility of all past spirits—an heir with a sense of obligation, the most aristocratic of old nobles and at the same time the first of a new nobility—the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of; if one could burden one’s soul with all of this—the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling—this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far; the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, when even the poorest fisherman is rowing with golden oars! This godlike feeling would then be called— being human. 11

Nietzsche here envisions not a harmonious integration of our different emotions but a taking upon oneself the deepest grief and sorrow over the most terrible losses, the boldest hopes, the most intense sense of honor of humans throughout their history, crowding these conflicting passions within oneself. They oppose one another and enflame one another. That would result in the most intense high-spiritedness, exhilaration, exultation, “a happiness that humanity has not known so far.” This state Nietzsche then identifies with god, nature, and humanity. It would be “the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter.” For Nietzsche does not conceive the highest kind of life, the divine life, as immobilized in bliss, but a life pounding with power and

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love, tears and laughter. There is no laughter without tears, for laughter is the release of power and pleasure before the unworkable, the collapse of utility and meaning, the absurd—and these call forth tears also. Love of someone is love because it is in conflict with power over him or her. But in the same person these two conflicting drives intensify one another. What Nietzsche identifies as the happiness that humanity has not known so far, the exultation made of the greatest intensity of conflicting passions, is the most truthful state. It opens widest upon, it engages most intensely with all that is and happens. Discovering that all things, sheltering and nourishing and also indifferent and hostile, are “entangled, ensnared, enamored,” it says Yes to all that is and happens, loving one’s life, loving life, loving the world. 12 We must trust our joy, for joy is the most truthful state. Nietzsche then says that the intensification and crowding together of contradictory passions would produce “a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, when the poorest fisherman is rowing with golden oars!” Here this state is identified with nature, with the sun, hub of nature, which gives inexhaustibly its energies to all life without asking for anything in return, and in this gratuitous outpouring creates all life and creates beauty. Pouring its gold into the sea such that the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars. This state would be the highest and also most natural state of humanity. The exultant embrace of the world with superabundant energies is creative. Creative of knowledge, which reveals and opens us, far beyond the limited sphere of human needs and concerns, to the vastness and complexity of the universe, to the songs of the cicadas that emerge only every seventeen years, the songs of the sperm whales in the ocean abysses, the solar wind that illuminates the curtains of the aurora borealis, the 67 moons circling the planet Jupiter. Creative of paintings and sculptures that enhance and hold the ephemeral blush of a young woman, the glitter of autumn on a mountain lake. Creative of temples that enshrine mountains and caves and sky. Creative of songs and dance with which we join the songs and dance of nature. “‘O Zarathustra’ the animals said, ‘to those who think as we do, all things themselves are dancing. They join hands and laugh and flee—and come back.’” 13 The domain of the passions, surging in anxiety and exhilaration, is, Georges Bataille says, laughter, tears, poetry, tragedy and comedy, play, dance, music, ecstasy, the magic of childhood, the funereal horror, eroticism (individual or not, spiritual or sensual, corrupt, cerebral or violent, or delicate), the divine and the diabolical, the sacred, of which sacrifice is the most intense aspect, intoxication, combat, crime, cruelty, disgust. This domain outside of utilitarian existence Bataille calls “the festive.” 14

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In designating the multiplicity of impassioned experiences “the festive,” Bataille indicates that the impassioned self is not isolated, closed in itself. We laugh and we weep with others. Before the collapse of laborious projects or pompous behavior or the disintegration of a sententious discourse into nonsense, we laugh, we look at one another and are indubitably aware of what each sees and the pleasure each knows in peals of laughter; we are transparent to one another. In tragic and comic art our passions surge together; in dance and carnival our anxiety and exhilaration surge like crests of waves spreading among us, in erotic passion each is excited by the excitement of the other, the pleasure and torment of each invades the other. Juan and Miguel descended Cerro Aconcagua and returned to Buenos Aires. Then what? They had known the anxiety and the exhilaration of transgressing the boundaries set by nature and society. These are not experiences that reveal the meaning of life and of the world; they encounter the inhuman, the destructive, the indifference in the substance of reality. Will Miguel driven violently from Cerro Aconcagua find himself bent on returning? Perhaps he will remember the climb as a time in which he dared and risked as never before, and in the pain and exhaustion found he had resources to endure that he did not know he had. Will he find himself attached to remote and forbidding landscapes, going back to the Andes, going to the Sahara, to the Ice Continent of Antarctica? Will he deepen his passionate attachment in reading books, viewing documentaries, himself speaking, writing, creating? Will he become an environmental activist? Or perhaps he finds in his carpeted office other mountains to climb. Perhaps he will rethink his real estate business, learn new computer technology to make it more efficient, train new employees. Perhaps his days, his weekends will be filled with things that have to be done, things that have to be said. Perhaps the urgency of things that have to be done and said will take the place of the meaning he had once sought for. Three times now Juan has gone to Aconcagua and turned back before reaching the summit. Which of his next patients—banker, middle-aged housewife, college student—is going to hear the advice to climb Aconcagua with him? NOTES 1. A previous version of this chapter appeared as “Passion” in Presencing EPIS: A Scientific Journal of Applied Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and Critical Theory (online and in print) and in the ISSUU: Journal of Presencing EPIS.

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2. Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 74–78. 3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 129. 4. Fisher, The Vehement Passions, 34–36. 5. Ibid., 36. 6. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 52–56, 132–35. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), I, §3. 8. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, tome 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 10–11, 39, 40. 9. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 129. 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), III, 12; The Gay Science, §333. 11. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §337. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), IV, The Drunken Song, 9, 10. 13. Ibid., III, The Convalescent, 2. 14. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vols. II & III, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), III, 230–31.

TWO Existence in Excess Tom Sparrow

To read the classical phenomenologists—Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, among others—is to learn how to see the everyday world of action and existence with fresh eyes. They have a knack for uncovering the largely hidden aspects of ordinary life and of pulling on threads that unravel the countless dimensions woven into the fabric of our world. The intricacies of mundane existence remain concealed from view because mundane existence leaves little room for reflection or the kind of examination that for Socrates makes life worth living. But it is not just our actions, decisions, and movements that get covered up by the way we manage our everyday lives. Our affects, our emotions or passions, are too often deployed automatically. They circulate along preprogrammed channels that we might call affective circuits. They get lost in the affective economy that typifies a world organized by instrumental actions conducted at home and work; by social media driven by mostly predictable provocations and responses; by personal and public interactions whose affective charge, if there is any, is easy to dodge or ignore. This is not to lament the fact that there isn’t more drama or disruption in our lives, but to note that genuine passion is not obviously a feature of ordinary existence. That’s kind of what is meant by “ordinary.” Affective circuits consolidate our emotions. They provide our emotional life with a readymade form; this form is publicly available and gives shape to our private agency, an agency that is at once predictable but prone to “rogue intensities,” as Kathleen Stewart has put it. 1 It can go off the rails at any moment, short-circuit, although, mostly it just moves us impersonally along. “Banality is the vitality of the times.” 2 The publicly available circuits which we inhabit tell us next to nothing about who 17

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we are or what we care about as individuals. They express very little about our deepest desires or hopes, and they risk nothing. They give form to our lives, but this form is prescribed, adopted. It is not one’s own. As Al Lingis has put it, “One is born with forces that one did not contrive. One lives by giving form to those forces. The forms one gets from the others.” 3 Lingis’s life and work resist this complacency. His philosophical and travel writing, his ethnography and photography, stand as some of the most formidable contemporary explorations of the passions. He diligently strives to reveal something about who we are and what we can become, by not only revealing what one can make of oneself, but more emphatically what the other can make of us. There is nothing banal about this. Lingis’s exploration of alterity, however, is not just an inquiry into the encounter with the other person or the experience of what is foreign, exotic, or wild. As the titles of books like Excesses (1983), Libido (1985), and Dangerous Emotions (2000) suggest, Lingis is out to demonstrate the alterity that emerges from within, that seizes the body and arrests its otherwise ordinary agency. Disarms the everyday; energizes it. To get at this excessive existence it is necessary to situate Lingis, if only briefly, within the phenomenological tradition he cites so liberally, in order to see how he contests the primacy of the practical that one finds in, for example, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. If early modern philosophers like Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza staged a seminal confrontation between reason and passion, and largely championed the superiority of the former over the latter, then Lingis is a master of adducing the tension between our practical and affective lives, while building a compelling case—with and against Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty—for the primacy of passion. When you read a text like Being and Time, the story you get is about how our lives are fundamentally organized by the projects that engross us. Not only that, but it is our basic concern for these projects and the future accomplishments we hope to realize that is at the center of our existence. When we are born we find ourselves already immersed in this world; perhaps not immediately concernful as newborn infants, but quickly caught up in tasks, deadlines, dreams, and goals toward which all of our energies are directed. In Heidegger’s words, “The kind of dealing which is closest to us [Dasein] is . . . not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use.” 4 When we encounter other persons or objects, it is against this horizon of concern that we understand them. These persons and objects are either useful or not. 5 Ideally, they are “equipment” for accomplishing the ends we set up for ourselves or which have been dictated to us by others. They may present an obstacle to accomplishment. Existence, for Heidegger, is fundamentally practical and things, pragmata, are the nonhuman allies that we enlist in our service. As Graham Harman puts it,

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“Heidegger shows that we normally do not deal with entities as aggregates of natural physical mass, but rather as a range of functions or effects that we rely upon. . . . Equipment is forever in action, constructing in each moment the sustaining habitat where our explicit awareness is on the move.” 6 Heidegger comes off as an eminently practical thinker. Arguably, his principal contribution to phenomenology was a shift in orientation toward the prereflective understanding that underlies everyday life. In some ways he can be seen as the existential corrective to the abstraction or dryness of Husserlian phenomenology, whose world too often has the ambience of a scientific laboratory, rather than the vibrant places where we spend the bulk of lives. Even though Husserl’s work does provide us with a version of what Heidegger calls being in the world, the Lebenswelt, Husserl’s introduction of the concept into phenomenology happens in response to Heidegger’s call for phenomenology to give more weight to the context provided by everyday life. It would be unfair to say that Heidegger’s existential philosophy lacks an account of passion, since “mood” (Stimmung) is part and parcel of Dasein’s very existence and given extended treatment by Heidegger. In Being and Time, of course, the focus is on the mood of anxiety. In Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, it is boredom. Perhaps it is inaccurate to call boredom a passion, but it seems uncontroversial too in the case of anxiety. 7 Whatever task Dasein engages in, whatever it is concerned with, Dasein is never without a mood that discloses the world in a particular light. As Lingis puts it, “the world is given in mood. In moods, the whole figures as that which weighs on us, that to which we are subjected.” 8 Whereas from the standpoint of everyday, practical life Heidegger presents Dasein as an active agent engaged in the world as a maker, from the perspective of mood Dasein reveals itself as always compelled to feel the weight of the world. Whether thrilled, anxious, or fearful, Dasein is never without something like an emotional state. I say “something like an emotional state” because it is not clear, as noted above, that boredom is an emotion. Is it really of the same order as, say, fear, anger, sadness, or joy? We do not call boredom a passion either. And it is furthermore not clear that Heidegger understands mood as inherently passive or affective, as beyond Dasein’s control. Boredom does not entail the susceptibility that characterizes both positive and negative emotions. 9 But that’s just the thing about moods in contrast to passions: the former attune us to the world, disclose it in a particular way and augment our concerned, purposeful dealings. Moods do not disrupt or hinder us, render our practical engagements problematic or impossible the way that rage, ecstasy, or grief do. Heidegger registers this when he distinguishes fear from anxiety, emotions, and moods. The former are ontic, merely psychological, while the latter are ontological, part of the transcendental structure of Dasein. 10 But precisely because they are con-

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stitutive of Dasein’s existence, moods are enabling even in their oppressiveness. Lingis writes: “Moods are pervasive; they are for Heidegger the second way the world is there as a whole. The world is grasped formally in the practical looking about and looking for and is sensed materially in mood.” 11 Moods are not an effect of the world passively felt, but a manner by which the world is projected by Dasein. If Heidegger attempts to get at the ontological significance of mood in his analyses of specific moods like boredom and anxiety, and how these moods (or mood generally) disclose the materiality of the world, then Lingis takes up the challenge of investigating the ontic side of materiality, the world as a site of countless singular affective encounters. This is what we find in the many photos that line the pages of Lingis’s books, beginning with Excesses. It is as if the faces and places that stare back at us, as readers, are designed to draw us immediately into the affective space of the chapters. They give pride of place to affect, to the passion underlying whatever discourse and conceptual framework that unfolds in the remainder of the chapter. They are not something to be grasped or seized, but appearances that take hold of the readers, fascinate, disconcert, or enrapture them. 12 Affect, for Lingis, is never simply about interest. It is always also about pleasure and the erotic potential of material life. And it is about the potential dissolution of self which is present in the self’s susceptibility to passion, never first and foremost a modality of selfhood or world-disclosure. As Lingis says in Abuses (1994), “To see the sensibility, susceptibility, vulnerability of another is to see not the inner diagrams but the substance of the body.” 13 This substance, as he already made clear in Excesses, does not reside in the depths of the body or in its immaterial form, but on its surface and its face. Libidinal life is multiple, idiosyncratic, and in many ways superficial—all surface effects, effects of the senses and sensation. The excitations provoked by material existence extend over the surface of the body; they are not, like perceptual objects, intended and apparent against a horizon of understanding. Channeling Freud, Lingis writes: There is something artificial about saying that the libidinal excitations occur on the skin—as though we already had a non-libidinal view of our bodies and of the membrane covering them. For through the free excitations which intensify and discharge, a body-surface first extends. We should say that the excitations, in their ephemeral and passing multiplicity, distend a zone which is all surface. Their movement is very different from the intentional movements of classical philosophy. Those exist by extending themselves, by moving, from hyletic datum to its meaning, from material sensation to its sense or signified referent, from the immanent, inward zone where life is excited to the exterior, objective sphere of the outlying world. The movement of the primary

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process, of the libidinal excitations, is horizontal, from one contactpoint on the skin to another. 14

Just as he questions the primacy of practical interest in Heidegger, Lingis calls into question the primacy of perception and praktognosia in Merleau-Ponty. “Our bodily experience of movement,” writes MerleauPonty, “is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a ‘praktognosia,’ which has to be recognized as original and perhaps primary.” 15 Lingis’s critique is already clear in Libido, a text which charts the handling of erotic life by French thinkers such as Sartre, Lyotard, Foucault, Levinas, and others. Lingis’s subtle critique of Merleau-Ponty is revealing for what it tells us about Lingis’s view of the passions. Put simply, where Merleau-Ponty sees intentionality and perceptual competence as the normal mode of everyday existence, Lingis sees the incompetence entailed by passion as enjoying equal primacy. Where Merleau-Ponty provides us with unsurpassable accounts of how the body negotiates its hold on the world and things, Lingis reminds us that it is equally the world and things that grab hold of and excite us. In his account of embodied existence, Merleau-Ponty describes how the lived body, supported by its postural schema and oriented by intentionality, carries out a dialogue with the objects of the world. 16 This dialogue reveals that the body is shaped as much by what Lingis calls the imperatives of the environment as the environment and its objects are shaped by the body’s horizon of meaning and perceptual competence. While it may be true that both body and environment enjoy a certain degree of transcendence, reality is such that the meaning of these two terms emerges coincidentally. Their constitution is codependent. 17 This means that the posture of the body, its stability and diagrammatic potential, depends on the objects it fixes intentionality on: “The postural axis,” writes Lingis, “is a dynamic motor whole by which the position of the fingers and the wrist at a given moment adjusts to the positions of the forearm and upper arm and torso, as well as to the anticipated position on the doorknob in front of it. It is the way the body positions itself before its field and its tasks.” 18 He continues: “Posture is intentional in that it is polarized in function of its objective; correlatively, the objective emerges in relief as a figure in the field of perception in the measure that the body positions itself before it.” 19 But sometimes the body’s postural schema and designs on the objective are frustrated by objects of perception. Sense, significance, and meaning recede; they fall out of relief and meld into the background from whence they emerged. In what way? In the section of Phenomenology of Perception on the body in its “sexual being,” Merleau-Ponty examines what Lingis refers to as “libidinous sensuality.” Here we find a rare moment when affectivity, and its threat to perceptual competence, comes to the fore of Merleau-Ponty’s exposition

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of perception. Lingis writes, “The stated goal of the text he wrote on sexuality in Phenomenology of Perception is to show how objects and the world come to exist for us through affectivity.” 20 Lingis notes, however, that “nowhere does he speak of what makes sexual behavior voluptuous—only of what makes it meaningful, only of the libido as the force that makes the successive events of life a personal history.” 21 In other words, Merleau-Ponty’s account of sexuality and libido in the Phenomenology restricts itself to the teleological, sense-giving dimension of sexual being, the libido that conspires with intentionality to direct the lived body’s erotic energy toward the object of desire or pleasure. What Merleau-Ponty does not attend to, however, is the body rendered dissolute or disintegrated by the excessive energy of the libido. Here is the breakdown of the postural schema that underwrites the competency of the lived body, exemplified by the body during orgasm: “Does not the orgasmic body,” asks Lingis, “figure as a body decomposed, dismembered, dissolute, where postures and dynamic axes form and deform in the limp indecisiveness of the erotic trouble? Is it not a breaking down into a mass of exposed organs, secretions, striated muscles, systems turning into pulp and susceptibility?” 22 What is often missing in the texts of Merleau-Ponty, as well as Heidegger, is a rich account of the impractical life of the body, of the excesses of existence that work not to aid us in the accomplishment of our projects, or our coping in the world, but which interrupt and frustrate our endeavors. Lingis’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology rests on, it seems to me, a disagreement about the relative priority of action and passion. Not that either thinker sees these modes of being as absolutely discrete—we are at every moment, in a sense, active and passive— but there is a privileging of action and ability in Merleau-Ponty that is resisted by Lingis. Lingis, by contrast and following Levinas, Bataille, and others, reminds us of the fundamental alterity at the heart of any contact with the world and the objects that suck us in, often short-circuiting the strategies we cultivate to handle, master, or dominate the other—other bodies, other selves. 23 Bodies frustrate us. They can be animate or inanimate. Lingis begins the essay “Sex Objects” by recapitulating Merleau-Ponty’s point that we do not recognize the bodies of others with whom we are familiar by their hair and skin color, or any other secondary qualities, but by the “inner lines of their postures and movements.” 24 What we perceive and register of the others is not their colors and shapes that make up their corporeality, but the peculiar way in which their bodies are animated. We recognize and identify them by their gait and physiognomy. But the ability to identify, and subsequently represent or know, the other can be disrupted or “troubled,” as Lingis puts it, by their sexualized expressions. Gestures, tattoos, piercings, costumes, and other accoutrements. All of these— which Lingis’s countless ethnographic writings catalogue in poetic de-

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tail—incite our passions and arouse within us an eroticized perception, one which undoes the order of our everyday embodiment and knocks the inner lines of our own posture off-kilter. Lingis puts it in these terms: Our eyes are not really undressing the other and visualizing [the diagram of the other’s erogenous zones]. Instead, the pattern of orifices we sense in the other pulls at the layout of lips, fingers, breasts, thighs, and genital zone in ourselves. We feel latent movements in our hands and genitals that rise to make contact with the sexual physiognomy of the other, troubling the axes of our posture. 25

This description of how the libido disengages the body from practical life, exceeding its practical needs with passions and pleasures that actively dissolve the world of work, tools, and objectives, is found in neither Heidegger nor Merleau-Ponty. 26 It captures a certain kind of event—call it voluptuous pleasure—that lies, for the most part, beyond the scope of Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. 27 “It is,” says Lingis, “a pleasure reeling in the change of the state of the body’s material reality, catalyzed by the change in the state of the material reality of the body of the other.” 28 Talk of the voluptuous or orgasmic body is more at home in the work of Freud and Bataille, from whom Lingis draws as much inspiration as he does from phenomenology and existentialism. And it is through Freud and Bataille that Lingis’s concept of passion and affectivity must be understood. It is with Freud and Bataille, among others, that materiality—with all its passivity and excess—is restored to the lived body. When this is done, it becomes as appropriate to think of the lived body as an excitable and volatile object as it is to think of the body as intentional subject. 29 Early texts like Excesses and Libido prepare the ground for this thinking of the material body, which continues throughout Lingis’s work in the 1990s, principally Foreign Bodies (1994), and beyond. For example, in Dangerous Emotions he explicitly presents passion as an accumulation of forces, “nonteological energies,” that exceed what is necessary “to adjust to [the] environment and compensate for the intermittent and superficial lacks produced by evaporation and fuel consumption.” 30 Never is Lingis’s thinking reducible to the orthodoxy of phenomenology, and neither does it ever reduce the body to the accounts of evolutionary biology. It navigates a provocative path between these two resources. The material excesses of the body are worn on the body itself. They appear to attract and communicate to others who cannot just apprehend or grasp them with perception or understanding. They seduce and disarm. Passion is not private for Lingis, like some internal turmoil troubling the mind, but publicly available to and informed by the outside. “It is through its feelings, drawing our eyes into their fields of force, that a body emerges out of its self-contained closure and becomes visible,” says Lingis. He continues: “Our emotions reorient others, disturb their trains

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of thought, seep into the blueprints of their projects, contest them, and afflict them with misgivings and self-doubt.” 31 This insight into the exteriority of passion orients Lingis’s reflections on travel and the way he interprets his encounters with foreign bodies and cultures. These reflections, which fill the pages of his corpus, are organized by the concepts of alterity and trust. Arguably, for Lingis even more than Levinas, it is affectivity that lies at the center of these concepts. It is possible, I’ve learned, to read the greater part of Lingis’s work as an investigation of the primacy of trust, not only in our everyday lives but in our travels to remote, unfamiliar, and especially hostile places. Put in philosophical terms, one of the primary theses advanced by Lingis’s life and work is that trust is the condition of possibility of being in the world. And trust is grounded in affective, not intellectual or practical, life. Trust always requires a risk and a danger: the risk of passionate attachment to some other, the first person singular whom I must trust beyond reason, who is forever beyond the reach of my knowledge. Trust asks me to suspend my usual affective circuits and circuits of excitation that organize and orient my everyday existence. 32 Lingis writes in Trust (2004): When we leave our home and community to dwell awhile in some remote place, it happens every day that we trust a stranger, someone with whom we have no kinship bonds, no common loyalty to a community or creed, no contractual obligations. . . . We attach to someone whose words or whose movements we do not understand, whose reasons or motives we do not see. Our trust short-circuits across the space where we represent socially defined behaviors and makes contact with the real individual agent there—with you. 33

Entailed in this suspension, or short-circuiting, of our everyday affective circuits is a disorienting vulnerability that transforms the competent body into one that is incompetent, which is to say, out of place and dependent on the help of others. 34 Trust, like courage, is not an attachment to a representation of the other; it is an attachment to the other who at once exceeds any representation that can be formed of them and it is an attachment that is itself excessive, a “force that can arise and hold on to someone whose motivations are as unknown as those of death.” 35 And just like the excitations of erotic pleasure, trust folds back upon itself and accumulates as it commands us—as an imperative—to trust in a trust that, by definition, cannot reasonably be trusted. It is a passionate and necessary bond that Lingis calls an “exhilaration.” 36 Our ordinary lives are shot through with habitual ways of feeling, sensing, and doing. They are often predictable and dull, but in such a way that enables us to pursue our hopes and desires. Everyday trust in others, our reliable institutions, and its agents, is part of this routine. We inhabit the world through our habitual circuits and affective attachments.

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These are not merely phenomenological, but material dispositions enabled and disabled by the ordinary affects that conspire to keep us who we are, in place, while at the same time keeping us on the edge of something, a short-circuit or becoming-other that cannot be predicted but which has always already infiltrated the most intimate places through which we move. 37 If Heidegger accounts for the way that moods attune us to the world, disclose it as either homelike or unhomelike, and Merleau-Ponty exhibits the dialectic of attunement that is perception, then neither thinker fully articulates the crisis of attunement prompted by passion or its promise of redemption. This is where Lingis steps in. Thank you, Al. NOTES 1. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 44. My thanks to Mark Paterson, not only for giving me the gift of Stewart’s book, but for pressing me to read it as soon as possible. 2. Ibid., 49. 3. Alphonso Lingis, Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996), 1. 4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1962), 95. 5. Ibid., 102. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2002), 18. 7. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 228–35. 8. Lingis, Sensation, 13. 9. Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 7. 10. Heidegger, Being and Time, 230. 11. Lingis, Sensation, 23. 12. See Lingis’s remarks on photography in Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis, ed. Bobby George and Tom Sparrow (Brooklyn: punctum books, 2014), 12–13. 13. Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 235. 14. Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 26–27. 15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 140. Merleau-Ponty is here reiterating and renaming Heidegger’s point, cited above (Being and Time, 95), about the “kind of dealing closest to us” which, says Heidegger, “has its own kind of ‘knowledge.’” Of course, this is the implicit knowledge and latent intentionality of ready-to-hand engagement with the world. 16. Ibid., 132. 17. Alphonso Lingis, Libido: The French Existential Theories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 40–46. 18. Ibid., 46. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 55. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 55–56.

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23. Ibid., 57. 24. Alphonso Lingis, “Sex Objects,” SubStance 23, no. 3, issue 75 (1994): 30. 25. Ibid., 30. 26. Ibid., 31. 27. The same cannot be said of Sartre and Beauvoir, however. On the libido in Sartre, see the first chapter of Lingis’s Libido. 28. Lingis, “Sex Objects,” 32. 29. On the volatility of the body, with reference to Lingis, see Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 30. Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 2. 31. Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, 17–18; Abuses, 137–38. 32. Lingis, Excesses, 29. 33. Alphonso Lingis, Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), ix. Emphasis added to “attach.” 34. On the competent body as the body oriented to the world and orienting reality, see chapter 1 of Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies (London: Routledge, 1994). 35. Lingis, Trust, x. 36. Ibid. 37. Here I am alluding once again to Stewart’s Ordinary Affects.

THREE Symbiotic Passion in Lingis Graham Harman

It is not sufficiently well-known that Alphonso Lingis is one of the greatest living masters of English prose. To gain a sense of his power as a writer, one need only read his essay “Aconcagua,” with its complex narrative structure and astonishing power to inspire. Let’s begin with a summary of his essay’s central ideas, quoting as many of Lingis’s diamondlike phrases as academic custom allows. Next, let’s consider the central paradox of the essay, in which Lingis says two apparently incompatible things about the human self. Finally, let’s see how the two sides of Lingis’s account of the self are unified in a symbiotic model of the human character. THE ONTOLOGY OF PASSION An unpleasant former colleague of Lingis at Penn State University was fond of telling everyone that “Lingis is brilliant, but he’s completely out of his mind.” I once heard an insightful rejoinder to this claim from a student who noted that for all of Lingis’s famous eccentricities, his career has been devoted to ethics pursued in a manner as sane as it is original, far from the paranoid narcissism of the critic quoted above. We taste this underrated humility of Lingis early in “Aconcagua,” which begins with a seemingly mundane anecdote from his travels. Trekking in the Argentine Andes, Lingis finds in his hotel a self-published book by one Juan Aguilar, a psychotherapist employed in the capital. Lingis decides to spend his evening reading the work and learns from it that one of Aguilar’s patients was a successful real estate agent who had no particular com27

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plaint about his family, career, or erotic life, yet still felt a sense of yawning emptiness. Aguilar proposes that the man join him in an ascent of Cerro Aconcagua, the world’s highest mountain outside the Himalayas; their dangerous attempt to scale the peak forms the bulk of the book’s content. Most readers would probably expect the book to be a moderately self-congratulatory adventure story, featuring Aguilar as an inspired therapist who healed his patient’s psyche with a bold outdoorsman’s strategem. Yet such expectations are swiftly undermined. This turns out to be the third time Aguilar made this proposal to a patient, and the two preceding attempts were both failures. To our surprise, the third effort to reach the summit is also a failure. Lingis shares his own dumbfounded reaction to the story: “This book unsettled me; I did not know what to make of it.” But from this puzzlement come some remarks on ethics that link up with some of the most basic problems of ontology. At first it is unclear just how the terror and magnificence of scaling a perilous mountain might be of use to a therapy patient dead to the meaning of life. “Impassioned states, that totally fill and throb in mind and body, disconnected from, disconnecting the experience and knowledge and enterprises of the past. Not opening upon a future: what was the utility of knowing these extremities of wonder, anxiety, terror, desolation, toxic lassitude?” 1 But this is precisely what Lingis means by “passion”: the experience of being drawn to something in a way that breaks with all the nuanced checks and balances of one’s life, leaping beyond utility or rationale. “Let us separate the term ‘passion’ from the terms ‘emotion,’ ‘affect,’ ‘feeling,’ ‘sentiment,’ and ‘mood.’ . . . [For] they belong to a specific kind of analysis and explanation. Feelings or emotions are taken to be psychic reactions to body disturbances caused by things or events that strike one from the outside.” 2 A passion, then, is not just a subjective event inside a mind, but places us outside in the things. Without this, the self tends to be almost indistinguishable from its environment: The sense of the self is not constant. Much of the time the tasks and the implements are laid out before us each day: the toothbrush, razor, and shower in the morning, the bus to work, the tasks laid out in the factory or office. A layout of directives in the things. We do what there is to be done. And the postures and manipulations we have picked up from others, and pass on to others. In all that we do not have a distinct sense of a self as an individual source of thoughts and decisions. 3

At first this might sound like a well-worn insight of the post-Husserlian phenomenology in which Lingis was trained, and to which he has contributed much of his own. The self is lacking in everyday life, but the way to generate it is not to withdraw from that life like a cogito on holiday from the world. Instead, the self comes about through a passion that fuses with its object: “All our senses are enflamed. Impassioned states

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give us the experience of being self-identical and undivided. Mind and body are one. Rage saturates the mind and is felt throughout the body, in the postural axis, in the clenched fists and beating heart, the trembling limbs.” 4 Rather than the self feeling passion as a transient state, “the self arises in the passion, takes form in it.” 5 Or even more beautifully: “Impassioned wonder, rage, terror, jealousy, and desolate mourning mark out a territory where my life and my honor are cut off from what is not mine, where what is deserved is bounded from what is undeserved. . . . Passionate outbreaks . . . stake out a territory that is my space, my world.” 6 Such passions also break with the everyday flow of time in favor of exceptional instants, along the lines of the old Heideggerian theme of kairos opposed to chronos: “passionate outbreaks . . . do not take place in a never-ending line of time segmented into minutes, hours, and days, nor in the time . . . where foreseen plans and projects are inscribed. . . . Passion intensely and completely fills a present.” 7 A passion requires that we be directly involved in an experience and are not just observers of a remarkable event. Lingis goes into specifics, offering a hierarchy and topology of passions. His choice of the fundamental passion echoes the pre-Socratics: “wonder is the fundamental impassioned state. . . . One is isolated, in the midst of the raging electrical storm, before the vast inhuman icescape of Antarctica, which fill the whole of space about one.” 8 This initial wonder spreads its wings in a multitude of forms: “There is an element of wonder, before the astonishing, the bewildering, the overwhelming, in every passion—in rage, in terror, in grief, in sexual passion.” 9 Even wrath expresses a wondrous commitment to our cause and our people. The same holds for courage, in which “an individual pits his own forces against the hateful machinations of men, against the furies of nature . . . [as] the inner voice of prudence and caution is choked. Courage arises in hard compacted energies before threatening forces and unsurveyable menaces, and takes a stand before the intolerable.” 10 Passion also “resolves us to endure fatigue and pain.” 11 Moreover, there is something mutually hostile about the passions: “Rage snuffs out fear. . . . But fear can shut off rage; the abrupt appearance of a mighty enemy force provokes flight. . . . Greed shuts out empathy and grief before the misfortune of others, grief over the death of a rich relative.” 12 Lingis observes further that each passion tends to follow its own typical course of transformation: “Terror characteristically passes into shame. Impassioned jealousy turns into rage. Rage often turns into mourning. Impassioned ambition often turns into guilt, although guilt does not typically turn into ambition. Unrequited love turns into hatred.” 13 Just as passions break with our everyday plans, they rupture with whatever historical or geographical context we happen to inhabit. Not only are “passionate states . . . tranhistorical and transcultural,” 14 as can be seen for instance from Homer’s Iliad, but even link different species:

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“rabbits terrorized by dogs, enraged pheasants defending their chicks against predators, elephants and dolphins mourn[ing] their dead.” 15 Indeed, we are such passionate creatures that some theorists hold that the only hope of political stability is to keep us all in check with the most patient and calculating of all the passions: avarice. Lingis quotes Albert Hirschman on the key role of avarice in modern liberalism, though the same point is made by Carl Schmitt to accuse the ostensibly bare-knuckled Thomas Hobbes of faintheartedness. 16 Hobbes is the true founder of liberalism, since the point of his Leviathan state is to crush the deadly struggle of the state of nature, where conversely the Nazi Schmitt (like his admirers on the Left) wants us to renounce bourgeois safety and embrace political danger once again. The final pages of Lingis’s essay teach us that passions are excessive, lasting, exclusive, and often shared. Unlike our biological needs for food and drink, passions do not aim to fill a pre-existent lack: “Impassioned states are not reactions proportionate to the situation; they are excessive. . . . Impassioned outbreaks surge with excess energies generated within.” 17 Passions are not just transient outbursts, but render their objects enduringly unique: “Passionate attachments are quite different from the utilitarian attachment to things, or the attachment to things for their symbolic value. . . . One is not merely attached to symbols, but to the dense and enigmatic reality of something alien to oneself.” 18 There is limited capacity in our passions, which cannot simply pile up cathexes without end: “Of the hundreds of women one meets over the years, one falls passionately in love with this one.” 19 Nor do passions always enclose us away from our fellows: “[Georges] Bataille indicates that the impassioned self is not isolated, closed in itself. We laugh and we weep with others [b]efore the collapse of laborious projects or pompous behavior or the disintegration of a sententious discourse into nonsense.” 20 Perhaps the specter of passion is the ultimate source of human hope. Who knows what unforeseen passions might break into our closed, grey worlds, tomorrow or ten years from tomorrow? Lingis concludes his essay on such a hopeful note: “Three times now Juan has gone to Aconcagua and turned back before reaching the summit. Which of his next patients—banker, middle-aged housewife, college student—is going to hear the advice to climb Aconcagua with him?” 21 Unable to join Juan on a climbing expedition, we can still look forward to joining Lingis in a closer discussion of his theory of passion. To this discussion we now turn. THE TWO FACES OF PASSION Late in Being and Time, Martin Heidegger cites Count Yorck’s correspondence with Wilhem Dilthey, in which the former remarks as follows: “But you are familiar with my predilection for paradox, which I justify by the

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fact that paradox is a mark of truth.” 22 The insight can be traced back as far as Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in which one of the definitions of substance is that which can support different qualities at different times: Socrates can be happy or sad, although happy always remains happy and sad is always sad. This implies Yorck’s related point that if something manifests different or opposite qualities at different times or in different respects, it must be deeper than any specific configuration of qualities that we might take it to have. A different form of the same insight lies at the core of Edmund Husserl’s work. The object of experience (and not the real object, as in Aristotle) is not equivalent to any set of its profiles but is something other. The object is not just the immanent principle of all its possible appearances, as Jean-Paul Sartre wrongly maintains. An orange is just this very orange, not the total series of possible viewpoints on it. In this way the “intentional object” of phenomenology is just as paradoxical, and hence just as much a candidate for truth, as the primary substances of Aristotle. Indeed, we can see an element of paradox in the very nature of philosophy, which as the Socratic love of wisdom both grasps and fails to grasp that which it seeks. Continuing down this path, we can try to identify the most paradoxical element of Lingis’s essay on passion. For this honor I will nominate his dual view on the status of the self as both related and unrelated to the outside world. For in a first step, we found Lingis asserting (much like Heidegger early in Being and Time) that the self is initially indistinguishable from its entire series of involvements. To repeat an earlier citation from Lingis: The sense of the self is not constant. Much of the time the tasks and the implements are laid out before us each day: the toothbrush, razor, and shower in the morning, the bus to work, the tasks laid out in the factory or office. A layout of directives in the things. We do what there is to be done. And the postures and manipulations we have picked up from others, and pass on to others. In all that we do not have a distinct sense of a self as an individual source of thoughts and decisions. 23

Against this banal set of everyday entanglements, like the biographical spider’s web in which Juan Aguilar’s patient felt himself trapped, passion is supposed to give rise to a self for the first time. We have already cited some of the passages in which Lingis associates passion with radical personal solitude. For instance: “Impassioned states . . . [disconnect] from, [disconnect] the experience and knowledge and enterprises of the past.” 24 We disconnect as well from the normal flow of time: “passionate outbreaks . . . do not take place in a never-ending line of time segmented into minutes, hours, and days, nor in the time . . . where foreseen plans and projects are inscribed.” 25 Life becomes a desolate adventure: “One is isolated, in the midst of the raging electrical storm, before the vast inhuman icescape of Antarctica, which fill the whole of space about one.” 26 In

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the electric storms, in Antarctica, as in all other sites of passion, we carve out a space that belongs to us alone: “Impassioned wonder, rage, terror, jealousy, and desolate mourning mark out a territory where my life and my honor are cut off from what is not mine, where what is deserved is bounded from what is undeserved. . . . Passionate outbreaks . . . stake out a territory that is my space, my world.” 27 And again: “Impassioned states give us the experience of being self-identical and undivided.” 28 Yet herein lies the paradox, since Lingis emphatically does not hold that the self exists before or outside its encounter with the object of passion. As he puts it: “the self arises in the passion, takes form in it.” 29 Our passions are always passionate in the face of something: “Courage arises in hard compacted energies before threatening forces and unsurveyable menaces, and takes a stand before the intolerable.” 30 Stated differently, passions are always object-oriented: “Passionate attachments are quite different from the utilitarian attachment to things, or the attachment to things for their symbolic value. . . . One is not merely attached to symbols, but to the dense and enigmatic reality of something alien to oneself.” 31 Nor is literal solitude required: “Bataille indicates that the impassioned self is not isolated, closed in itself. We laugh and we weep with others.” 32 There is no evident paradox on the question of whether Lingis thinks the self pre-exists its passions: his answer here is a clear “no.” Instead, the paradox concerns whether the self is fundamentally attached to the world, since Lingis answers sometimes in the affirmative and sometimes in the negative. There is no question that in non-passionate states Lingis sees us as completely immersed in the plans and equipment that surround us. Yet he does not view this as a “self.” According to Lingis the self first arises in passion, but this self is sometimes described as immersed in raw solitude and at other times depicted as in necessary fusion with its objects of passion. This topic bears extensively on recent disputes between relational and non-relational philosophies in the continental tradition. The dominant trend these days is surely anti-substance, pro-relation, and pro-context. Alfred North Whitehead and Bruno Latour are among the leading figures of this camp, though Karen Barad’s “intra-active” relational theory is increasingly cited as well. 33 For such philosophies there are neither subjects nor objects prior to their interactions with one another: hence Barad’s term “intra-activity,” meaning that objects pull each other into being with one another’s bootstraps. For Whitehead a thing is its prehensions of (that is, relations with) other things, while for Latour a thing is identical with its actions on other things. We find a relational component in Lingis’s own position in two different places: the indistinguishability of an autonomous “self” from its banal everyday entanglements and the inseparability of the true self from the objects of its passions.

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Yet contemporary philosophy also has a small but growing non-relational model of the self and of objects more generally. Quite apart from object-oriented ontology, there is the concept of the self found in Alain Badiou, whose position on passions is probably not far from that of Lingis. 34 Recall that for Badiou, the term “subject” does not refer (as in previous modern philosophy) to all thinking humans but only to those individuals or groups that remain faithful to an event that accords with one of the four Badiouian truth-procedures: art, love, science, politics. We can see how the self would need to be non-relational for Lingis, since his concept of passion requires that the self break for the first time with an enveloping web of petty calculative actions and routine domestic comforts. But what is the difference between the petty attachments of this case and the apparently profound ones of passionate moments? Does it come down to some institutional or literary authority’s assessment of what distinguishes the important from the trivial? Must we simply make arbitrary ad hoc judgments about love affairs, revolutionary activities, and the specific purposes of the moment for which we happen to be using hammers and drills or withdrawing money from bank accounts? SYMBIOTIC PASSION Such piecemeal arbitrary judgments prove to be unnecessary, since there turns out to be a genuine difference in ontological kind between the two forms of attachment: worldly absorption in trivialities on the one hand and passionate encounters on the other. To see this we must begin by disagreeing with both Lingis and Heidegger about the status of the self in situations of normal everyday concern. We recall that Lingis does not yet think there is a self in this situation, and by the same token Heidegger at this stage identifies only an “inauthentic” self immersed in its worldly dealings. This is fully in keeping with his tool-analysis more generally, which views equipment as a holistic system that gives rise to individual items only in rare cases of malfunction. Somewhat oddly, Heidegger views this as a negative event for nonhuman entities but a positive event when it happens to humans. For a nonhuman entity to be freed up from its equipmental context generally means that it takes on a false life as something represented in consciousness or fettered by the desolate enframing of technology. By contrast, when the human entity breaks free from its context in moods such as Angst or boredom, Heidegger views this as a situation of heroic courage, as a mark of one’s own superiority to the other, tranquilized Daseins. This matches Lingis’s own view of passion, though he does not comment on nonhuman entities in this context, and thus we cannot compare his view on this topic with that of Heidegger.

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Where I disagree with both Lingis and Heidegger is with their notion that there is no independent self in the case of everyday duties and absorptions. To show this, let’s first consider the case of nonhuman entities. Heidegger’s position is that entities are strictly speaking not individual in their everyday state, since they are all plugged into other items of equipment, with everything referring to everything else and gaining its meaning from everything else. Yet this cannot be correct. Heidegger is not just the philosopher of equipment but, even more importantly, the philosopher of broken equipment. It would be impossible for tools to break if they were sleekly assigned to each other, in holistic fashion and without surplus or residue, to all the other items in their environment. The hammer could not shatter if it were nothing more than its current references, if it were not something in excess of its current assignments. But the same holds for humans. If it were really true that no self existed apart from its current surroundings, it would never occur to us to break from those surroundings, and there could be no difference between authentic and inauthentic (Heidegger) or passionate and unpassionate lives (Lingis). Though the self never finds full expression in any given situation any more than nonhuman entities do, selves and hammers and bridges do exist in their own right in everyday situations, as something more than any particular situation in which they are inscribed. Yet the self may feel stifled or unfulfilled here, reduced to a caricature of itself as it goes about a limited range of deadening daily tasks. The self relates to the entities surrounding it, but both turn each other into caricatures, failing to capture the full depth of either’s plenitude. Passion changes this situation in obvious ways. But I would say that the self does not just appear for the first time in passion, since the self was already there in everyday life, but in muffled form. What appears in passion is not the self as a freestanding entity, but a new compound object formed from a merger of the self and its object of passion. When experiencing the electrical storms or Antarctica, it is not that I become an isolated self or that the self appears now for the first time. Instead, there is a kind of metaphorical transference of properties: I become Antarctic or electrical, and in some sense the Antarctic or the lightning bolt becomes me, the “me” who has proven worthy of them. A similar concept is developed by a scientific author who is among Lingis’s personal favorites: Lynn Margulis. 35 Her route to scientific fame, after an initial period of ostracism, lay in proposing that our multi-organelled eukaryotic cells came about from a symbiotic fusion of smaller and simpler organisms. Fruit flies evolve, Margulis argues, through the acquisition of viruses rather than through a lengthy and gradual process of natural selection. On an even more palpable level, those who join a safari in Kenya will find zebras and wildebeest herding together to pool the zebra’s fine eyesight and the wildebeest’s keen nose as means of detecting predators. There may well be a universal “human nature” just as

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there is a true human self behind any demoralized office worker or carpenter. But it may not matter, since however enduring this human nature may be in the view of adoring conservatives, it is largely drowned out by the symbioses we form with glass, domestic dogs, fire, wheels, canoes, electric lights, airplanes, and smartphones. History does not play out on the level of the human self, any more than biology remains at the level of simple prokaryotic cells. And as Lingis shows, ethics does not play out at the level of some ascetic “true self” freed from the world into empty space, but at the level of our passionate and sometimes monstrous attachments to dogs, hang gliders, or electrical storms. You are what fascinates you. NOTES 1. Alphonso Lingis, “Aconcagua” in Passion in Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Alphonso Lingis, ed. Randolph C. Wheeler (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 5. 2. Ibid., 6. 3. Ibid., 6. 4. Ibid., 6. 5. Ibid., 6. 6. Ibid., 6. 7. Ibid., 7. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Ibid., 7. 10. Ibid., 8. 11. Ibid., 8. 12. Ibid., 8. 13. Ibid., 8. 14. Ibid., 9. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 17. Lingis, “Aconcagua,” 10. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ibid., 11. 20. Ibid., 14. 21. Ibid., 14. 22. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Revised Edition of the Stambaugh, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010), 383. 23. Lingis, “Aconcagua,” 6. 24. Ibid., 5. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. Ibid., 7. 27. Ibid., 6. 28. Ibid., 6. 29. Ibid., 6. 30. Ibid., 8. 31. Ibid., 10. 32. Ibid., 14. 33. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

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34. Alan Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (London: Continuum, 2013). 35. Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

FOUR Love and Lust after Levinas and Lingis Wolfgang W. Fuchs

In A Natural History of Love, Diane Ackerman cites Stendhal as asserting there are four kinds of love: mannered love, physical love, vanity love, and passionate love. 1 2 An unofficial count in Love in the Time of Cholera 3 revealed the word “love” bestowed with twenty different modifiers. Yet contemporary philosophy has been quite frugal in the distinctions it provides in its discourse on love. Perhaps therefore we have not yet understood love and lust. Hegel gave desire a position of honor in philosophical thought that it has not had since the Symposium. He makes it (Begierde) the condition for the possibility of self-consciousness. In Hegel’s account, desire is transcendence. Yet Hegel did not follow the seemingly straightforward path of the levels of love (eros) that Plato does. As the great translator of and commentator on Hegel, Jean Hyppolite, observed: One more thing needs to be said here, at least in order to characterize Hegel’s venture: it would have been possible to present the duality of self-consciousnesses and their unity in the element of life as the dialectic of love. The importance attributed to love by the German romantics, by Schiller for example, and by Hegel in his early works, is well known. Love is the miracle through which two become one, without, however, completely suppressing the duality. Love goes beyond the categories of objectivity and makes the essence of life actually real by preserving difference within union. But in the Phenomenology, Hegel takes a different tack. Love does not dwell sufficiently on the tragic nature of separation; it lacks “the seriousness, the torment, the patience, and the labor of the negative.” 4 37

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Hegel intersected the path of Plato, the path which seemingly has not been taken up in this original manner after Hegel. And yet, particularly in the work of Sartre, we do find desire, love, as an original encounter with the other; one that is, of necessity, conflict. Even though it is clear in the Phenomenology that desire is the larger notion of which love is a subset, that eros is not singular, neither Hegel nor the thinkers who follow him, Sartre, Levinas, Lingis, clarified the relation(s) of desire and love. It may well be that this is an ambiguity, or a vagueness, that comes to us from life itself, or perhaps from the contexts in which we think life and seek to articulate it. It is a commonplace to differentiate (sexual) desire, lust from love, and to do so by establishing a hidden hierarchy. “It was only lust, it didn’t mean anything.” Or, “It wasn’t only lust; I love you.” Lust we often designate as having to do with animal or physical need. Or, in accord with conventional experience and the wisdom thereof, we distinguish phases of love and life, and affirm that (sexual) desire, or lust, is often what draws people into love, as does the philosopher John Armstrong. 5 Or we accept the Freudian account that all of the different types of love are simply weakened, diluted forms of the basic biological erotic drive for pleasure determined by the constitution of the human animal. One of the more fascinating aspects of Hegel’s work in the Phenomenology, however, is that desire for otherness that finds its satisfaction only in another consciousness is already the humanizing force; it is desire that makes consciousness human. 6 For later thinkers of the phenomenological–existential tradition, that desire is humanizing and humanized is taken as a given, which does not mean, however, that the lust–love relation becomes perfectly clear. Although finding the origination of the relation to the other in a way different than Hegel did, Sartre, Levinas, and Lingis have doctrines on lust and love that are, in part, because of their lack of clarity, phenomenologically questionable. Drawing lessons from Hegel, Sartre affirms that conflict is the original meaning of being for others, explicating that in terms of the ontological structure of human reality or being-for-itself, in that I am responsible for my being for others, but I am not the foundation of it. 7 In the concrete analyses that he offers, Sartre lists as the first attitude toward others: love, language, masochism. Specifically unlike Hegel in the Phenomenology, Sartre proposes love as the way to understand the fundamental relation to the other that is a constituent of my being. How strange that this philosopher to whom we owe so much for his reflections on the body, the body as a locus of meaning, nonetheless has to assert that it is consciousness, understood as the other’s freedom, that I wish to assimilate through love, but that can be done only on the basis of my own objectivity. This reveals the ideal of my transcendence through love as a failure. “This unrealizable ideal which haunts my project of myself in the presence of the Other

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is not to be identified with love in so far as love is an enterprise; i.e., an organic ensemble of projects toward my own possibilities. But it is the ideal of love, its motivation and its end, its unique value. Love as the primitive relation to the Other is the ensemble of the projects by which I aim at realizing this value.” 8 To further his analysis, Sartre raises the question, “Why does the lover want to be loved,” as though this were self-evidently central to love. No doubt there is something very rich in Sartre’s analysis, but by the end, or perhaps from the beginning, he has conflated desire and love, and insisted that the project of love is to be loved, which means to be again, and still, in his ontology, a transcendence transcended. This fundamental position holds even where he speaks specifically about desire as sexual: “My original attempt to get hold of the Other’s free subjectivity through his objectivity-for-me is sexual desire.” 9 Sartre, of course, recognizes this description as posing an untenable position, but rather than renounce the position he draws the consequence that it is desire, in its very structure, that is untenable: “Such is the impossible ideal of desire: to possess the Other’s transcendence and at the same time as body, to reduce the Other to his simple facticity because he is then in the midst of my world but to bring it about that this facticity is a perpetual appresentation of his nihilating transcendence.” 10 Ironically, love is disembodied in the work of Sartre, and sexual desire seeks the transcendence of the other. Lust is merely a variation of consciousness’s project to become its own foundation, a project that necessarily fails, since even in sexual desire in which the other has become flesh, I become again a body confronting flesh. Against this view that gives the origin of the relation to the other as ensuing from an ontological dimension of my being, that of being seen by the other, and that leads to the recognition that I am responsible for my being for others, but not the foundation of it, Levinas grounds the originating relation to the other in the face, and the necessity of understanding that I am first of all responsible for the other. Levinas makes the claim that to be human means to have a responsibility for the other; he rejects Sartre rendition of the primacy of the libidinal in favor of a variation of Heidegger’s notion of care (Sorge). The other concerns me. It is not the case that other is a limit for me. 11 For Levinas the responsibility for the other is the grounding moment of love. Not really a state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit) or a sentiment, but rather, in the presence of the face of the other, love is obligation. In clear distinction to Hegel, and nearer to Descartes in this point, Levinas starts with interior life. He must, since he claims the subject to be an identity, a necessity he finds in order to account for both subjectivity and alterity. The I is not first of all a relation. “Alterity is possible only starting from me.” 12 And, “Subjectivity originates in the independence and sovereignty of enjoyment.” 13 Nonetheless, Levinas, like Hegel, must

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and does account for desire. Contrary to Hegel, for whom desire is transcendence, he will insist that there are relations that are analogous to transcendence that are distinct from relations of transcendence. Levinas makes a distinction between need and desire that is central to understanding the positive descriptions of Levinas and the distinctions he might be making among love, sexuality, desire. Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, and this need still presupposes the total, transcendent exteriority of the Other, of the beloved. But love also goes beyond the beloved. This is why through the face filters the obscure light coming from beyond the face, from what is not yet, from a future never future enough, more remote than the possible. An enjoyment of the transcendent almost contradictory in its terms, love is stated with truth neither in erotic talk where it is interpreted as sensation nor in the spiritual language which elevates it to being a desire of the transcendent. The possibility of the Other appearing as an object of need while retaining his alterity, or again, the possibility of enjoying the Other, . . . this simultaneity of need and desire, of concupiscence and transcendence, tangency of the avowable and unavowable, constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal par excellence. 14

It is this doctrine of the equivocal that must be examined in regard to its constituents, for it would appear that within the fundamentally equivocal there is further equivocation. Need seeks to fill a negation or lack in the subject; it originates from the subject, that production of identity. 15 In his very original version of “first philosophy,” Levinas presents need, which for Hegel would be a type of desire, as the source of enjoyment; it is “living from.” The human being lives from contents that are not itself, that are distinct from its substance. 16 Living from . . . is happiness. But Levinas also in this context subscribes to naming need—the vulgar Venus. 17 Desire, on the other hand, is positively attracted by something other not yet possessed or needed. It originates in the other. Levinas proposes to characterize desire as a series of affirmative movements free of compulsion of any sort. “Having recognized its needs as material needs, as capable of being satisfied, the I can henceforth turn to what it does not lack. It distinguishes the material from the spiritual, opens to Desire.” 18 And further, a thought that leads us to the heart of the equivocal: “The infinite in the finite . . . , which is accomplished by the idea of Infinity, is produced as Desire—not as a Desire that the possession of the Desirable slakes, but the desire for the Infinite which the desirable arouses rather than satisfies.” 19 According to Levinas, such desire is to be understood, should it be perfectly disinterested, as goodness. In the interview already cited above, Levinas affirms that, “love thy neighbor” and “thou shalt not kill” mean the same thing. 20 It is of some interest that in the Phenomenology when love is spoken of by Hegel it too is of the neighbor. The biblical injunction is being heard. But is it clear who this one who is near is?

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According to Levinas, love, initiated as desire, finds its origin in responsibility for the other, and is thus transcendence of the self. But love also goes beyond the beloved in that movement structured as fecundity. “In paternity desire maintained as insatiate desire, that is, as goodness, is accomplished.” 21 It would appear that this one who is near, the desire for whom accomplishes goodness, is one who is very much related to me, the desiring I. This is the relation to infinity in the finite, for, discovers Levinas, “Paternity is a relation with a stranger who while being Other . . . is me, a relation of the I with a self which yet is not me.” 22 How exhilarating, how new, this doctrine thus far: desire is enjoyment, and love, lifted beyond need, is the insatiable desire, for it does not find its end in the immediate beloved, but is a trajectory to the future, to the child and to infinity. There is indeed equivocation needed to propose this doctrine that finds the nearest one in the child who is a (the?) stranger but who is also me. Aside from this, there are other difficulties with this doctrine that equates love with responsibility, that grounds love as the ethical relationship. The first difficulty: how is it that this one is the beloved? The way that Levinas comes to terms with this question is one that, although he has specifically rejected the type of explanation offered there, nonetheless recalls the myth told by Aristophanes but transforms the myth into a mystery: “love: which as transcendence goes unto the Other, throws us back this side of immanence itself: it designates a movement by which a being seeks that to which it was bound before even having taken the initiative of the search and despite the exteriority in which it finds it.” 23 A second difficulty comes with the first: unlike Aristophanes, Levinas will not merge the lovers, the lover and the beloved, into one soul to account for the unique attraction of the specific one to the specific other. For romanticism and even for Hegel, and still for common sense, the merging into one is the ideal of love. But that would be to lose otherness. In the interview titled “Being toward Death and ‘Thou Shalt not Kill’,” Levinas says: “not collapsing the lovers is the good in-itself—the very place of goodness.” 24 Thus, he diverges from Hegel’s sense of the tragedy of the separation of lovers to seeing proximity as the location of goodness, where the other lives as other. What is it then that pulls, across the distance necessary for genuine alterity, the love of the lover? What makes the beloved, in singularity, loveable? This raises a third difficulty. If love is born in responsibility, if it is a relation of the ethical, and if that is the spiritual itself, how is love possible as erotic love, as sexual love, as lust? To give an account of this, Levinas must return love as sexuality to the regime of need, beneath desire, to the activities of life that are enjoyment. But for Levinas, enjoyment is egoism, or, as he unequivocally states, “In enjoyment I am absolutely for myself.” 25 Levinas thus resorts to giving an account of eros as voluptuosity, and, “Voluptuosity hence aims not at the Other but at his

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voluptuosity; it is voluptuosity of voluptuosity, love of love of the Other.” 26 Levinas characterizes this as vertigo about the depth of alterity because it is already, without plan or project, the engendering of the child. It is also thus a profanation. “The simultaneity of the clandestine and the exposed precisely defines profanation. It appears in equivocation. But it is profanation that permits equivocation—essentially erotic—and not the reverse.” 27 By embedding the erotic in voluptuosity, Levinas grants its impersonal character as well as Sartre’s claim that at stake in this relation is “being loved.” It is difficult to see how this singular, that is, unique other for whom I am responsible could be approached or maintained in the bond that is both love and erotic desire. LINGIS In his discourse about the other, Alphonso Lingis follows Levinas, whom he has called his master. For Lingis too, alterity is about the face and responsibility. In his book Libido, published in 1985, Lingis praised Levinas’s teaching on eroticism: “Levinas alone has outlined a nascent theory of the vocative and imperative sense of the erotic solicitation. We require a concept of provocative sense, a semantics of the secrecy that is not disclosed but profaned.” 28 How striking then that in a later work Lingis associates eroticism with the zone of the sacred. Lingis offers not so much a doctrine or doctrines as entrances—unconventional ones—in regard to sex and love and eroticism. Lingis does not find fecundity to be given in the structure of the erotic, but neither does he see the erotic as arising out of and returning to the regime of need. In a bold move, Lingis does not first of all distinguish eroticism from love, the relation to the other of transcendence, but from sexuality. Sexuality, that object of so many serious discourses that rehearse the debate of its meaningfulness, is presented by Lingis as outstandingly the laughable pleasure, one that brings forth laughter and giggles, teasing and play. Lingis describes the generic pattern of the sexual encounter: When we do make contact, caresses disconnect our hands, eyes, and postures from the tasks and attractions in the outlying practical environment. . . . Closed to the outlying field of urgencies and demands, coupled with a body corresponding to our own, the sexual embrace and penetrations find contentment in the opaque flesh filling our orifices and engulfing our probings. Each one feels the eddies and ripples of pleasure that intensify the sensual contentment, a spiraling pleasure arousing and aroused by the pleasure of the other. 29

But for Lingis, this does not describe eroticism; that is something else. “Eroticism is not satisfied in contentment; it is the release of excess forces, craving extreme experiences in extreme torments and extreme pleasures.” 30 Having thus found a level of eroticism not accounted for in the

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phenomenological descriptions of Levinas, Lingis needs to locate not only a source for this experience but also a source in exteriority. Erotic passion is not an initiative of what we call our person—our separate and discontinuous existence, source of its own acts, responsible for what we ourselves say and do. . . . The erotic object . . . gives rise to a longing to pour all that we have of kisses and caresses, the energies of our throbbing blood, the flash-fires of our hyperexcited nervous tissues, the heat and phosphorescence of our carnal substance, into the other. 31

How very different this conception is from anything like the origin in need as Levinas had described it. Erotic passion, lust, is not an enjoyment where, “I am absolutely for myself,” as Levinas presented it, but is a dissolution of that self. What moves such passion is erotic beauty. Lingis acknowledges many kinds of beauty, but erotic beauty is that which detaches that body from the contentment of our practical, expressive, and sexual couplings, and makes it a snare for out lusts. It institutes the longing for disorder, for chaos; it is itself form bursting asunder with content that is too much for that individualized, personified form. A person turning into an erotic object realizes, makes real for herself or himself, that dimension of existence of what she or he is not the foundation. It breaks the person out of the world of work, reason, and order of the everyday—but also out of their personhood in the usual sense. Lingis finds eroticizing to be the call to break out of ourselves. The decomposition entices. “Voluptuousness plunges all that is infantile, feral, violent in oneself into another, seeking all that is frenzied, predatory, bloodthirsty in the other.” 32 The interior longing for chaos is different from the longing for release, for relief of tension that characterizes the sexual life of the everyday. It is the animation of the environment. This environment is the zone of the decomposition of work and reason, says Lingis. What Levinas identified as the occurrence of profanation, Lingis discloses as the zone of the sacred, the “zone of spilt blood, semen, discharges, excretions, which excite the transgressive and ruinous passions.” 33 LOVE OR LUST? If indeed Lingis has brought us beyond Levinas’s ambiguity of eroticism by specifying it as lust, the eroticism that is beyond, other than, the sexual encountered under the regime of need—let us call it “plain sexuality,” within the sphere of egoism, or within the zone of the profane—has this not come at the price of love? Lingis says very little about love. How could he when, in basic agreement with Levinas that love is responsibility, fear for the other, he finds eroticism to be violation, to thrive on the dissolution of selves, both my own and that of the other? For Lingis, the

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erotic relation is not an ethical relation, must not be an ethical relation. Where is one to look for a way to think of this dyad (or triad) that would avoid being a simple reiteration of traditional conventional wisdom, that is, common sense, which has told us that the tenderness of love and the excitation of passion are mutually exclusive? Perhaps from Lingis’s thought that the erotic is the zone of the sacred, a zone “set aside,” we get a hint of how to think about love in a way to avoid making it the enemy of the erotic. What we, following Levinas’s description, designated as “plain sexuality” is driven toward an end, a finality, the discharge of tension(s). It carries within it a duration with an end station. It is enjoyment toward an end. The erotic has a different temporal vibrancy; it seeks to enclose and include. It always wants more, but primarily more in intensity, in depth and breadth of feeling, and all at once. Eros lives simultaneity. As in time, so too in space. Both the sexual and the erotic loosen the ties to the practical world, make fade out on their respective stages that which escapes their immediate urgency. Love is different. As profound and enriching as they are, there is something troublesome in Levinas’s accounts, since they originate with and from a self that is substance. Perhaps it is possible to narrow the divide between sexuality and love, while allowing a place set aside for eroticism, if the self is comprehended as relation. In the practice of elementary sex—those fumbling hormone-fueled adolescent experiments—isn’t it necessarily also a matter of finding out about ourselves, what we are capable of, what we are—which can only be done through, by and with the other, becoming a sexual being? Isn’t erotic passion, pulled by the other, inspired by the other, or luring the other, demanding the other, a becoming eroticized, becoming a traveler in the zones we do not inhabit until now, being and wanting to be other than we have been? The I that becomes is the I of the relation to the other, a relation that is not first of all responsibility but transformation. Therein is the manifestation of the unique, the singular. It seems to me that the novelists and not the philosophers are right: there are multiple loves. Love temporalizes, love diffuses. Love is not first of all a feeling or a sentiment, although it becomes those too, but as loving, it is first of all an existing, existing precisely as a relation. This existing exists intertwined with and through the existence of an other. We can learn from Levinas that it is a regime of tenderness or responsibility, that to love is “to fear for the other,” but that does not exhaust what we can say about love. Just as there is poor sex, and perhaps poor eroticism (sexiness?), so too there is impoverished love. This love seeks to channel the flow of existence of the other, always towards the future, a future that is simply the horizon of the yet unencountered. This generates a past, a “what has been” that serves as canal gates of the flow toward the future of these two existences—a relationship. A rela-

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tionship is always about the past and what has been. It is dead water. Sartre is right that there is love, and not just desire, that desires to be loved, that being loved can be the inherent project of the lover. Investment love, loving for the return of being loved. This existence exists intermingled, but not merged, with the existence of another. This occurs under the regime of tenderness or responsibility. In its most mundane, it is existence encompassed—it attempts to channel the flow of the existence of the other: it embraces the existence of the other and accompanies the other, always toward the future, a future that is simply the horizon. But this process generates a past, a “what has been” of this duality of existences—a relationship. A relationship is always about the past and what has been. Perhaps this is a way to understand Sartre’s claim that the project of the lover is to be loved, since the past that I am really is in the domain of the other. In Levinas’s account it is striking that he spoke of the other as the desirable pulling me forth as the feminine that, through modesty, is always beyond. He didn’t speak of the other as loveable. And he spoke of love becoming need, that is, as having its origin in the self rather than the other. Surely this need to love is not “bad,” nor is its existence to be denied, but just as surely it is a love that avoids and surrounds, that resists transformation. One goes beyond oneself, accompanies the other in the direction of the future, but demarks the path. I suspect much of parental love, and the love that would be in its image, is like this. It is love not only protecting, but protected. Isn’t there also another love, a great love or a wild love, a loving that is an existence plunging itself into the midst of the existence of the other because the other is loveable? It is an attraction and not a drive; it flows intertwined with the existence of the other and is not subjected to the borders of the other. Unlike sexuality and the erotic, this love is diffused, temporally and spatially, throughout all of the aspects or dimensions of existence. Love does not aim at the extremes as does eroticism; it is already itself extreme. Love finds the loveable in the extraordinary, but also in the ordinary. Love’s field is the total playing field of the other. You love her not only because she lives in a way that is warm and generous, because she lives a life of courage and struggles for justice, but because of the way she drives, or how he concentrates when working on something, or because of how she lights a cigarette, or because of how he makes a mess when he cooks. Your loving is called forth when she giggles because she was caught in a downpour or because he can never remember where he put his car keys. You love her because she gives pseudo-scientific justifications for downing gobs of ice cream. You love him because he hates to shop for new clothes. This love that spreads out across the entirety of the everyday also surges across time; you love the little girl that she must have been and

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that is still in her. You want to know about her girlhood not to understand her better but to love her more, across a time that you did not share. You already love the feisty little old lady that she is destined to become. You love that little boy look he has sometimes and the playful senior citizen he is about to be. You love, embodied in this one, that flesh that does not replace the empty roll of toilet paper. Such love risks losing its grounding and its sovereignty because those are not its concerns; they are the by-products of loving. By loving thus one becomes more, other, better than one has been. In going toward the other one goes beyond oneself. This too is how one becomes, and how one becomes the lover of life. We must think here of Nietzsche’s “solar economy,” of the great star that gives of itself without recompense because that is how it exists. Perhaps love is a minor star. NOTES 1. Originally printed in Philosophy Today (52:1, 2008), 45–51. 2. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love (New York: Random House, 1994), 100. 3. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 4. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 164. 5. John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: the Philosophy of Intimacy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003). 6. G. F. W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 109–10. 7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 475. 8. Ibid., 477. 9. Ibid., 497. 10. Ibid., 512. 11. Emmanuel Levinas, “Being-Toward-Death and ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,” in Is It Righteous to Be: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford University Press, 2001), 132. 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 40. 13. Ibid., 114. 14. Ibid., 254–55. 15. Ibid., 62. 16. Ibid., 112. 17. Ibid., 114. 18. Ibid., 117. 19. Ibid., 50 20. Levinas, Is It Righteous to Be?, 132. 21. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 272. 22. Ibid., 277. 23. Ibid., 254. 24. Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?, 131–32. 25. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 134. 26. Ibid., 266. 27. Ibid., 257.

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28. Alphonso Lingis, Libido: The French Existential Theories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 118. 29. Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 140. 30. Ibid., 141. 31. Ibid., 142. 32. Ibid., 147. 33. Ibid., 149.

FIVE On Alphonso Lingis’s 80th Birthday —A Philosophical Journey From Nowhere to Nowhere John Murungi

It is not easy to determine how a philosopher’s birthday ought to be celebrated. What can formally be pointed out is that do so properly is to do it philosophically. This does not tell us much, but it opens the possibility of exploring what would constitute such a celebration. There is no manual to guide us. This is not one of the professional events where we can call on professional experts to tell us how to do it. To be sure, there have been numerous celebrations of birthdays for philosophers and, undoubtedly, many more will follow. It is also true that it is customary to have speeches or papers on philosophy read at such gatherings, just as we are doing here today. But there is no guarantee that these events are necessarily philosophical. What we can reasonably do here today is take this celebration as an occasion to learn what a philosophical celebration is. One may take doing so as an illustration of such a celebration. There is a reasonable expectation that a professor of philosophy can help us determine what a philosophical celebration is, but it should be born in mind that professors of philosophy can be obstacles in the making a proper determination. Heidegger’s words are relevant as we think about this matter. He tells us: The misinterpretations with which philosophy is perpetually beset are promoted most of all by people of our kind, that is, by professors of philosophy. It is our customary business—which may be said to be justified and even useful—to transmit a certain knowledge of the phi49

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I bring up Heidegger’s view to disabuse anyone of an erroneous expectation. Do not take me as a professor of philosophy with the expectation that I will provide you with information on how to celebrate a philosopher’s birthday. It is indeed true that professors of philosophy can provide such information, but one should not mistake them for philosophers. Non-philosophers may also be in a position to provide such information, but they too should not be mistaken for philosophers. I will not deny that there is what is professorial in what I am about to say, but there is also what is non-professorial about it. My interest lies in the latter. It may also be worthwhile to remind ourselves that one does not listen to a philosophical presentation passively. One listens to it creatively. There is room for every good listener here to add to or to enrich what is being said. To help us situate ourselves for what is to follow, we may provisionally benefit from Nietzsche’s view on who a philosopher is. He tells us: A philosopher . . . is a human being who never ceases to experience, see, hear, suspect, hope, and to dream extraordinary things, who is struck by his own thoughts as from outside, as from above and below, as by his type of experiences and lightning bolts; who is perhaps himself pregnant with new lightnings; a fatal human being around whom there are constant rumblings and growlings, crevices, and uncanny things. A philosopher—alas, a being that often runs away from itself, often is afraid of itself—but too inquisitive not to “come to” again— always back to himself. 2

What he says may tempt one to think of a philosopher as someone who is subject to constant hallucination or as someone who is chronically psychotic, and as someone who would be better off at a mental institution. This interpretation of Nietzsche is to be resisted. It is indeed the case that Nietzsche can be read as a psychologist, but one should not mistake a psychologist or a mental diagnostician for a philosopher or vice versa. Nietzsche deserves a philosophical interpretation and a philosophical understanding. What this entails is not self-evident. But assuming that what he says is correct, what he says has a bearing on the birthday we are celebrating today. We meet to celebrate the birthday of Alphonso Lingis—the birthday of a philosopher. On this occasion, the Lingis who ought to be of interest to us is Lingis the Philosopher, not Lingis the professor of philosophy. There is a difference between a professor of philosophy and a philosopher, and this difference ought not to be overlooked. The way philosophical education has been institutionalized covers up this difference. Students of philosophy as well as professors of philosophy are often oblivious of this difference.

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In the light of what Nietzsche says, approaching Lingis as a philosopher, we approach someone who is extraordinary. The approach itself must be extraordinary. In either case, what is extraordinary is not selfevident. I am here reminded of a story told by Aristotle according to Heidegger. The story is told of something Heraclitus said to some strangers who wanted to come visit him. Having arrived, they saw him warming himself at stove. Surprised, they stood there in consternation—above all because he encouraged them, the astounded ones, and called for them to come in, with the words, “For here too the gods are present.” 3

Heidegger’s comment on this story is illuminating. He says: The group of foreign visitors, in their importunate curiosity about the thinker, are disappointed and perplexed by their first glimpse of his abode. They believe they should meet the thinker in circumstances which, contrary to the ordinary round of human life, everywhere bear traces of exceptional and rare and so of the exciting. The group hopes that in their visit to the thinker they will find things that will provide material for entertaining conversation—at least for a while. The foreigners who wish to visit the thinker expect to catch sight of him perchance at the very moment when sunk in profound meditation. He is thinking. The visitors want this “experience” not in order to be overwhelmed by thinking but simply so they can say they saw and heard someone everybody says is a thinker. 4

There is what is Heraclitean about Lingis. Those who visit him or those who are with him, as we are, are likely to find nothing unusual or extraordinary about him. The celebration of his birthday does not immediately strike one as unusual or as extraordinary. After all, this event is one of the many events that take place on our campus. If we are to celebrate this birthday the way it ought to be celebrated, the task ahead of us is to see and experience how what is ordinary about him is extraordinary. This is not going to be an easy task, and we may not be successful, for we seek nothing but extraordinary success. Moreover, if it is granted that philosophy has something to do with who or with what we are as human beings, philosophy reveals what is extraordinary in each and in every one of us. This too is not self-evident. Let us also note that extraordinary beings inhabit an extraordinary environment, and where we are is or ought to be such a place. Again, this, too, is not obvious. If we do not recognize the extraordinariness of what or who we are, or the extraordinariness of where we are, in part, this is due to the poverty of our experience and to our perceptual incapacity—both of which may be due to the way we have been brought up. We have been socialized and acculturated into the ordinary. Such socialization or acculturation is not accidental. Ordinariness is the social and cultural glue that holds society together. The guardians of society and culture invest heavily in social and cultural

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preservation and conservation work. The university is itself not immunized from this societal and cultural undertaking, if only because it is one of the institutions that society uses to preserve and conserve itself. It is largely a place of the ordinary, and it is expected to promote ordinariness. It appears to be set apart by society as a site for the production and dissemination of ordinary information, at least, for the most part. Socrates, one of the memorable philosophers, got in trouble in Athens, his hometown, for engaging in philosophical activity—an activity that the guardians of society thought was politically disruptive. The prevailing societal tolerance of philosophy at the university today points to the success that society has had in repressing or suppressing philosophy’s extraordinary activity. For the most part, what takes place at the university as philosophy is anti-philosophy. Today’s university is a desert for philosophy. Very little is philosophically alive here. Society is not to be blamed entirely for this state of affairs. Resistance to extraordinariness of philosophy could also be due to existential timidity. For the most part, we are without courage when philosophy knocks on our door—the door into what we are. We often take flight from ourselves—from what philosophy can reveal about us. There is what terrifies us about what we are. Flight from ourselves has become a part of our daily bread. We may be suffering from petrification or mummification brought about by the society and the culture in which we live and also by enslavement to biosurvival instinct. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre has spoken eloquently about the attraction most of us have to the solidity of the stone. 5 We crave for the solidity because it provides us with a zone of psychological comfort and mental serenity. We encase ourselves, as if to shield ourselves from the world. The world frightens us. A philosopher, however, listens to a different drummer—an extraordinary drummer. He or she is a citizen of an extraordinary environment—a boundaryless environment. It is such an environment that nourishes him or her. Again, Nietzsche says: More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction of his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of man whom one calls philosophers, though themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience their time. 6

A philosopher will not allow himself or herself to be frozen in time or in history. He radically and most emphatically says yes to time, yes to history. He or she embraces his or her own temporality and historicity, which ultimately is the temporality and historicity of being human. Philosophy unglues. It wards off rust lest it settle on human existence, on human life.

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I believe it is in this context that Nietzsche refers to philosophers as furtherers of man. It is in this context that one encounters Lingis and in which one encounters anyone else who has given in to the seduction of philosophy. My observation of Lingis, the philosopher whose birthday we are celebrating today, has convinced me that he is one of the few courageous philosophers. The analytic of his existence and a reading of what he has written, and in listening to what he says, reveal that he is truly a dangerous question mark. Almost unreservedly and with an uncompromising passion, he throws himself into tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. He is a man dedicated to the endless conquest of the frontiers of existence, always testing the limits of life. It is entirely appropriate for us to characterize him as a philosopher without borders, as a philosopher who works at a university without walls—a university that is or that has become the world. He is a compulsive sensorial trespasser. One is likely to find him at the edge of the perimeter of the world of every sense organ. He is an obsessed trespasser of these perimeters, always demanding that these perimeters give way for deeper and broader reaches of aesthetic experience. He has what appears to be an unquenchable thirst for aesthetic experience. He has conducted an all-out assault on the rational universe and constantly contests the building of an electrified wall around it. He has not spared philosophy itself. He has made demands on it that it surrender the rational armor it has secreted around itself and open up to the demands or imperatives of life wherever they may take one. He has not hesitated to undo its conventional location. He favorably quotes Jacques Lacan at the beginning of his book, Excesses: “On the other hand, we hold that Sade’s bedroom is the equal of those places from which the schools of ancient philosophy took their names—Academy, Lyceum, Stoa. Here, as there, science was being prepared through a rectification of the position of ethics.” 7 The title of this book is revelatory. I dare say that it expresses what he is. He is excessive, terribly excessive. He does not appear to be attracted to what is not excessive. Lingis is no longer a professor of philosophy at an academic institution and, perhaps, he no longer professes philosophy. The classroom appears to him to be too confining. He has discovered that one can have philosophical experience elsewhere. A philosophy clinic or a philosophy laboratory need not be in an academic classroom. Life is the proper theater for philosophy, a theater where the drama of philosophy is composed and unfolds. It is not that he has continued Sade’s rectification of the position of ethics in the bedroom. His philosophical thoughts are generated and situated in ancient ruins, in jungles, in deserts, on riverbanks, on beaches, in favelas, in festivals, in terrorist-plagued countries, in indigenous ritual places, in indigenous religious sites, on human bodies, in his house—a house that appears to be an embodiment of his philosophical life. He himself is to be philosophically read the way one

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reads a philosophy text. He is a sign that is not in possession of what it signifies, that never exhaustively signifies. He is a perpetual signifier and signifies endlessly. Often, he appears to be on a hunt for new places to undertake philosophical study, to undergo philosophical experience, and unfailingly, shares the fruit of his research with the rest of us. He is a very generous man. Let me call your attention to one of the gifts he has for friends of philosophy. It is a gift for everyone here. He informs us: One night, sick for weeks in a hut in Mahabalipuram in the south of India, I woke out of the fevered stupor of days to find that the paralysis that had incapacitated my arms was working its way into my chest. I stumbled out into the starless darkness of the heavy monsoon night. On the shore, gasping for air, I felt someone grasp my arm. He was naked, save for a threadbare loincloth, and all I could understand was that he was from Nepal. How he had come here, to the far south of the Indian subcontinent—farther by far than I who, equipped with credit card, could come here from my home in a day by jet plane—I had no way of learning from him. He seemed to have nothing, sleeping on the sands, alone. He engaged in a long conversation, unintelligible to me, with a fisherman awakened from a hut at the edge of the jungle and finally loaded me in an outrigger canoe to take me, I knew without understanding any of his words, through the monsoon seas to the hospital in Madras sixty-five miles away. My fevered eyes contemplated his silent and expressionless face, from time to time illuminated by the distant flashes of lightning as he labored in the canoe, and it was completely clear to me that should the storm become violent, he would not hesitate to save me, at the risk of his own life. We disembarked at a fishing port, where he put me first on a rickshaw and then on a bus for Madras, and then he disappeared without a word or a glance at me. He surely had no address but the sands; I would never see him again. I shall not cease seeing what it means to be bound with a bond that can never be broken or forgotten, what it means to become a brother. How indecent to speak of such things in the anonymous irresponsibility of a writing he cannot read and a tongue he cannot understand! 8

When I read this piece, a piece that is memorialized in his book The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, 9 it cast a spell on me. Instantly, I was drawn into a state of existential angst. I found myself trying to make sense of what he had experienced, just as he himself tried to make sense of it. Someone who had contributed to his life-saving measure vanished absolutely. He who had assisted him was not there to be thanked. He had been swallowed by the unknown, by the unknowable. Light had gone out, and all that was left was darkness, heavy darkness, heavier than the proverbial darkness in ancient Egypt. One can imagine Lingis staring at nothing, or nothing staring at him. It is as if he had vanished with the vanishing of he who had contributed to his survi-

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val. As I reflected on this experience, it gradually became my experience. I got sucked into it. I saw myself staring at nothing, nothing staring at me. I saw myself trying to think of absolute absence, trying to figure out what to make of this elemental experience. Elemental experience is not owned by anyone. It is an offspring offered to anyone and undergone by anyone, even to those who may not be responsive immediately. It is an experience into which we are catapulted disclosing an elemental/constitutive dimension of who and what we are—an extraordinary dimension that rarely surfaces in our normal everyday consciousness. It is on this level that philosophy flourishes. This is the manner of philosophy’s way of offering itself to us. The door into what it is opens up and extends an invitation to us to enter and be at home there. Philosophy is a doorway. Its essence lies in being open and in opening. It opens itself as open and welcomes whoever seeks to dwell in openness and to being open, on the condition that one recognizes and preserves openness as one’s primordial mode of being. To have been open or to be on the way to being open is to be at home in this opening and in this openness. Openness is philosophy’s oxygen. Philosophy oxygenates. A philosophical celebration, such as the one we are having here, is a celebration of this opening, this openness. Here, the brotherhood of those who are open and those who are on the way to being open is constituted and unveiled. It is a constitution and the unveiling of true brotherhood— the brotherhood that Lingis found himself face-to-face with and in which we too must find ourselves face-to-face with if we are open to ourselves. Here is an essential location for ethics. The brotherhood at stake here is not blood brotherhood, it is not racial or ethnic brotherhood, political brotherhood, gender brotherhood, religious brotherhood, or the brotherhood of common political citizenship. It is a brotherhood in nothingness, a brotherhood that is truly human, brotherhood in which every human being is open to every other human being and, indeed, to all that is. It is into this brotherhood that philosophy initiates and sustains us. To be a true brother is to exhaust oneself unreservedly in this brotherhood. It is to expect no reward for our good deeds. There is an intrinsic satisfaction and pleasure in simply belonging. Philosophy welcomes us to common brotherhood—brotherhood that is both human and extra-human. It invites you to be a member of this brotherhood for you are what you are because of it. You are not invited to join what is foreign to you, but to be who and what you are. At Mahabalipuram, he who renders help appears from nowhere and disappears into nowhere. The same way he came is the same way he disappears: coming from nowhere and disappearing into nowhere. As it were, out of the blue, he disappears into the blue. He has no address where he could be located and thanked. His address is on the sand, the sand that is constantly being washed away by a sea or ocean wave, or by

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the wind. This is the way of a philosopher, the way of philosophy. One knows not where one comes from or where one goes. One has no identifiable location—location that could constitute one’s address, where one can be found. The philosopher we are celebrating today is without an address. He is here and not here, and he is there and is not there. Since a philosopher is a man or a woman without an address, it can be said of him or of her that he or she is homeless where many are ordinarily at home. It is this homelessness that constitutes his or her home. I suspect that this is precisely what intrigued Lingis about the Mahabalipuram experience and what made it memorable. He found himself in he who had come to assist him, the disappeared one. The assistant was a site for self-awareness. He discovered an ethics. He discovered in and about himself a brotherhood that lay dormant in him. To be so intrigued is to be intrigued about oneself as a philosopher. To be philosophical is to be haunted by nothing. Ordinarily, we want a crutch, something to lean on. Lingis found nothing to lean on. His assistant had been swallowed by nothing, not even a trace was left behind. He looked and looked, and looked, but there was nothing to be found. But he found nothing and this nothing found him. He was enigmatically comfortable with this finding—this finding of nothing. This experience is the undercurrent of everything he says, everything he writes about, as far as I can tell. One suspects that he breathes it and that even his dreams are pervaded by it. It is entirely proper to have a philosophical celebration of a philosopher’s birthday. If Lingis were a dancer, it would be proper to celebrate his birthday by dancing, and if he were a magician, we would properly celebrate his birthday by magicking. He is a philosopher. Accordingly, we celebrate his birthday by philosophizing. It may not be obvious, but a philosopher’s birthday is the birthday of philosophy. When what is born is born, that which is born reveals itself and stands out, thereby availing itself to those who care to experience it. Moreover, the birthday of philosophy is at the same time the birthday of a philosopher, and in witnessing the birth of philosophy, a philosopher witnesses his or her own birth. Because Lingis is a philosopher, his birthday is the birthday of philosophy, just as the birthday of philosophy is his birthday. Here, we witness two birthdays—birthdays in which each is the site for the other’s birthday. There is, moreover, another birthday that we are likely to overlook: our own birthday, in so far as we are philosophically inclined. To be drawn to the celebration of the birthday of a philosopher is to have ourselves implicated in this birthday in a way that makes it our own birthday too. Provided that we fully understand ourselves, we who have gathered here to celebrate Lingis’s eightieth birthday, also gather to celebrate our own birthday. To celebrate his birthday is to enter into a fraternal relationship with him. We are born with him and he is born with us. We are as old as he is and we are as young as he is. There is yet another birthday that we rarely think about and that we rarely celebrate, a birth-

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day we are at the moment also celebrating: the birth of nature. Nature gives birth and sustains what is. It is causing to be and preserving what comes to be. A birthday is the day of coming to be. It is not only human beings who come to be. In celebrating a birthday we celebrate all that comes to be, and because we ourselves come to be, celebrating birthdays is comprehensive. Philosophy draws us to this experience of birthday. In any sense, this is an extraordinary experience. It is this experience that draws us together. Embarking on a journey to come and celebrate Lingis’s birthday is to embark on an extraordinary journey. We are here extraordinarily and in the presence of the extraordinary. I must confess that when I first met Lingis, what is extraordinary about him was not evident. I met him when I was a graduate student. Initially, I was hesitant to approach him, apprehensive about getting too close to him. He was dressed in a black suit, black shiny shoes, a white shirt, and a tie. I did not dress this way, and I did not want to dress this way or to hang out with people who dressed this way. It made me uncomfortable. To use the language of the time, there was nothing groovy about him. Had he ever heard of James Brown, of Jimi Hendrix, of the Youngbloods, of the Beach Boys, of the Chambers Brothers, of Chuck Berry, of Bob Dylan, of the Flower Children?—I asked myself. Because of the rebel in me, nurtured in the paroxysm of the sixties, he came across as the very opposite of what I was and the opposite of what l wanted to be. He was too “clean” and too antiseptic. He appeared to be too puritanical for my taste. He appeared to live in a world that was totally unlike the world in which I lived, a world that my generation wanted to create as an alternative to the repressive and oppressive world that the previous generation had apparently created. In the course of time, however, I mastered enough courage and enrolled in one of his courses, a little anxious, not knowing exactly what to expect. After the first course, I decided to take another, and then another. Increasingly, I got the feeling that there was something about him that was attractive in the way he saw the world, and in the way he passionately talked and wrote about it. Gradually, I was weaned from my prejudices about him. He succeeded in casting a spell on me, the same spell that philosophy had cast on me, and the same spell that philosophy casts on anyone who is a philosopher. I experienced a rare kinship with him—the kind of kinship that philosophy fosters on those who cannot resist its seductive pull. Here, too, is a site for elemental brotherhood, for philosophical ethos. My initial encounter with him yielded very little knowledge about him. For some time now, I have come to recognize that I did not fully know who I met, and I must confess that even today, when in his company, I do not know fully who I am with. It is not that he is concealed or that he conceals himself, or that I am too dumb to know who he is. What appears to be the case is that neither he nor any one of us is an object of comprehensive knowledge. I am not even sure that partial knowledge

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makes sense in regards to the kind of being that we are. It may not make sense to think that we are no more than an aggregate of knowledges or subjects of ever-increasing knowledge. To know someone is not to know someone. Inevitably, each and every one of us embodies the unknown and the unknowable. Socrates died without knowing himself except for the extraordinary knowledge he had, the knowledge that he did not know himself. Whereas others erroneously believed that they knew themselves, he knew that he did not know himself. This not knowing himself unfolded in the course of time. The way he died, dying ahead of himself, still in pursuit of self-knowledge, is precisely the way we will meet our own death when it knocks on our door. We will die the way we are: out of reach, without having known ourselves. It seems to me that this reading of Socrates, this reading of ourselves, resonates with some of the observations presented to us in phenomenology, an area of philosophy in which Lingis has truly distinguished himself. He has insightfully written about the phenomenology of the world of the other. It is also unequivocally clear that he understands that from the standpoint of the other, he is the other for the other. His writings are inevitably autobiographical, even when he writes about others. He tries to traverse the distance between himself and the other and between himself and himself, and all these attempts fail—a failure that is a success. The other is just as elusive as he is. It is he who has observed that “to see the other is to see her place as a place I could occupy and the things about her as harboring the possibilities that are open to my skills and initiatives. It is to see the other as another one like I am, equivalent to and interchangeable with me.” 10 Strictly speaking, one does not harbor possibilities. Possibilities have no subject to which they can be predicated or attached. One is one’s possibilities, and it is precisely for this reason that we are unknowable, if to know is to preempt us of and as possibilities. These are strange possibilities, possibilities that are singular and at the same time communal. We rise individually from the pool of being human, from the pool of nonbeing, and remain rooted in this pool. This is a pool that is never overpopulated. It is a pool of possibilities. What phenomenology has done is truly epochal. What most of us usually refer to as self-knowledge or the lack thereof is ordinarily understood in terms of mind—mind in the Cartesian sense in terms of an immaterial thing mysteriously located in the body, sometimes called spirit, soul, reason, or intellect. Phenomenology has alerted us to the inadequacy of this understanding. It has made and continues to make a case for the incarnate self. This places self-knowledge or the lack thereof at the center of corporeality. The unknown and the unknowable are corporeal modes of being human. It is that in which all of us are immersed. Our corporeality is the site of the possibility that we are. As the sensible, the corporeal is where we encounter others and it is where others encounter

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us. It is precisely this insight that Merleau-Ponty brought into prominence and that animates the work of Lingis. To my knowledge, today, Lingis is one of the few philosophers who are at the cutting edge in the process of deepening and broadening this insight into corporeality. For him, what used to be called intersubjectivity is now intercorporeality. The unknown and the unknowable about us are encrusted in the corporeal, in the flesh. Phenomenology has contributed to the rescue of the body, from the clutches of biophysical thinking about the body and from those religionists and spiritualists who make their mark by trashing the body. It is not that phenomenology is anti-biology or anti-physical or anti-natural sciences or anti-religion. Rather, it is a matter of recognizing the lived dimension of the body—the body that you and I inhabit as a way of being who or what we are. Both the unknowable and the non-knowable are ever-receding. They exist as possibilities of being—being never catches up with them. They are essentially horizonal. These positive negative modes of being are beautifully mirrored in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. In regard to being human, Sartre tells us, “strictly speaking, we should never say of him that he is at all. He is what he is not and he is not what he is.” 11 Sartre’s words remind me of a song by The Beatles, a song that has phenomenological/existential import. The song says: He’s a real nowhere man, Sitting in his nowhere land, Making all his nowhere plans For nobody. 12

What Sartre says and what this song says convey a sense of what Lingis is, a sense of what we all are. It is about all of us singularly and communally. Prevailing economics, the economics of modernity, has obscured this human reality. It has subjected us to the modern cult of petrified individualism, petrified autonomy. In the context of modernity, when I look at you, I see the negation of what I am; and when you look at me, you see a negation of what you are. We see each other as competitors, not as an affirmation of our kinship with each other but as each other’s enemy. Unwittingly, we have become children of Hobbes. To be is to be at war with each other. We appear to have forgotten that it is in the community of human beings that each one of us is what he or she is. Let us imagine this community as a corporeal community—a community that is more than an aggregation of bodies. We are an organic community of bodies. We are nowhere men and nowhere women, and reside in nowhere land. Corporeally, we are all citizens of this strange land, a land of no citizens. We can all fit in it. Here there is no overpopulation. This is the land where we celebrate Lingis’s birthday, our birthday. If it is granted that what is philosophical is not alien to us, coming here to celebrate Lingis’s birthday is coming home. Coming here is not

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truly coming here, if it implies walking away from where one was before coming here. Where one comes from is where one goes and is where one returns. It is where one always is. A philosophical journey begins where it ends, and ends where it begins. Here, we have a journey that is truly enigmatic, so enigmatic that it can be said of it that it is a journey that begins nowhere and that ends nowhere—a journey that is not a journey. A philosophical journey begins at home and ends at home. In the annals of the history of philosophy, we are told that in ancient Greek philosophy, Parmenides, a well-known philosopher, allegedly distinguished himself by categorically denying the possibility of motion. There was also in ancient Greek philosophy another well-known philosopher by the name of Heraclitus who allegedly distinguished himself by claiming that everything was in a state of flux. Apparently, he categorically denied what Parmenides categorically claimed. Then in our time, comes a philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who claims that the two ancient Greek philosophers said one and the same thing. As he says, “Actually, Heraclitus, to whom is ascribed the doctrine of becoming as diametrically opposed to Parmenides’s doctrine of being, says the same as Parmenides. He would not be one of the greatest of the great Greeks if he had said something different.” 13 Assuming that Heidegger is correct, a philosophical journey is enigmatic. It does not appear to be a journey in the normal sense. A journey is expected to be from somewhere to somewhere. When someone tells us that he is going on a journey, our normal expectation is that he or she is to leave from one place and go to another place, from A to B. When the place of departure is indistinguishable from the place of arrival or when it is identical with it, normally we are at a loss on what is to be understood. The distinction between departure and arrival appears to lose its ordinary meaning. It is precisely this normal understanding of a journey that is set aside when the statement at stake is philosophical. As said previously, there is what is extraordinary about philosophy and, by implication, what is extraordinary about a philosophical journey. To remove the extraordinary from philosophy is to bring about the death of philosophy; it is to silence it. The extraordinary is the milieu or the environment in which we are to find ourselves if we are to properly celebrate a philosopher’s birthday. In the celebration we are to allow ourselves to be led by the extraordinariness of philosophy. We should not seek to manipulate or control where or how we are led by it. It releases us into the extraordinary that it is. Here, in this celebratory event there is a possibility for us to learn about philosophy and to deepen our understanding of philosophy, or gain an insight into what takes place in the philosophical world—a world in which Alphonso Lingis is a citizen and in which you, too, are a citizen, in which all of us are citizens. Before one is born, one is not, and when one dies, one will not be. This not being, as a way of being, haunts every philosopher. It haunts every

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human being. It is not and cannot be left behind, or be severed from oneself. It is integral to what one is. It is this existential situation and in it that the celebration of the eightieth birthday of Lingis is constituted and celebrated. If you were truthfully to retrace your steps back to where you were before you came to this celebration, you will end up discovering that you were already here. You came where you already were. After this event you will return where you are. If this is indeed the case, one can reasonably ask oneself, why bother coming in the first place or why bother returning to where I came from? I wonder about this too. But didn’t the ancient Greeks allegedly claim that philosophy begins with wonder? There is nothing exclusively Greek about this claim. One is likely to encounter it wherever philosophy flourishes and in whoever philosophizes. Let us not forget that the work of a human being is being a human being. This is our work and will remain our work. There is no exit. Let us not look elsewhere. We are at home, a home that is here and everywhere. Zhuangzi has words of wisdom for us: “To keep the torches burning in broad daylight would be making needless trouble for oneself. To continue watering one’s garden during heavy rainfall would be pointless labor.” 14 Be anchored where you are, which is everywhere and nowhere. To be so anchored is to be anchored in oneself. This is the home of the philosopher’s birthday celebrants. It is also the home of Dionysus and the home of the gods and the goddesses. We are homemates of the gods and goddesses. It is here that the celebration of a philosopher’s birthday takes place. Participating in this celebration is to undergo an ecstatic experience. It is to be cast out of oneself as a way of being oneself. NOTES 1. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 11. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 230. 3. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Books, 1993), 256. 4. Ibid., 257. 5. Jean Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George Becker (New York; Schocken Books, 1965), 18. 6. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 137. 7. Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), v. 8. Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 158–59. 9. See note 8. 10. Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who have Nothing in Common, 127. 11. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 735.

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12. The Beatles, “Nowhere Man,” recorded October 12 to November 15, 1965, on Rubber Soul, Parlaphone 77746402, compact disk. 13. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, 257. 14. Zhuangzi, The Essential Writings, trans. Brook Ziporyn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 6.

II

Collaborations: Lingis and the Philosophical Tradition

SIX Collaborations Alexander E. Hooke

Developing the often-overlooked phenomenon of collaboration, Alphonso Lingis observes: “We greet the other as a depth structure of forces, and recognize community with him or her, in the handshake that seals a pact—a community that is realized in the collaboration in which each has his or her own tasks.” 1 BINARY STARS Most of us looking into the starry heavens see very little. With artificial lights and pollution obscuring normal vision, we need a telescope or access to areas remote from civilization to discover the many splendors of the night sky. Among the most startling of these splendors are binary stars. Binaries—also called doubles, multi-star systems, or clusters—are born when two or more stars enter each other’s stellar atmospheres or mutual orbits. Often one is much larger than the other, such as when the giant red star extends it thermonuclear forces upon a white dwarf, causing a brilliant outburst of colors for amateur and professional astronomers. The splendor is short-lived, at least in terms of cosmic time. After a million or so years, the white dwarf disintegrates and binary brilliance disappears. Binaries or clusters are surprise events. This unpredictability adds to their charm, but also to the curiosity and wonder of stargazers everywhere. Astronomer Piet Hut likens the birth of binaries to taking center stage of the stellar theatre, displaying the stunning beauty of a ballet of a 65

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million dancers. “It is through their (binaries) interactions with other players,” says Hut, “in the form of occasional pas de trois (three) and pas de quatre (four), that fascinating new patterns (and even new characters) arise.” 2 If such celestial liaisons were possible among humans, what might they look like? How can something so unpredictable but brilliant as binary stars illuminate potential human liaisons that momentarily take the center stage of our world? One answer, studied in the writings of Alphonso Lingis, is collaborations. While the word “collaboration” has nefarious and trendy uses by fascist sympathizers and institutional partnerships, Lingis provides a distinct and compelling case that the human is also a collaboration driven by passions, imperatives, or visions that, like binary stars, bring two or more individuals committed to completing a passion, imperative, or vision. The work of Lingis shows that such collaborations offer a new perspective on perennial philosophical themes, from beauty and justice to truth and goodness. Here we attempt to address the following. Collaborations, like binary stars, unpredictably emerge and occasionally take center stage of the human world. Their philosophical significance is presented in the many anecdotes, stories, photographs, meditations, and commentaries a reader finds in Lingis’s writings. The next section on “Collaborating” highlights the context of his focus on this topic and several cases he depicts in terms of their shared passion, imperative, or vision. Section 3, “Existential Genealogy—A Sketch,” outlines a methodological approach deployed by Lingis (admittedly, he does not use this term) in his efforts to understand and convey the fascinating appeal collaborations hold for us. Whereas the historical genealogy of Michel Foucault provides us a conceptual lens to investigate how relations of power, knowledge, and freedom lead to the birth of, for example, the prison, clinic, or human science, existential genealogy in the work of Lingis offers an innovative perspective to see the embodied passions, imperatives, and visions of humans to seek to give birth to—or often a rebirth of—intriguing or disturbing truths as well as unfamiliar cases of beauty and goodness. Section 4, “Lennon/ McCartney” attempts to apply Lingis’s perspective to another collaborative phenomenon—John Lennon and Paul McCartney—in order to illuminate a prehistorical passage that led to the historical moment they founded: The Beatles. Section 5 closes with a brief account that if Lingis’s views can be considered an introduction to existential genealogy, then in the context of this essay we can see how Lingis adds two philosophical moments to understanding a human dimension: witnessing collaboration and experiencing collaboration.

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COLLABORATING On the collaboration of the Chapman brothers, Lingis contends: “For twenty years their artworks have been made working together. Theirs is not a family but a political collaboration, they say: working together undermines the ego.” 3 A variety of associations appear in Lingis’s writings. Friendships, lovers, collectives, communities, families, fellow nomads, symbiotic relationships with creatures, and elements of nature are among the many contacts that he depicts, describes, and reflects upon. Collaborations are distinct in several ways. First, they are anchored to a task or project. Second, they thrive on the margins of society and institutions, at times assuming the perspective of outsiders looking in. Third, they are limited in duration; as the project nears completion, the collaboration itself begins to dissipate. Fourth, the intensity of collaborations tends to suspend or erase the demands of private egos and individual needs or wants; indeed, often this intensity transforms the collaborators themselves. Fifth, collaborations are born out of a shared passion, imperative, cause, or vision. Admittedly, the term collaboration carries dubious connotations. Those who are familiar with or lived through World War II immediately associate collaborators to those who assisted the fascists and tyrants. This sense still carries considerable weight when ascribed to those who are in cahoots with today’s dictators, military regimes, and terrorist movements. The term collaboration has also become an overused term to account for any organized partnership among institutions and organizations. According to Joshua Shenk in his study of the powers of pairs, a collaborative couple is construed as the primary unit. Like the surprising dynamics of binary stars, human collaborations create a distinct entity. This creative aspect and momentary suspension of individual gain eludes the formalized and self-interested plans of institutions that work together or those in cahoots with tyrannical forces. Shenk describes the birth of a collaboration as a chance meeting that leads to “joint identities,” an experience that is a leap into the unknown insofar as each individual now approaches an unpredictable tension and growth by working with another. 4 The chance and singular moment of these joint identities leaping into the unknown underscores Lingis’s focus on collaborations that address conventional themes of truth, beauty, or goodness. This focus should not be construed as an extension of affect theory. Lingis shares with affect theory notable influences—particularly in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. He also diminishes the significance of human intentions and motives when trying to account for ever-surprising forms of human behavior, and focusing on the status or meaning of human intentions or motive often reveals quite little. Affect theorists add that humans themselves are rarely the self-conscious initiators of an action or cause. They

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are caught up in a web or network of conditions. For affect theorists such as Brian Massumi, life is bound in connectibility, to be studied in terms of “rhythm, relay, arrival, and departure.” 5 Building on this notion, Stamatia Portanova claims “Affect is not a continuous fluidity but needs to cut a space for itself and for its non-socially-connoted non-linguistically-expressible resonance.” 6 From this, the view of the perspective of the collaboration makes sense. It too is already caught in a web or network, and now in the midst of a temporary coupling. That is, the collaboration is that participation of elements that “allows the formation of doubled, or multiple, visions of the world.” 7 Lingis’s view presents a more creative and compelling perspective. Affect theory presents a passive or reactive perspective by seeing collaborations as “participation of elements that allows.” For Lingis, a collaboration does not allow a vision. Rather, the vision gives birth to a collaboration. What we find to be important, beautiful, honorable, tragic, or urgent comes to us by our visions and passions, yet they are often most energized through collaborative efforts. One example involves the artistic collaboration of two brothers, Jake and Dinos Chapman, who have been working together for over twenty years. While in London, Lingis attends an exhibition displaying their sculptures. Lingis tells of the laughter and horror from seeing some of their works. One statue at first glance seems to be an African mask or fetish, but upon a closer look the spectator sees the McDonald’s golden arches logo furtively appearing all over of the piece, with an image of Ronald McDonald twinkling at the museum visitor as if to entice him to order a greasy hamburger with fries. The ubiquity of the golden arches in the world outside the museum illuminates the fetishes of our own society. Another work, titled Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic Desubluminated Libidinal Model, depicts twenty-one child mannequins in distorte, sexually perverse, and mechanistic poses. With the proliferation of childlike mannequins and television commercial erotically displaying children’s bodies to sell the latest foods and fashions, one is struck by the sculpture’s ability to merge the junk of mass manufacturing with the botched products of genetic engineering. The collaborative works of the two brothers, according to Lingis, evokes a “laughter that interrupts and decomposes the moral autonomous individuality in us (which) obscurely knows and calls forth a new kind of existence for us.” 8 As the above epigraph notes, the Chapmans’ aesthetic and political collaboration thrives insofar as their individual egos dissipate or alternate in the vision that guides their artistic projects. But examples only take us so far. Lingis is also interested in how collaborations become possible and what are the conditions for their unexpected emergence.

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EXISTENTIAL GENEALOGY On becoming an accomplice, Lingis determines: “Something was understood; the password among accomplices was recognized. Something was said that made you the accomplice of the one that is one of his kind: quetzal bird, savage, aboriginal, guerilla, nomad, Mongol, Aztec, sphinx.” 9 It was at Loyola College, Maryland, when I first heard Lingis present a talk. He reflected on an encounter with Augusto. Later the talk appears as a chapter, titled “Matagalpa,” 10 a small town in Nicaragua. While the listener might be more focused on the dramatic descriptions of Augusto protecting a stranger in the middle of the night, the reader has a better opportunity to situate the encounter within an historical backdrop of invasions, cruelties, and terrors brought upon the citizens by the governments of Nicaragua and the United States. The reader has a chance to reread the section where the scene shifts to a modest dinner at a small hotel and the electricity abruptly shuts off. There are sounds exchanged, but in different tones and languages, so the reader is not certain of the communication being undertaken. Then the chapter’s dramatic development is interrupted by Lingis’s reflections on communication systems among bees, ants, wolves, adding that humans have the ability to discover specific traits of things and events. Which things and events the reader soon discovers as “Matagalpa” comes to a close. While driving his car through the dusty roads and crowded villages, Lingis recounts the recent violence that overwhelms Nicaraguan life, particularly the battles between the thug government and Sandinista rebels. Suddenly his car is stopped by Augusto, a man with a rifle who has hunted and been hunted most of his life. Augusto then requests they go to another village, where Lingis finds he is the lone guest. He is introduced to a young woman named Consuela, who is collaborating with Augusto and other rebels to thwart the government thugs. As an American, Lingis could have been a profitable tool for negotiations over release of prisoners or purchase of weapons. Instead, Augusto and Consuela’s collaboration is guided by an imperative of justice—not just for their people but for anyone. This is exemplified when, at the risk of death, one of them takes the American traveler into the midnight jungles to protect him from the approaching government military. Conveying the experience of this collaboration through a philosophical story is one of Lingis’s central contributions to contemporary thought. The method or paradigm used to study and reflect on such experiences we will tentatively call existential genealogy. Lingis does not use the term. In the foreword to Sensation, for instance, Lingis carefully distances himself from several major tenets of existentialism. 11 Existentialism’s emphasis on a holistic view of the self, the primacy of the intersubjective world, the significance of nothingness in human determination and re-

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flection, and the centrality of truth in communication is often suspect in Lingis’s thought. These limitations aside, there are existential themes that underscore many of his writings and help the reader to interpret some of his philosophical contributions. This more positive affirmation of existentialism appears in Lingis’s analysis of the singularity of experiences, the unpredictable but intense ways humans live their bodies, the surprising moments when people declare that things can and must change, the encounter that begins with the face of another, and the importance of humans focusing on a project. In the story about Augusto, Lingis’s most startling points are not about Augusto’s intersubjective motives or exercise of free choice in an absurd world. The reader is more directed to how Augusto and Consuela collaborate, with the possibility of their being lovers being merely an afterthought. While a listener of the Lingis talk holds on to the vivid descriptions of the scenes, particularly Augusto walking through the jungle in the middle of the night to protect a foreigner’s life, the reader gets a better sense of how the collaborators arrived at this abandoned hotel, the trust and courage they have in one another, and even the likely futility of their task. The reader learns that Lingis’s account shows a collaborative effort that hopes to give a birth, or more accurately—a rebirth—of a passion for justice. Genealogy has become a significant philosophical endeavor since Nietzsche’s analysis of the emergence of the ascetic ideal in Western morality. His On the Genealogy of Morals spawned a series of research projects that embrace historical genealogy. Spearheaded by French philosopher Michel Foucault, historical genealogy focuses on how formations of knowledge intersect with exercises of power to give birth to new forms of discipline and institutions such as the prison, hospital, or insane asylum. Historical genealogy often starts with a contemporary phenomenon or controversy, then retraces its possibility by studying how a particular science merges within a form of power, and how a power emerges from the establishment of a particular science. For example, Foucault wonders how the social concern for autoeroticism among adolescents began. He looks to texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth century and discovers a growing fascination with the diseases or anti-social behaviors that allegedly stem from precocious sexuality. In a word, Foucault wryly notes, families, physicians, religious advisors, and moralists are worried about the little masturbator. In view of this great fear, disciplinary measures, such as spying on a child in his bedroom, inventing devices such as a metal corset, or Wender’s cane, that inflict sharp pain in case for a boy having an erection, become the tools for preventing madness or criminal behavior later in life. 12 Hence Foucault’s quip that he was doing a history of the present. In his analysis of the emergence of the confession, Foucault traces the rituals, ceremonies, and contexts of the growth of the confession in West-

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ern discourses and practices. He focuses on the emergence of criminology and its reliance on the confession to learn about the truth of the criminal, or the criminal’s ability to say the truth about himself, his crime, and his motives, and whether they indicate a mad or sane wrongdoer. These preliminary concerns are, in Foucault’s words, a “protohistory of criminal subjectivity.” 13 Subsequently, an entire apparatus—the prison, psychiatrists, surveillance techniques, interrogation methods, and social sciences committed to the criminal as an object of knowledge—is established that is now well-entrenched in modern societies. In Foucault’s words, this genealogical study uncovers the birth of the criminal subject. Lingis also examines discontinuities and ruptures within established discourses and conventions. He tries to discover the times and places where unexpected beginnings emerge. For him, though, analyzing formations of knowledge and exercises of power can only take us so far in comprehending how changes and shifts occur. At some point individuals or groups had to act. With laughter and sorrow, blessings and curses, at some point individuals mustered the courage, were moved by a passion, followed a vision, responded to an imperative, and dared an honorable deed. True, such acts do not occur in a vacuum. They often arise in the context of circumstances that have historical influences, but they can be told through a philosophical story of singular experiences of individuals and groups. In this sense we might say that existential genealogy undertakes a prehistory of the future. This take on existential genealogy is consistent with Nietzsche’s formulations. In his analysis of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche traces the emergence of the phenomenon of punishment as public spectacle. Humans have been so inventive in administering pain and suffering upon others in the name of justice. And this has led to an eventual declaration of who belongs and who does not, who has a debt to gain or a debt to pay. Humans learn to measure themselves in relation to one another. Outlining these points is, for Nietzsche, “retaining the criteria of prehistory (this prehistory is in any case in all ages or may always reappear).” 14 Discussing ancient religions, Lingis observes that the instincts and passions and visions they highlighted often recur in later times, even if without the religious fervor. Could these forces, Lingis asks, recur in new forms? 15 LENNON/MCCARTNEY Invoking trust as dimension of collaboration, Lingis notes: “Once we determine to trust someone, there flows a current of strength and lightness and a distinctive freedom. We celebrate our trust in one another in our adventures, feasting, games of glamour, courage, skill, and in epic, song, poetry, and thought.” 16

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They met in 1957 at a church lot on a Sunday afternoon. The older one, John Lennon, had just finished a musical gig with his band, The Quarrymen. A friend introduced him to Paul McCartney, who at fifteen years old seemed like a kid to the seventeen-year-old Lennon. At first they were a bit wary of each other. Paul was impressed with John’s singing, but noticed how limited he was on the guitar. John was surprised that Paul could read musical notes and tune a guitar, though a bit jealous of Paul’s knowledge of music. Within weeks it happened. They found in each other a compelling passion—American music. Paul could sing Little Richard, John had Elvis down pat. They learned to play the first rock song to top the Billboard charts, Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” then Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Smokey Robinson, and numerous other singers from the late 1950s and early 1960s. They became inseparable, practicing new chords, catching the latest songs from across the Atlantic, while playing gigs all over Liverpool, England. They cut school to practice, visited local pubs and record stores to hear the latest musical developments, and even tried writing their own songs, simple ditties about who loves whom and whose hearts got broken. They kept toying with their band’s name, since most groups were named after the lead singer and then a plural noun, such as Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers or Rory Storm and The Hurricanes. John and Paul preferred only a group name, so they eventually decided on The Beatles. In 1960, Lennon and McCartney and their fellow band members go to Hamburg, Germany. Their parents are horrified. Paul, with his knowledge of music and the arts, could become a professor. John, if he stays out of jail, might be an artist or writer. This cannot be possible, say the adults, who only see their boys squandering away their future. At Hamburg, dressed like reckless thugs and looking like aliens from a faraway land, they played six days a week, from early evening to whenever the pubs closed in the morning hours. Their living quarters are not much better than a prison, two bunk beds, chilly room, with bathroom and shower down the hallway. Drunks, pimps, whores, ex-Nazis, derelicts, addicts are among the misfits attending their performances. Fights break out, spectators ridicule the performers, audiences demand encores and more spectacle. Lennon hurls back insults, McCartney schmoozes them with a ballad. Throughout they played, practiced, wrote, and played some more. Should any members worry about money, girlfriend, parent’s approval, going to school, Lennon would castrate them with his words, “Forget that. . . . You’re in a fuckin’ band, now!” Individual selves were lost among the emergence of this band. They were committed to a musical event: The Beatles. When they returned to Liverpool, their growing legions of fans were awestruck. The Beatles were generating a sound never heard before. By 1963, this sound had reached all of Great Britain, and by 1964 the world.

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Still today The Beatles event endures in artistic, musical, and cultural venues. The source of this event is one of the most famous collaborations in John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Chapters in Lingis’s Foreign Bodies consider strange lusts and alien feelings that are our own. Implicit is the possibility that experiences, myths, or truths we tend to deny or devalue are actually quite close to us. They often arise in moments of passion and collaboration. Such moments open up strange passions and visions that are paradoxically quite close. In covering and building on the songs whose origins reside in AfricanAmerican music, The Beatles conveyed to their American fans that much of the strange beauty of The Beatles sound is indebted to the music in their own country. Foreigners, including The Beatles, had little idea of how fragmented the United States was. All John Lennon and Paul McCartney knew of The States is what they saw on television and heard on the jukebox. This foreign component is integral to the awakening of strange feelings among their American fans. White kids learned of the passions stirred by American blues and early Motown when listening to The Beatles. Until 1964, most access to current music for teenagers was radio and singles. Much of this access was compartmentalized in terms of race. Though some disc jockeys such as Alan Freed and producers such as Phil Spector or writers like Lieber/Stoller and King/Goffman were leading the way for integration through music, most American teenage rock and roll fans began to appreciate the richness and immense variety of the creativity and talent from their own country by experiencing The Beatles. Even adults, much to the chagrin of rock purists, began to appreciate the roots and importance of their own country’s music by hearing their children enjoying Beatles songs. Today’s most popular music forces—from Kanye West, The Flaming Lips, Tori Amos to U2, Green Day, Bruce Springsteen—continue to cite The Beatles as central to their own artistic directions. In Philosophy and Event, Alain Badiou dismisses any significance of The Beatles as popular music. “The Beatles were innovatory, in terms of music of entertainment, only because they extensively plundered forms of serious music, going back to Bach.” 17 This pejorative dismissal undermines Badiou’s own efforts to give seriousness to an event, for two reasons. First, the accusation of “extensively plundered” betrays an ignorance of Lennon and McCartney’s overt indebtedness to their predecessors. They worshiped, not plundered, the sources of their shared passion and pioneers of their own paths taken. By Badiou’s myopic perspective, he might as well accuse Bach of plundering the music of Vivaldi, or Mendelssohn stealing a Bach cantata for his Reformation Symphony. Not serious music? No one was more serious about music than the seventeenyear-old John Lennon and the fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney when

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they met in 1957. Eight years later, the music they were serious about was the music taken seriously by generations of human beings still enjoying and creating new sounds in the shadow of The Beatles. Yet by Badiou’s own terms, where an event is “something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable,” 18 he misses the significance of The Beatles event. While Badiou grants the personal event of being in love, for him most events are sparked by groups and classes, not intimate collaborations committed to a passion and a project. From an existential genealogical approach as found in the writings of Lingis, a collaboration such as Lennon/McCartney becomes significant in terms of how it has influenced music but also as a way of thinking and being. Contrary to Badiou’s dismissal, rock and roll critic Greil Marcus contends “The Beatles’ event . . . affected not only the feel but the quality of life. They deepened it, sharpened it, brightened it, not merely as a factor in the cultural scheme, but as a presence.” 19 In his study of creative pairs, Joshua Shenk presents John Lennon and Paul McCartney as historical figures. As with other remarkable collaborators, such as Sartre and Beauvoir, Marie and Pierre Curie, Lennon and McCartney formed a complete and intense trust in one another. They helped one another to master the playing and singing of nearly every song that hit the charts in America and England during the late 1950s and early 1960s. They formed, in Shenk’s terms, a confluence, an unpredictable but magical pairing, much like binary stars in the distant heavens. They illuminated the horizons for generations of fans and musicians. There was no plan or grand design. When Lennon and McCartney decided to go to Germany, write their own songs, drop out of school, and play clubs night after night, they had, like all other collaborations, begun by “Leaping into the unknown.” 20 Mark Lewisohn’s first volume of a proposed trilogy on the history of The Beatles focuses on the years up to 1962, just before they reached national and international fame. It is over eight hundred pages, in addition to the nearly one hundred pages of sources that include newspapers, books, and interviews of those who witnessed Lennon and McCartney becoming a collaboration that gave birth to an event. In terms of existential genealogy, the first years of John and Paul were a prehistory. They studied the masters, played roles of rebels, soaked up all the music of their time, practiced and practiced. They worked their talents and materials before lonely drunks, raucous sailors, and British royalty, from the stench of Liverpool’s Cavern Club to the decadence of Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. The early days of this collaboration is a prehistory, but not solely in terms of chronology. It is a reawakening, rebirth of the passions, visions, and imperatives of distant ancestors and ancient gods. The fundamental unit is not a single individual—it is a pair. When Lennon and McCartney first had a sense that they would record songs—even ones they wrote—

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there was an exhilaration that eventually led to their historical moment. It happened in May 1962, Lewisohn recounts, when John and Paul “looked each other full in the face and saw that something, saw white-hot ambition, determination, daring, craving, personality, talent and ego, and went for it.” 21 The Lennon/McCartney case illuminates how existential genealogy helps us understand—and perhaps experience—the truth and beauty that became a vision or passion of those who trust one another so completely that they commit themselves to a common project. Often the project fails. Sometimes it succeeds. In the case of Lennon/McCartney and their group The Beatles, this success had a direct effect in telling American audiences their stupidity in neglecting the richness of their own soul and blues music. This success introduced to fans their own possible options or directions. This success prepared the grounds for rock and roll music becoming a permanent feature of contemporary culture and politics. This is only one example of how what we call Lingis’s existential genealogy can provide a conceptual lens to illuminate and examine how collaborations are human experiences that demand philosophical attention to what is true, just, and good. TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS Looking forward, Lingis asks: “What rituals will we have to contrive, to celebrate in elemental spaces, in order that the visions with which our evolutionary biology and our astronomy today confront us may enter into our lives?” 22 Philosophy is a way of living in the world and studying the world. Frequently the living and the studying do not mesh. Our ideas are different from how we live. Our commitments are shallow, give the lip service we provide to prevent any serious risk. Genealogy is one approach to understanding this tension and its unexpected effects. Historical genealogy focuses on shifts of scientific discourses and forms of power that anticipate current controversies. Existential genealogy directs its attention to the experiences—in Lingis’s terms, the blessings and curses, the laughter and sorrows—of those who, among so many possible associations—meet as collaborators. In our view, the writings of Alphonso Lingis articulate the moral, political, and cultural gifts and dangers of collaborative projects. The Chapman brothers, college basketball teams, Consuela and Augusto, weight lifters, Lennon/McCartney are among many collaborations that speak of potential ruptures and new ways of living. Like binary stars glowing in the cosmic heavens, these unexpected liaisons, however shortlived, cast a momentary brilliance upon the human world.

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These experiences can still be found or produced. From the professor and a former student devoted to a particular thinker, artists portraying new realities awaiting us, to musicians extending the insights of their idols, Lingis’s version of existential genealogy entices us to consider alternate visions, passions, and imperatives. NOTES 1. Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 185. 2. Piet Hut, “The Role of Binaries in the Dynamical Evolution of Globular Clusters,” in The Origins, Evolution, and Destinies of Binary Stars in Clusters (San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 1996), 391. 3. Alphonso Lingis, Violence and Splendor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 105. 4. Joshua Shenk, Powers of Two (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), xxiii–iv. 5. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 20. Parenthetically, Massumi emphasizes Frank Sinatra and his “Ole Blue Eyes” motif as a more dramatic cultural event than Elvis Presley or The Beatles. Unfortunately, minor facts undermine his point. Sinatra’s early fame was conveyed through black and white photos and films. He was not known as “Ole Blue Eyes” until his attempt at a comeback in the late 1960s, long after Elvis and The Beatles established their importance. 6. Stamatia Portanova, “The complexity of collabor(el)ation,” Inflexions (December 2008, No. 2), 5. 7. Ibid., 2. 8. Alphonso Lingis, The First Person Singular (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 108–9. 9. Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 67. 10. Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 79–88. 11. Alphonso Lingis, Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press), ix–xiii. 12. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge), Part 3. 13. Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth Telling, ed. Babienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt, trans. Stephen Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 217. 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), 2/9. 15. Alphonso Lingis, Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 158–59. 16. Lingis, The First Person Singular, 79. 17. Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 80. 18. Ibid., 9. 19. Greil Marcus, “The Beatles,” from The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll (New York: Random House, Second Edition, 2007), 216. 20. Shenk, 59. 21. Mark Lewisohn, Tune In: The Beatles, All These Years, Vol. 1 (New York: Crown, 2013), 625. 22. Lingis, Trust, 147.

SEVEN The Importance of Alphonso Lingis in Introducing Emmanuel Levinas to America Richard I. Sugarman

In the spring of 1969, John Wild taught his last courses at Yale University, before leaving for the University of Florida. 1 Wild had proposed to teach a course on Levinas’s foundational work, Totality and Infinity. The translator was Al Lingis. However, the translation was delayed until after the end of the semester. As a result, Wild had to alter his course to a “Phenomenology of the Other.” Yale graduate students in philosophy, like me, were for the most part, not adept enough to read the work in French, Totalité et Infini. Still, Wild used the course to introduce the thought of Levinas to American students of philosophy. He did this almost exclusively by extracting excerpts from the French and providing his own philosophic gloss on the subject under consideration. In the ensuing years, Wild was to complete a book-length manuscript on Totality and Infinity; this work, which was found among his posthumous papers, has been annotated and edited by me under the title Speaking Philosophy. 2 Still, it was only with Al Lingis’s translation into English, published by Duquesne University Press (1969) that most American students of philosophy had, for the first time, the chance to study the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Nearly thirty years later, Lingis translated Levinas’s most radical work, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. On this occasion, Lingis wrote a brilliant introduction to the book. To put the matter quite simply, the American and English-speaking philosophical world owes a great debt to Lingis. In 1987, Alphonso Lingis edited and translated a book of Levinas’s essays called Emmanuel Levinas: Collected Philosoph77

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ical Papers (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers). The eleven essays included in the Collected Philosophical Papers have an importance both in terms of their originality in the thought of Levinas and in tracing key philosophic moments in his works that reflect with great familiarity the philosophic writings of Levinas. The essays are preceded by yet another introduction by Lingis that shows a thorough and deep grasp of the phenomenological method employed by Levinas. Between these times, Lingis contributed to the accessibility of the thought of Levinas by providing a translation of one of Levinas’s first original works of philosophy, Existence and Existents (Duquesne University Press, 1978). The translation is preceded by an extremely helpful introduction authored by Lingis. There are several points that need to be made. First, Lingis shows a keen understanding of the importance and originality of Levinas both within the phenomenological movement as well as the tradition of Western philosophy. What, in my view, is most distinctive in Lingis’s approach to Levinas is his emphasis on the way that Levinas deals with the concerns of epistemology in his phenomenological approach. In his reflections, Lingis shows how Levinas came upon his own descriptive insights. While Lingis will adapt the thought of Levinas in his own original works, he still remains utterly faithful to the core of his thinking. As students of Emmanuel Levinas, we are indebted above all to the modestly titled “Translator’s Introduction” to Otherwise than Being. This introduction provides far more than a survey of what is included in what many scholars believe to be Levinas’s most original and important work. It is, in fact, a phenomenological reflection that warrants study in its own right. In what follows, I will try to explicate what Lingis calls the “Reduction to Responsible Subjectivity.” To begin with, Lingis artfully ties the work of Levinas back to the burden of Husserl’s mature thinking. Lingis opens his reflection by stating what is implied in Husserl’s Crisis: “self-responsibility and not the satisfaction of wants of human nature is . . . the telos of theoretical culture which is determinative of Western spirituality; phenomenology was founded in order to restore this basis—and this moral grandeur—to the scientific enterprise.” 3 Lingis goes on to give a searching, detailed analysis of the importance, significance, and logical unfolding of this self-responsibility. Why is this important? It is important because the Crisis anticipates the imperative for restoring responsibility to the philosophical enterprise. This responsibility began to be abdicated in the 1930s by Heidegger’s irreversible and unrepentant plunge into Nazism. Already in 1927, in Being and Time, Heidegger had devalued the phenomenon of moral responsibility. Heidegger thus became the great scandal of twentieth-century continental philosophy. By this I am not at all suggesting that Being and Time is a harbinger of Nazism. What I am suggesting is that by deval-

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uing the death and life of the other person, Heidegger has made room for a phenomenological ontology that is completely unbounded by moral considerations. As such, there is nothing so terribly inconsistent between his political conduct from 1933 onwards and the philosophy inscribed in Being and Time. Levinas, as Lingis so clearly sees, is more than a mere corrective to the enterprise of fundamental ontology. His reading of Husserl precedes in a new and original direction. The reader has only to look at the last sentence of Levinas’s first book The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology where Levinas introduces the notion of the unexplored axiological dimension of Husserl’s thinking. Importantly, this is where Lingis begins his reflection introducing Otherwise than Being. As Lingis correctly notes, “In Levinas’s work responsibility is once again set forth as the determinative structure of subjectivity, and the very form of the supplement of intelligibility philosophy’s reductive methods aim to bring to theoretical disciplines.” 4 What Lingis understands is that for the Husserl of Levinas, responsibility founds consciousness, not the other way around. This is how, according to Lingis, the natural attitude can be bracketed and Levinas can devote his sustained reflection to the idea of infinity. Lingis shows how the theoretical attitude itself arises in the discourse between the moral subject and the other person. In order to ground this relation, it will be up to Levinas to show how, according to Lingis, “before being the structure by which truth is realized, [how] it is a relationship with the good, which is over and beyond Being.” 5 Lingis then proceeds to schematize the arguments of Levinas in establishing his radicalizing of Plato’s position. It is my view that any serious student of Levinas will find it advantageous to read (again) Lingis’s introduction to Levinas’s Otherwise than Being. It is a difficult, even forbidding, text. Lingis, to his great credit, has grasped its originality and assisted the reader in threading his way through the knots of its complexity. It is my view that he understands the text not only as a radicalizing of Levinas’s own thinking, but as a continuing response to the philosophic tradition, and most especially, to the great scandal of Heidegger. He begins plainly and clearly, with an inventory of what he calls “The Facts of Responsibility.” He states at the outset: “The critical exigencies of rational discourse, the resolve to think in response to what Being gives, are movements of responsibility.” 6 He alerts the reader to the self-referential demonstration of responsibility on the part of Levinas. Note that he says: “Every effort to deduce responsibility, justify or ground it, or even state it in a synthetic representation, is already an exercise of responsibility.” 7 This is to say that Lingis understands that, for Levinas, the beginning of philosophy, contra Heidegger, is already responsibility for what one says. In this way Lingis argues that responsible discourse arises prior to the ontological logos of Being. What then, is responsibility?

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Lingis states: “Responsibility is a bond. It is a bond with an imperative order, a command.” 8 Unless the reader is already familiar with the thought of Levinas, he will be troubled by this insistence on beginning with the imperative mode of discourse. The imperative, however, originates with the other rather than the self. This means that all description is already an explanation to and for the other. Correctly, he points out that this involves a key phenomenon for Levinas—the face. As he says, “For Levinas, responsibility is the response to the imperative addressed in the concrete act of facing. Responsibility is in fact a relationship with the other, in his very alterity. Then a relationship with alterity as such is constitutive of subjectivity.” 9 If responsibility does not appear at the outset of philosophic inquiry, it will remain only empty rhetoric or apology. In other words, Lingis grasps that there is both a moral and an epistemic dimension to responsibility. However, this will be demonstrated by Levinas in a phenomenological manner rather than stipulated as a formal argument. Straight away, Lingis goes to the core of the problem. He states: “Responsibility is a form of recognition—acknowledgment of a claim, an order which is even constitutive of subjectivity—a summons to arise and be and to present myself.” 10 This in turn means that along with the imperative mode that originates with the other, there is the provocative mode that permits speaking with the other, the very origin of philosophy. Furthermore, my expressive acts make it possible for the other to correct me and to call upon me to justify what I am saying, ad interruptum. This is the comportment of a fully embodied, incarnate subject. Immediately, Lingis introduces the key category for Levinas, substitution, without naming it in the introduction. Levinas has already acknowledged that it is this phenomenon, explicated in chapter 4, around which his reflections on Otherwise than Being are built. Lingis puts it this way and adds the dimension of maternity that will appear for the first time in the text before us, without saying why he goes on to mention that the figure of maternity is an authentic figure of responsibility: “Responsibility is enacted not only in offering one’s properties or one’s possession to the other, but in giving one’s own substance for the other. The figure of maternity is an authentic figure of responsibility.” 11 By way of anticipation, maternity, for Levinas, is the active responsibility awareness of caring for the other within the ethical subject. Practically, Lingis asks, as do other readers, how far does this responsibility extend? He accurately captures Levinas’s intention without, of course, resolving the matter: “Responsibilities increase in the measure that they are taken up.” 12 He reminds the reader that such responsibility does not issue from “an act of subjectivity.” 13 It arises prior to any active initiative on my part and, therefore, is always subject to being besieged. One of the strongest features of Lingis’s introduction is the fact that he almost never fails to grasp the temporal dimension of Levinas’s thinking. And in the case of responsibility, it is there and has implications before I actively assume it: “I am

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responsible for the situation in which I find myself and for the existence in which I find myself.” 14 This includes not only my past, but the past of the other. While this may seem counterintuitive, let us keep in mind that this position only works if the past, as Husserl first made us aware, inheres in the present. For example, if I tell someone that at this very moment that I love her, but at the same time do not love anything leading up to this present moment in her, then clearly I am not dealing with someone who is genuinely other from and facing me. On the other side, dealing with the future, Lingis immediately sets out the other side of the position, that my responsibility for the future continues even without me: “I am responsible for processes that go beyond the limits of my foresight and intention, that carry on even when I am no longer adding my sustaining force to them—and even when I am no longer there . . . my death will mark the limit of my force without limiting my responsibility.” 15 This responsibility for the future of others, even without me, is the beginning of what we might call generational responsibility. What it suggests is that we do find ourselves already responsible for a habitable and decent environment for those who come after us. Without being able to maintain this position, the movement known in our time as environmentalism would be lacking philosophical foundation. Furthermore, Lingis grasps the generative character of Levinas’s thinking. While so much ink has been spilled on the “end of philosophy” in the contemporary era, an alternative that focuses on its fecund and generative dimension not only rationalizes its activity but shows, perhaps, its very importance. Lingis correctly links this to the sense of infinity that Levinas would temporalize as “ an infinition of infinity. The bond with the alterity of the other is in this infinity.” 16 This is not a naivety on the part of either Lingis or Levinas. It assumes an almost unbearable sense of guardianship for the other. As Lingis says, it is “to bear the burdens of its existence and supply for its wants.” 17 He concludes this discussion in chapter 4 by intimating the problematic concept of the subject as hostage for Levinas. What does it mean for the subject to find itself in the accusative mode, both grammatically and ethically? It is in a strange way, “otherwise than Greek.” Let us recall that the Iliad begins with the taking of a hostage and closes with the releasing of a dead body that had been taken hostage. Here, the hostage is one of me-for-the-other, thus permitting me to assume responsibility not only for her, but for her responsibility toward the third party. THE INNOVATIONS OF OTHERWISE THAN BEING Lingis alerts the reader to some of the innovations she will find in Otherwise than Being, more sensitive to the epistemic implications that elude

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most other Levinas commentators. What Lingis points to in Otherwise is a different kind of approach than that used in Totality and Infinity. He puts it this way: “In Totality and Infinity, the relationship with the other was presented as a contestation of the pure sensibility, in which the ego pursues its own closure and contentment. Now Levinas actually sets out to see in the exposedness to alterity in the face of another the original form of openness.” 18 As he will subsequently argue, Lingis perceptively shows that Levinas represents an advance on Kant’s theory of knowledge and ethics. He states: “the relationship with the other is an a priori to fact, preceding the a priori forms or conditions for the possibility of experience.” 19 What Lingis appears to be arguing is the provocative notion that there is a transcending condition that comes even before time, space, and any variation on Kant’s transcendental deduction. On a concrete level what this means is that vulnerability is experienced as susceptibility and, therefore, as Lingis puts it “vulnerability in regard to pleasure and pain.” 20 Lingis carries his argument further: “Not only is there no receptive and perceptive sensibility without susceptibility with regard to what one is exposed to, but the exposure to alterity as such—an openness opened by the outside—is at the basis of the openness by which the subject opens itself to objects and to things.” 21 If I understand Lingis’s argument about Levinas correctly, it is making the original argument that susceptibility, such as it originates from the other, is already a joining of ethics and epistemology. In other words, what orders my subjectivity, in fact, enables it, derives from the outside from the very beginning. The reader will notice that this pierces through the philosophic problem or perhaps pseudo-problem of “other minds.” This is why Lingis can say: “Alterity is closer still to me than the present.” 22 Lingis wisely understands that Levinas is involved in what might properly be called an “existential reduction.” It is as though the book Otherwise than Being is written as a pure saying. This saying is recovered through its emergence as the time of diachrony. The reader will remember that for Levinas diachrony is time that arises with the other. This is what makes the text, in my view, so maddening and enthralling at the same time. It is as though the reader had been reinserted back into his own life with others. I remember my first experience reading this book shortly after Lingis had translated it. Very seldom, if ever, has a book excited me to the point where I had to put it down. What Lingis grasps is that Levinas has discovered a radical kind of contingency within time itself. Such time is interruptive. It does not simply “flow.” It forces me back on myself into the accusative mode of both grammar and existence. At the same moment, or perhaps the next, I am being torn out of myself by my vulnerability toward the other. The world of things is alien but in a new way, here only as objects encountered in the sphere of the interhuman. This makes them no less important or valuable. However, we have taken an enormous step beyond the categorization of an Umwelt, an envi-

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ronment where the most basic question is the status of things, for me or near me. What Levinas appears to do, according to Lingis, is to retrace life as it is experienced in all of its raw, contingent, breathless resistance to an encounter with others. Lingis begins by putting it this way: “The present is already passing, bypassing itself. This diachrony, which is already in the instant itself, makes the instant of a subjective stance not a coinciding with itself.” 23 What Lingis has so brilliantly expressed is the new form through which identity is experienced and established by the self. As we can see from Levinas’s early philosophic writings, beginning with On Escape, the self is not yet a subject. It proceeds by way of inertia. This means that it experiences enjoyment, the satisfaction of its most basic needs, and its well-being as though it were a monad. What happens when alterity appears is that the self undergoes a kind of exodus from itself toward the other. Slowly it begins to recognize that in approaching the other, it takes on responsibility. By the time of Totality and Infinity, the newly ethical subject stands upright, face-to-face with the other. Now we may speak of the subject in relation to his subjectivity. He must maintain a just relation with the other. In order to do so, he must perpetually justify himself in relation to the other. This is how Levinas can argue, as he does in Totality and Infinity, that justice arises before truth. It does so because the subject is now called upon to give good reasons for what it says and does. These acts of justification are the beginning of the juncture between description and explanation. What Lingis grasps but does not name is Levinas’s radical, original theory of interpretation. For Levinas, explanation is always an explanation to a someone else. For this reason, all explanation is provisional. For it can be criticized, amended, rejected, and sent back to the one who advanced it ad interim. We might speak of this as a kind of infinite egress. Unlike Hegel’s bad infinite, in explanation the subject is always going above or beyond itself. Once again, the emphasis is upon transcendence in relation to time. What has long been absent from most Levinas scholarship is the reflection on the relation of the present, as a phase of time, to diachrony. When Lingis argues that diachrony is in the present, I believe what he is saying is that this comes before the movement of the other toward me or my response. The moment itself, the present, is therefore divided, not mathematically or indefinitely, but forms the heart of the ethical human encounter at this given moment. Lingis continues by describing the relation between the present and the past moments, which are already marked by a relationship: “It does not so much retain it as it is held by it, retained by it. The present instant is extended by a past which it cannot catch up with or coincide with or represent, render present.” 24 Lingis understands not only the original insights of the philosophy of Levinas, but the way that these insights tend to form patterns as mo-

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ments in relation to one another. For example, Lingis clearly registers the interrelation for Levinas of the temporal format with alterity and subjectivity. We can see this in the phenomenon of ageing. Lingis puts it this way: “There is loss, falling away irrevocably, lapse [Lingis’s emphasis] of time. The bond with the past is a bond with the dimension of oneself, which cannot regain possession of once more, which presents complete self-possession and which yet holds onto one, holds one like a bond. Ageing is this temporalization—by virtue of the temporalization of one’s time, one is being carried beyond one’s powers.” 25 For example, ageing registers to the subject as “I can no longer,” corresponding to childhood as “I can not yet.” Each reflects a different way that time expresses itself. In relation to the past, according to Lingis, the past cannot be rendered present. This means that it cannot genuinely be represented: “The present is afflicted with a bond with something that comes to pass without being convertible into an initiative of the present, and that holds on, and in this hold distends one.” 26 The remainder of Lingis’s introduction focuses on a variety of phenomena that Levinas explores, illustrates, and temporalizes. In 1978, Al Lingis translated and wrote a brilliant introduction to Existence and Existents, one of Levinas’s early important books. Here Lingis had already situated Levinas’s thought, especially on the subject of temporality, in relation to that of Heidegger. He states that: “Time is the inner structure of subjectivity, that is, of the movement of existing. Levinas’s work contains not only wholly new analyses of the forms of time— of the present, the past, the future—but also a new conception of the work of time.” 27 What is intriguing in Lingis’s reflection is his capacity to show the initial, first movement of time according to Levinas. He does this not only by a careful attentiveness to the book that he has translated but also by situating the thought of Levinas in relation to that of Heidegger specifically, and indirectly to that of Nietzsche. Lingis shows how Levinas is aware of questions posed by Heidegger that were originally raised by Nietzsche. What Lingis shows is how the first movement out of the self involves the claims recognized as issuing from the other. He puts it this way: “The instant does not only interrupt the transmission of the past, but holds back from the future—it is fatigued by the future. What is radically new in Levinas is that he introduces a contact with alterity at the origin of the process by which a temporal structure is engendered within a life. It is alterity, in the guise of the other, the appeal and the demand of the other that faces, that comes to draw the self-identical existent out of itself—and makes it exist, that is, transcend itself and be temporal.” 28 Lingis proceeds to ask one of the central questions of philosophy as it bears upon the aspiration for meaning. He asks: “Is the temporal essence of our existence a condemnation? Is it possible for an existence that continually passes away to attain to sense and worth?” 29 What comes to mind is the utterance credited to Anaximander, and reflected upon by

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Nietzsche: “Where the source of things is, to that place they must also pass away, according to necessity, for they must pay penance and be judged for their injustices in accordance with the ordinance of time.” 30 According to Nietzsche, Anaximander understood that transience itself is the irremediable and primary injury responsible for all human suffering. Levinas, as Lingis correctly points out, rejects Heidegger’s resolution of this problem in Being and Time, as understanding the heroic posture that Dasein must face as an authentic being aware of his own inevitable death that governs his thinking on his time-bound subjectivity. Levinas reconceives the future by demonstrating the possibility of pardon for the imperfections and injustices toward others in the past of the subject. In this way, the past is opened and is exactly as Lingis puts it: “Time is a promise and a hope because it is the possibility of beginning anew. . . . The essential unforseeability of the future points to a break between the actual and the future: there is discontinuity. An instant is an inauguration, a beginning, and another instant is a new beginning.” 31 What Lingis has captured, I believe, is the generative character of Levinas’s view of time and philosophy. What Levinas goes on to describe in Time and the Other are sexuality, paternity, fecundity, and the feminine. Levinas puts it this way: “The fecundity of the ego must be appreciated at its correct ontological value, which until now has never been done.” 32 A student of Levinas will look far and wide before hearing another instance of this kind of rhetoric from him. Lingis understands the radical newness of Levinas’s reflection on the nature of time. This is what makes his own work very important. He goes on to show very clearly and schematically how Levinas offers an alternative view to that of Heidegger and thus opens an impasse that has been signaled almost in a voguish or desperate way as “the end of philosophy.” He states: “But for Levinas, the happiness that time could bring—and which constitutes the very promise of the future—is not simply the happiness that fills the space created by the obliteration of the guilty past, but that which restores the past pardoned.” 33 It is not simply a matter of preserving the past through its traces, but according to Lingis, for Levinas, a redemption of the past itself. He insists that after Levinas, we have a more positive feeling of time. As he goes on to say: “The sense of being temporal is not just anxiety, the sadness of feeling one’s being continually dissipating and with only the definitive nothingness ahead of it.” 34 Levinas has made a distinction with a great difference, that is, between the Greek notion of the apeiron that extends from Anaximander to Heidegger and the notion of time as infinition. This has a practical consequence that Lingis grasps, unlike any other Levinas commentator, in its historical philosophical context. It is the sense of time governed by the notion of the apeiron that gives us an awareness of the horror of the indeterminate. From this, Lingis notes, “The insomnia that endures the night is the very experience of this gaping and pointless suffering.” 35

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With his usual attentiveness, Lingis introduces a brief reflection on the phenomenon of space in the thought of Levinas: “for Levinas the relationship with alterity precedes and makes possible the sensuous expanse and the practical layout itself. Intersubjectivity does not only intervene for the constitution of universal or objective space, but already for the first exteriorization of the sensible and the practical. . . . Space, the sphere of the simultaneous, is itself a work of temporalization, established in a synchronization.” 36 While the language employed by Lingis is sometimes rather forbidding, it always aims at a conclusion that is direct and practical. If I understand him correctly, Lingis is establishing the basis upon which Levinas can explain the relationship between alterity and the third party. This becomes exceedingly important in trying to grasp the connection between ethical and political life for Levinas. Distributive justice can arise, for Levinas, only if synchrony has already established a spatiality where such justice can be inscribed. In other words, the ethical is already present with the first upsurge of time and place with respect to the other. Artfully, Lingis shows this by reminding the reader that: “one has to remember that in Levinas the relationship with the other is first described as putting myself in his place, a substitution.” 37 THE SINGULARITY OF THE I Lingis takes unusual pains to describe the upsurge of the “I” before it reaches the more conceptual level of identity. This is a reflection that is largely absent from most Levinas scholarship. Lingis is concerned with what motivates the acts of self-identification and the efforts to escape the self. He sees this as coming before the act of self-identification. He offers a serious insight into the way that the subject is originally experienced as singular: “It is in being addressed and contested, in being accused, that one is first singled out.” 38 The description of singularization that Lingis offers is itself quite novel: “Singularization is not the result of a work of the subject itself. . . . For him singularization rather means being held to be oneself, being passive with regard to oneself.” 39 This notion of a passive synthesis, if we may call it that, is hard to understand in the thought of Levinas. What it appears to involve is the way that the subject allows himself to be addressed in a way that is not able to be detached from who he is. It would be an evasion for him to actively challenge the other who has assigned him, at least in this first instance, his responsibility and therefore his singularity. As such, I am, as Lingis puts it: “held to my own existence and my own deeds, bound to bear their weight and answer for them.” 40 My singularity, then, is something for which I am responsible and answerable to the other. Neither Lingis nor Levinas takes up the issue of surrogacy, that is to say, whether I can find someone to act on my behalf. It seems that this is not the issue at stake. Lingis puts it this way:

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“the whole weight of the universe is on my shoulders, and I cannot shift this burden upon anyone else—this is my finding myself one without a double.” 41 In this drama of singularization, Atlas is not permitted to shrug: “And this predicament is founded on the relationship with alterity; it is being answerable without limit.” 42 This is an extravagant notion of responsibility, to say the least: “The approach of the other holding me responsible for everything, even for what I did not do—the unlimited accusation—is what singularizes me utterly.” 43 There is no precedent, to the best of my knowledge, for this position, either in the history of phenomenology or that of philosophy. As Lingis notes, subjectivity begins outside the subject with alterity. He correctly ties this to Plato’s notion of the good. 44 Levinas notes a certain Platonism that is apparent in his adaptation of the notion of the good from Plato. The good, for Levinas, precedes being. However, one of the dimensions of his thought, not touched upon by Lingis, is the fact that the good appears in time as the prospect of the good metaphysically, it is the not-yet-good or the almost-good. This phenomenon of the prospectively good, of promising, is what lures me out of the present moment and my immediate attachments. It is also the case that the good will find itself morally expressed in actions of kindness small and large, and generosity practiced by the subject, toward others. In this sense, Levinas seems very close to the writer Vassily Grossman, whose book Life and Fate he recommends repeatedly throughout his late years. He appears to adopt Grossman’s view that we are not speaking here of “a regime of goodness.” Such a regime would fall under the rubric of totality. This is not to say that Levinas is indifferent to political life. Rather, he regards it as the elaboration and extension of moral life. It is the justice that is practiced by me toward the third party. What Levinas says in “The Ego and the Totality” (1954) is not in fact a critique of the imperative to love the neighbor: “A third man essentially disturbs this intimacy; the wrong I did to you I can recognize to have proceeded entirely from my intentions; . . . If I recognize the wrong I did to you, I can, even by my act of repentance, injure the third party.” 45 Levinas clarifies this apparent critique of loving the neighbor in Otherwise than Being. The relation to the third party is one based upon justice. In this respect, the relation to the You, the second party, always adumbrates the appearance of the third party. Only in this way is it possible for me to become an other to others. At the same time, the love of multiple neighbors can be expressed, beginning with justice practiced to a third party and his neighbor. Temporality, where multiple others are concerned for the subject, we may designate as polychrony. In an explanatory note that precedes Otherwise than Being, Levinas affirms that his chapter on “Substitution” lays out the argument of this book. Lingis succinctly captures what Levinas means by the term substi-

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tution: “For Levinas, substitution is the ethical itself; responsibility is putting oneself in the place of another.” 46 It is important to keep in mind that for Levinas, substitution does not indicate a fusion between the other and me. I do not deprive him of his special vantage point, perspective, or relations with others, nor does he for me. What I do in the action of substitution is to stand in and “for” the other. We already recognize the surface level of this phenomenon in everyday life. We know that the other is for me by his face, glance, or gesture, even before he speaks. We can also sense whether or not the other stands against me in a similar way. Substitution, however, assumes this ability to distinguish the for-theother and its opposite. It involves my taking a risk that may not be reciprocated. In this sense, I assume a responsibility not only for the other, but for the other’s responsibility to third parties. Lingis points out that this includes even the one who wounds or persecutes me. This is hard to digest. Levinas is not advocating that we become saints or martyrs. What he does appear to be saying is that the fullness of my humanity consists in my willingness to place myself in the other’s skin. In doing so, while I do not become the other (I remain “I”), I am willing to put myself in the place of the other. He does not associate this in the case of martyrdom with masochism nor in the case of surrogacy with servility. What is dramatic, original, and radical beyond question is Levinas’s argument that the other comes before me. This has not been seen in the literature of the history of philosophy, except in glimpses in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In Otherwise than Being, we see an entire schema that bundles the various categories that surround the phenomenon of substitution. These include proximity and obsession, which is otherwise than neurotic, even to the point of becoming the other’s hostage. Becoming the other’s hostage is something that I permit myself. Grammatically and existentially, I allow myself to be placed in the accusative mode. This is not to be confused with becoming an object for the other. In the accusative mode, I am open to interrogation, critique, and ready to be answerable for a summons out of myself by the other. As Levinas hints later in Otherwise than Being, we see the prophets using the Hebrew word heneini, which means “here I am and ready,” or alternatively “send me.” I am more like a sentinel for the other, not waiting to be relieved of my position. I do this not simply as a generality; rather, this conduct is what assigns to me my singularity. As Lingis puts it, “One is held to bear the burden of others; the substitution is a passive effect, which one does not succeed in converting into an active initiative or into one’s own virtue.” 47

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REITERATION I wish to stress that one of the strengths of Lingis’s introduction to Otherwise than Being is that he confines himself strictly to the phenomenological and philosophical aspects of the thought of Levinas. Perhaps for this reason, he does not attempt to engage the Hebraic dimension of Levinas’s thought. More precisely, he properly recognizes that this belongs to a complementary branch of Levinas scholarship. While his own original writings will be discussed in the volume dedicated to him and his work, it is important to recognize the great care and, to a certain degree, the comparative conservatism of Lingis’s analysis. What he accomplishes without question is securing the place of Levinas within the phenomenological tradition beginning with Husserl. Levinas, who began his scholarship with The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology in 1930, was still writing sixty years later on the importance of Husserl’s philosophy toward the very close of his career. Furthermore, Lingis understands the importance of the Levinas’s critique of Heidegger. In this respect, he is unerring. Lingis’s introduction to Otherwise than Being is comparable, in my view, in its importance to Merleau-Ponty’s preface from the Phenomenology of Perception. It can be read before, during, or after the reading of Otherwise than Being. What the reader should not look for, either in this introduction or that of Existence and Existents or his masterful prefatory remarks to the collected papers of Levinas, is Lingis’s own complex, philosophical vision. For this reason, neither the advanced students of Levinas nor the novice who wants to understand what this most important and original of thinkers is saying should see the meditation of Lingis as a guide to understanding the rich variegated philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. What Lingis has accomplished is showing why and how the phenomenological philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas embodies the first challenge to continental philosophy in the twenty-first century. ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would like to thank Professor Anne Ashbaugh for encouraging me to write this chapter and Randolph Wheeler for his careful editing of the text. I also want to express my appreciation to Lauren Kenney, my longterm assistant, for her meticulous care on the manuscript. NOTES 1. For Matthew Geiger, beloved student and friend.

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2. John Wild, “Speaking Philosophy: John Wild’s Commentary on Totality and Infinity,” in The Promise of Phenomenology, eds. R. I. Sugarman and R. B. Duncan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 183–250. 3. Alphonso Lingis, Translator’s Introduction, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, by Emmanuel Levinas (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), xvii. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., xviii. 6. Ibid., xxviii. 7. Ibid., xviii–xix. 8. Ibid., xix. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., xx. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., xxii. 19. Ibid., xxiii. 20. Ibid., xxiv. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., xxv. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., xxv–xxvi. 25. Ibid., xxvi. 26. Ibid. 27. Alphonso Lingis, Translator’s introduction in Existence and Existents, by Emmanuel Levinas; A. Lingis, trans. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), xxii. 28. Ibid., xxiii. 29. Ibid. 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, M. Cowan, trans. (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1962), 45. 31. Lingis, Translator’s introduction in Existence and Existents, xxiv; emphasis added. 32. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, R. A. Cohen, trans. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 92. 33. Lingis in Existence and Existents, xxv. 34. Ibid., xxv–xxvi. 35. Ibid., xxi. 36. Lingis, in Otherwise than Being, xxxv. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., xxxvi. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Plato, Republic, 509b. 45. Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 30. 46. Lingis, in Otherwise than Being, by E. Levinas, xxix. 47. Ibid., xxxvii.

EIGHT Alterity after Infinity Interview with Alphonso Lingis (2015) Randolph C. Wheeler

We met in July of 2015 at the home of Professor Lingis in Maryland to discuss his own views on the importance of Emmanuel Levinas’s doctrine of alterity. Along with being the English translator of Levinas’s major works, Lingis brings new perspectives of support and criticism to what he sees as Levinas’s groundbreaking ideas. In Levinas, he sees something new—the perception of need as an ordering, not as just absence or negativity as the philosophical tradition claims. Need carries with it an ethical ordering of what we must do to address it. Also against the tradition, Levinas extends feeling through the realm of ethics beyond all reason. Lingis, however, goes even further than Levinas by extending ethics beyond the human face to our encounters with animals, things, and situations. In a rectification of Levinas’s separation of totality and infinity, Lingis places ethics in the very act of perception: “to see what something is, is to see what it needs.” Culminating his criticism of infinity in Levinas and in Hegel’s dialectics, Lingis describes the significance of “moments of completion” as ethical and aesthetic perfection. Q: You have established a philosophical path of your own, but how did Emmanuel Levinas become a prominent figure in your thought? A: What I found very important at the beginning is his phenomenological account of the perception of need. Modern philosophy, probably because it was connected with physiology and with perception as opposed to imagination, begins with the impact of an outside cause, an outside stimulus. Perception was seen to be composed of sense data conceived as 91

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positivities that are here-and-now presences. That conception continued in phenomenology also. Levinas’s description of what it means to perceive need appears as something new and important. For Levinas, need is not just a negativity, perceiving a need is not just perceiving an absence. Need orders one, puts demands on one. When I perceive needs, this perception reverberates throughout my sensory– motor body. To see what someone needs is already to have a sense of what I could do to respond to that need. If you see an old or infirm person stumble, to see that that person is weak and needs support is already to sense what you could do to support that person. It seemed to me that this analysis was very new and important. It wasn’t very long for me to extend that beyond the human face. It occurred to me that to see anything, to see what something is, is to see what it needs. If I see a tree, I see that it needs space, it needs light, it needs the support of ground. To see a cloud, to see what it is, is to see what it needs; it needs space to move and to hover. To see a fish is to see that it needs water to move. To see what something is, is to see what it needs to be what it is. Q: You’ve said a striking thing earlier about the naked body—that its vulnerability doesn’t initially invite exploitation but solicits protection. Is this another way that you go beyond the appeals of the other’s face? A: The topic started with Sartre’s “look.” In Sartre’s analysis, the look objectifies. I feel that I am an object of the other’s look. But there is also in Sartre that the other judges me. It’s very vivid in Sartre’s analysis of me peering through the keyhole. The other sees me in a situation and assesses the situation, judges it; I appear shameful or ridiculous or clumsy to his look. What then Levinas adds is that the other is judging but when he faces me, he’s asking for a response. In Sartre’s example, someone sees me peering through the keyhole and I feel objectified and I feel ashamed. But we know the other would put a demand on me. The next thing that happens is that the other is saying “What are you doing here? Give an account of yourself.” Of course, Sartre has not proceeded in that direction. For Levinas from the start when someone looks at me, he or she is asking something of me, is putting a demand on me. Judgment requires a response. Since Levinas has started with that, the encounter when someone faces me is already a linguistic situation. It’s a question and a demand. Levinas goes beyond it rather soon, especially in Otherwise than Being, where it is not the words, it is not the content of what they say, but the fact that someone in facing me is exposing the nakedness of the eyes and the vulnerability of the face and the skin. The demand is not so much in the words. Someone may be hungry but not ask for food because he is shy or intimidated by me or doesn’t have the authority to ask for my help. But the fact that he is facing me vulnerable and hungry and that this vulnerability is seen on the face,

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on the skin—the sensitivity and the susceptibility of the skin—is where the demand is. I think that the next move that one could make is that where someone is not singling me out and addressing me but is unconscious, an accident victim, the demand is all the more urgent, and we all feel that. Q: So why the face for Levinas and not the naked body? Is it because the face is generally exposed, unlike the clothed body? Is it the most immediate nakedness? A: The more I think about it, the more the perception of need and the acknowledgment of being required extends to much more than the faceto-face encounter. Yet there is this experience of being singled out, a very empirical experience. We could ignore poverty and hunger in our city, and when we’re walking down the street heading to the restaurant and there is a beggar child who looks at us in the eyes (here I’m thinking especially in Mexico and India), this makes a dramatic break. This we really concretely feel we have to answer. I am now just suddenly thinking of something I never thought of before: in the movie Milk, the gay rights cause was getting nowhere with the public. Milk has the idea that everybody had to come out of the closet and identify themselves; when the public saw that they know homosexuals, their own family members or neighbors—now you’ve seen this guy who looks at you—that’s what’s going to make a big difference. When someone looks at you in the eyes, there is an experience of obligation dramatically different from a merely conceptual recognition that there are hungry people, that there are oppressed people out there, and that I should be doing something about it. Q: In Baltimore’s Fells Point, merchants have signs everywhere asking that patrons not give any money to so-called panhandlers. The business community is well aware that these encounters intrude with their ethical commands that go far beyond our demands of self-interest. These encounters last only a few seconds, but they contest our desire for pleasure and disturb the flow of commerce. A: I think the same thing happens with other species. I had a very vivid moment thinking about this one day. I was at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. At the end of the day, they close the buildings, though the zoo is always open. There were many people milling around; there were all kinds of people who had spent a day at the zoo, especially young parents with little children, but there were also lonely people, old people, and immigrants who don’t know anybody and don’t have money to go anywhere. Looking around I saw that everyone was hesitating. The buildings were closing but everyone was reluctant to leave. At the time, there was some political argument going on in the press about some endangered species; maybe it was the spotted owl. It occurred to me that if you went up to these people and said, “you know this species here is endangered, should we protect them or not?” Everyone would say “yes.”

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We have to protect these animals, these otters, these birds. But people feel as though they have no power. What can I do against the politicians and the logging corporations? I remember I had a conversation long ago with a woman in Asia who was working with orangutans; I asked her what she thought of zoos, because zoos are much criticized—they make animals into entertainments and so on. But she said that we have to see these animals; otherwise, there’s no hope. So I think with these other species it’s the same as with humans. If you see them, if you look at this lemur or this chimpanzee face-to-face, there is somehow in that a concrete, empirical encounter where we experience obligation. That was the dramatic thing that I thought about when I was first exploring Levinas. Kant looks for an experience of obligation. For Kant, the mind experiences, as soon as it starts to think, an obligation of the universal and the necessary. What Levinas searches for is a concrete empirical experience when I feel obligated. And that is the experience of being face-to-face. I don’t know how to put these things together. I do want to emphasize the importance of the power there is in being faced by someone. Sartre is the first one who felt that. There is quite a difference between sitting in a bus station and seeing people as a spectacle, as forms that you are looking at, and then a person turns around and looks at you. There is an extraordinary power in that move, which Levinas’s phenomenology has brought out. Q: An area of continuing discussion today is Levinas’s doctrine of ethics in light of religion. How do you see the two realms to relate for Levinas? A: In his philosophical writings, he explicitly rejects theodicy, any rational argumentation about God. And he picks up from Heidegger his criticism of the idea of God as a supreme being, as a supreme entity. He only finds God in the ethical demands, in the ethical experience. It’s a very ethical religion. Q: Do you think that Levinas gives us the last word on ethics? A: The way Levinas elaborates the basic encounter with another strikes me as being problematic. He analyzes it from within. When I am being confronted with someone, I’m not looking at this encounter from the outside; I am experiencing a demand put on me. If I say that I also have demands that I put on the other, then I am outside that situation, looking as it were from above. There is me and you, and if I see that we’re equivalent, I’m looking at us from an outside point of view. Levinas stays with me in the encounter with a demand put on me; he does not move to that outside perspective on us. And then he says that the demand put on me is unending. But I have a problem with that.

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Q: The infinite responsibility of ethics: do you see this as a shift in your perspective, away from the infinite? A: Yes, this concept of unending need and unending responsibility seems to me to be just empirically wrong. If I’m a parent, I am responsible for the needs of my child. I supply my child with protection and clothing and food. One might say that once I’ve committed myself to do that it’s unending, because that child is hungry again, in six months the child will need clothing again. But that is a false picture. Every organism generates excess energies beyond what it needs. When you supply for the needs of any organism, it is in order for it to supply its own needs. You are supplying the needs of a child until the time that the child can, and wants to, supply his needs for himself. And the other thing is that all needs are limited. If I can step back a moment, there’s a long tradition in philosophical thinking to think that life consists in need, for Hegel in desire. An organism is a material system in which lacks develop. It loses substance through excretion, secretions, evaporation. Because these lacks develop, an organism is open to the outside, looking in the environment for what it lacks. And that is the very movement of life. I want to replace this negative conception of life with a positive conception of life: that life is a force in an organism that generates energies in excess of what it needs. Needs are not the core essence of life. They are superficial. They are not the inner essence, the core essence. They are intermittent. You’re not hungry twenty-four hours a day; you eat and it’s over. It is true for every organism. The rule for keeping fish is that you feed them once or twice a day what they will eat in five minutes. If you feed them any more, it will pollute the water. Look at them (Lingis points to the large aquariums in his study); they’re not searching for food. They swim around, they play, they enjoy their movement. And that’s true for humans. It’s just not true that every time you satisfy the need of someone who faces you, this opens to an unending situation of need. Once we say that, we no longer see the essential difference between humans and the other species. Levinas never really addressed the issue of other species. 1 He would say what the difference between a dog that faces me and my child who faces me is that when I respond to the needs of a child, they are unending, whereas the dog’s needs are limited and finite. But I don’t see that this is an essential difference. I think behind an alleged difference is the Hegelian idea that desire is open to infinity. The Hegelian philosopher Eric Weil transfers the Hegelian dialectic into discourse; every time one says something to someone, one asks for a response, and this response gives rise to another response. I say something, you respond, then I respond to what you have said. He sees that in discourse this is unending, so that the search for knowledge is

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unending. I have problems with that too; I think that there are many streams in discourse that come to an end. Eric Weil was the Hegelian that Levinas refers to and who was much read when Levinas was preparing Totality and Infinity. All the dialectical talk in Totality and Infinity I see primarily in reference to Weil. In Weil’s pictures of discourse the responses lead to the requests for responses and thus become a discourse; Levinas then sees that to be true of material needs. Someone presents hunger to me and I respond. There will hunger and thirst tomorrow. There is film by Satyajit Ray about the Bengal famine that occurred during the Second World War. The Brahman has stored up food for his family, but one day a starving person appears at his door and he gives food to him. The next day the starving person has come with his starving family, and before long you see the whole landscape of starving people coming unendingly. But I think that the picture of unending need that I have to respond to is a false description of our relations with one another. Q: So do we have a more reciprocal relation with one another, as in Kant’s doctrine of respect? A: In Levinas, this is a problem. His description of the face being faced is within that experience. As long as I am being faced by a hungry child, I experience the demand put on me and I am not putting an equivalent demand on the child. That, in Levinas’s conception, only occurs when there is a third party. It is the outsider, the third party, who sees you and me as equivalent who can then introduce equitable distribution of resources between us. Levinas says that as long as I am just being faced by an individual, he explicitly says that I have a duty to take from what I need in order to answer the needs of the other. So he doesn’t find a duty that I have all by myself to respond to my needs. When I’m living in my own environment, satisfying my need is the pre-ethical experience, the sphere of the same. I adopt an orphan and later discover that this child has an ailment that requires very expensive medical attention. Then I would find myself obliged to find that I have a good job and maintain myself in good health so that I can take care of the needs of my adopted child. That’s where Levinas finds I have duties to myself. I think that this issue of the third party is a problem. Levinas has first said that my responsibility to the one who faces me is absolute and unending and infinite. But at the same time, I exist in society and in an economy. In the measure that I act as a member of the institution of society and as a citizen of the state, I have to think of the equitable distribution of resources. I think here there’s an acute conflict in Levinas. Reading Max Weber’s Politics as Vocation clarified my objection. In Levinas when someone faces

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me, I am in the situation of absolute and unending responsibility to the one who faces me. But when I act as a citizen of the state or any institution, I am looking at all members of the state as equivalent. I’m thinking of how justice would consist of satisfying everyone’s needs with limited resources. So there’s a conflict between the two situations. This problem appears in Levinas’s own career in the issue of Palestinian rights. To us on the outside, we say that the Israelis and the Palestinians have equivalent rights; for example, the right of return. The Palestinians were driven into exile in huge numbers from their land, and in all justice it would seem that they have a right to this land. They have a right not to be displaced by Israelis. But Levinas did not think this way. Part of his thinking is political and historical: if you give the Palestinians the right of return, you effectively destroy the Jewish state. So the question of social justice for both peoples is extremely difficult, a very difficult practical, concrete issue. It cannot be resolved simply by saying that the person who faces me, whether he be Jewish or Palestinian, has a right to demand everything from me. Q: Hannah Arendt on the topic of evil brings up the problem of the lack of citizenship, lack of state status for Jews, which made them so vulnerable before and during World War II. A Jewish state would have protected them from being refugees without rights to citizenship. Noam Chomsky perhaps offers a way to justice between Israelis and Palestinians. He’s said he supports a Jewish homeland but not a Jewish state. A: If you’re taking the view of the state, the state exists through violence. Through laws, through fines, through punishment, through confinement, through expropriation, eventually through imprisonment and more, and capital punishment. These are means of the state. Weber was thinking of the ethics from the Sermon on the Mount. If you promise to love the neighbor as well as yourself, you can’t do that as a responsible citizen of the state. Either you’re going to withdraw from the state, and there are purist communities who do that, or else you try to put that purist ethics in practice with the means of the state, but then you become fanatical and tyrannical. I feel that there is a parallel problem with Levinas’s ethics. If we take literally his absolute responsibility to the one who that faces me, this cannot be practiced as a member of the state. Would it mean that if I’m in charge of distributing food, then I give it to whoever faces me and give it unlimitedly to whoever is in need? But I can’t do that; I have to deprive these people in order to distribute the food equitably. It would seem I could practice Levinas’s ethics only in the private sphere, with my children, my family, but not as a member of the state. Q: Does Kant supply the public path to ethics then via practical reason?

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A: That’s a big discussion. Can I really treat everyone as an end in himself? It seems to me that with the state, I’m not doing that; I’m treating other people as means. I’m sending young people off to die for the protection of the state. I think Levinas’s position is this: the ethical authority of the community is somehow derived from the original experience of the obligation I experience when I’m being faced. Otherwise, it’s hard to see that social ethics has any real authority. One could say that it has simply practical authority. Say, traffic laws, or to take a more sophisticated example, an industry, a construction company. Within the company we set up a lot of professional rules and obligations, so if you work for this company, you agree to a number of obligations: to turn up every day, to work with a team, to obey the leaders, and so on. But what is the binding force of those rules? We could say that it is simply practical, that everybody agrees that this is the most practical way to get things built. But of course the next question arises, why do I care? What obliges me to care about getting these things built? I worked in a lot of companies when I was working my way through college. I realized that my fellow workers really didn’t care. We’d obey all the rules simply because if we didn’t, we’d get fired. Bosses would keep an eye on us, and we had to toe the line and obey all the rules, but we didn’t really care if this stuff got made or not. I remember I worked in a cheese factory, and I don’t know if I had any real sense of the importance of having to get this cheese manufactured. In virtually every company that I’ve worked for, we workers would steal from the company every time we thought we could get away with it. We stole tools either to use them in our own houses or to sell them. You never felt an obligation to work hard because it was important to get this stuff manufactured. They made the rules simply because if they didn’t, nothing would get built, the company would go bankrupt—and we wouldn’t get paid. There wasn’t any ethical obligation there; it was simply a practical obligation. So I think that Levinas wants to say that behind the community you find an obligation to other people, people when we are faced with them. And that seems to me a very strong position. It seems very concrete. Take, for example, a colony, a group of people who went to out to homestead in the West, they “found” towns, communities; they took care of one another because they know one another and helped one another when there was need and hardship. So the community is built on the face-to-face sense of obligation. Q: What you’re saying is reminiscent of what you wrote in The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. There you lay out the rational community, and then there is this “other” community. Is there an eternal relation of those two strata, with the ethical as primordial? Is there a way to make the rational ethical, or is there always a tension between the two?

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A: In an enterprise we follow the rules in this practical way, but there are times when you feel: this is why it is all meaningful. You have a career, and then your child or a neighbor’s child is ill. A researcher from your company comes up with a new medicine. Engineers are often just thinking about the internal rationality of the enterprise, and then a flood or Hurricane Katrina happens, and you see this is why I’m an engineer. Q: Do you feel that way about teaching? It seems clear that you do from your writings. A: A former student in Montana was teaching in an undergraduate department. He remarked that when you teach in a graduate department, you change people’s thinking; but when you teach undergraduates, you can change their lives. I think that professors say this quite commonly. Somebody comes up to you who took your class 20 years ago and says how important your class was to me (whether it’s in philosophy or some other discipline). I think that what professors feel it’s all about. Q: Can we step back a bit to need and desire, specifically on Žižek and Lacan on desire in the context of Levinas and infinite obligation? Infinity seems to be the standard of desire for Žižek, desire that can never be satisfied—the Coca-Cola model of endless consumption; the more you drink, the thirstier you get. I glean from your writings that we can have a sense of satisfaction, of completion. But it’s not eternal, we get exhausted and this can make one stronger. I guess it’s like your view of emotional need: we actually generate excesses. Do you think that that’s a fair criticism of Lacan and Žižek, that they are too need-based? A: I first got into this with Levinas. He talks about pleasure, enjoyment, closing in on itself, retreating into this little corner of the world in total satisfaction. There is the whole Hegelian tradition that one saw in desire the craving for the absolute. There is a theological history behind that way of thinking: our hearts are blessed and rest in Thee, O God—the idea that we’re longing for infinity. But against that, I want to emphasize the moments of completion. For example, in music, the Nietzschean idea of the eternal return is there. There are the moments that you would say to the demon who says you will have to relive those moments an infinite number of times: you are God and I have never heard anything so divine. It’s a very musical experience. I think it’s in Beyond Good and Evil; the end of the passage is that we should shout “da capo!” At the end of a performance, a symphony of Beethoven, we just want that everyone should shout “da capo”—play it over again from the beginning. It’s so perfect that one could not imagine wanting anything more. Some get into a piece of music so deeply that any kind of longing for anything outside disappears. Maybe we want to hear the whole thing

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over again, but we also know that is not going to make it any better. I often discover a new piece of music that I love and then play it all day. That’s a mistake; it loses its marvel in the repetition. But there are so many experiences, so many days, when we think this day is perfect just the way it is. We spend a day in nature, out in the mountains; at the end of the day, everything about it is perfect, including the fact that it came to an end. Q: Isn’t that Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence? This is the way it should be and must be versus, say, Adorno’s view of the eternal recurrence as an infinite repetition. A: What’s fundamental is this experience of perfection. You know, I never really thought this before, but just as we’re talking, I think it happens in every sphere. How often a friend visits for a few hours and then leaves. And you realize that it was perfect; the hours were perfect and the friend left at the right time. A symphony comes to an end, and you (at least the ordinary listener) can’t really spell out the reasons why it had to end now, but you feel the ending was right. The very notion of perfection is something that comes to an end, that’s completed, that it forms closure. We have this experience often in reading stories, novels. Movie reviewers say all the time: it’s too long, it went on and on. We know when things come to an end at the right time. All that kind of analysis is lacking in that simpleminded Hegelian dialectic that goes on to infinity. When I was in graduate school and first encountered the Hegelian dialectic, it was very attractive—the idea that the search for knowledge is unending and science will go on infinitely. We didn’t like the dogmatic view that everything was all tied up and finished. We also liked the idea that we were researchers and that it was fine to be searching, realizing that the search would never end. I first started thinking about this because of what Levinas says about enjoyment, how it closes in upon itself and disconnects from the past and disconnects from the future. When you go for a dive in the ocean, your eyes are just open to the splendor of the coral reef and the movement of the fish; what happened before or what happens after disconnect. You don’t think “what am I going to do with this?” or “what am I going to do tomorrow?” Q: Is Levinas right in saying that we close ourselves off in contentment? Don’t we open up, as with Nietzsche’s sense of joy? It’s not resentment against time like when we say I don’t ever want this moment to end. But this speaks to perfection, as you just said. A: Yes, I found in Nietzsche the idea that joy says yes to all the woes and wants eternity. I used to think of these joys as like in trips. If you spend a day in nature on a trek that will end with a breathtaking view of the

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ocean at sunset, it’s not better if you were taken by taxi to that cliffside at six o’clock in the evening. The fact that you trekked the whole mountain and were sweating and tired and had aches and pains—all that made it better. All that delightful exhilaration of the body—strain and fatigue and obstacles are wrapped up in this fulfillment. Q: You have done much to enhance and clarify Levinas’s doctrine of the elements, even finding an elemental imperative before and beyond the role the elements have for Levinas. 2 Do you think that the elemental can substitute for infinity? A: The elemental is part of lifeworld experience and perception. It’s the boundless light, the darkness, the warmth, the heat, and so on. Levinas uses the word apeiron, the unbounded or the indefinite. The light seems to go on; we don’t see the bounds of it, but it is not grasped positively as infinite. I think there is the same thing in Kant with the idea of law or the sublime. What he calls the mathematical sublime, the grandeur of the cliffs that are greater than what the eye can take hold of and encompass. That gives a sense of infinity, but it seems to be a contradiction in terms that the infinite can be grasped. Instead of a positive grasp of the infinite, you have some sense of the unending—that notion of infinition, of unendingness. I think Levinas never took account of the Kantian premonition of the infinite that Kant would see in the sublime. I was just thinking now that we still have the Kantian case of the starry skies. We look out there and it seems like the darkness of outer space is unending, so we have an inkling, like Kant would have before the sublime, of infinite space. Or better, the unbounded, the indefinite. Astronomers are still unsure whether the universe is infinite, whether space is infinite or not. It seems to me that especially astronomy has so radically altered our perception of things. Q: It seems to have altered our perception of ourselves, too. I cannot imagine the upheaval the Copernican revolution caused in discovering that the earth is no longer at the center of the universe. A: The big shock for me was when I seriously began to think that the sun will burn out. I realized, especially in the humanities, that with human life everything we do is for the future and we suppose there is going to be a future. Somebody said any scientific article that comes out will be obsolete in eight months. But in the humanities we’re still reading the very first things that were ever written, philosophy that was written 2,500 years ago. Nietzsche said he would be understood in a thousand years. We always think that a philosophy book will always be read and that it will take a couple of years for people to be able read it and think about it and talk about it and spread it around. So you’re in no hurry. And you

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hope that a few of your books will still be read after you die. But the idea that everything will be burned out, that there will be no future in any way. . . . Q: Does that indicate your devotion to the world, to the secular realm? A: One of the most illuminating things that I read was Leigh A. Payne’s book, Unsettling Accounts (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2007). She studies the torturers who confessed in Argentina and Brazil, Chile, and South Africa. In Argentina there was an army officer who finally came out and talked about taking prisoners during the regime of the generals and flying them out into the ocean and dropping them there. It was the first time that anyone had admitted that this had been done, so it was really sensational. But then the author studied whether these people were believed. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, when the torturers confessed, how did they confess? Some of them said that they were doing just what they were ordered to do. Some of them were seen to be deliberately shifting blame onto superiors or other colleagues. Some of them defended what they did, saying that their country, Argentina, was in chaos, being destroyed by subversives and that they had to use harsh measures. And some of them had acquired a kind of glory as confessors, as people who heroically confessed their crimes. Some of these people who then began to appear on talk shows and wrote books about what they did were believed less because they were seen to be benefitting from their confessions. We will think about these things with more psychological and sociological insight. I would say that that is part of phenomenology in a kind of broader sense, describing how people actually perceive their environments and how they are perceived in their environments. In thinking of the Phnom Penh trials, I began to see that there were a lot of ethnocentric ideas that were being vented—this idea that “truth will out,” that “truth heals”—all these are very deeply ensconced, very Western ideas. In our culture there has long been this idea that truth will out. The idea that many criminals who go years without being detected in the end will confess. Although that doesn’t seem empirically to be the case. Also, that truth heals, this is another problem. On the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, there have been pretty extensive studies on the effects of those hearings. Some people just found themselves re-traumatized when they were confronted with their torturers and had to go back to those events again. Q: What does Nietzsche say about forgetting in The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life? We have to forget at the right times and remember at the right times. It’s not amnesia, it’s not denial, but . . .

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A: In any case that we’re processing it all the time. For example, in Cambodia, these horrors took place thirty years ago. In the past thirty years, if you’ve been able to live, you’ve processed them in some way. Q: There’s a rather large question I have for your work. On subjectivity, do you have a theory about an affective core there? Not a soul necessarily, but some substance in our subjectivity to start with? Do you have a “substantial” view of human subjectivity, as opposed to Sartre’s more open, self-positing view, which seems to start from scratch? A: To me maybe the most dramatic one and that’s close to our phenomenological literature is the medical experience. All of us have an idea that we might get sick and die. We learn the medical discourse when we have an ailment, and now when we come back from the doctor, we look it all up on the Internet. We learn the vocabulary, the language, and what’s going to happen. When we communicate with the doctor, we understand the treatment. But there is this other issue. It is what is this aliment doing to my life? I had a very vivid experience recently at a British meeting on medical humanities. One of the performance artists, Martin O’Brien, has cystic fibrosis. Most people with cystic fibrosis die in infancy. The longest anyone has ever lived is forty-three. Martin is 27. He knows that he has much less time to live than the rest of us. And his performance really helped us to share what that is. When you discover, for example, that you have cancer, does your life now come to an end? You have to deal with that in a way that the medical discourse is of no help. You have to form a private discourse, a discourse for yourself, by yourself as to what this means to your life, to your conception of what’s meaningful in your life, what you’ve been trying to achieve in life. Q: How would you describe your own philosophical style? You’ve blazed your own trails there. A: In a way, everything that I do is phenomenology. At least in this minimal sense that all insights in philosophy come through describing something, perhaps something that has been described again and again, but describing it more closely, more accurately, or describing something in a phenomenon that had not been taken account of. Accuracy of description is the origin really of any new movement of philosophy. NOTES 1. In “The Paradox of Morality” Levinas addresses this very question: “I don’t know if a snake has a face. I can’t answer that question. A more specific analysis is needed.” The animal he cites, the snake, is however, the biblical symbol of evil “par

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excellence.”—Ed. [Emmanuel Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality” in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, trans. Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 172]. 2. Alphonso Lingis, “The Elemental Imperative,” Research in Phenomenology (18:1988), 3–21.

NINE Resisting Individuality Emily Anne Parker

In the opening pages of Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes that disciplinary societies eliminate all rights of the prisoner as an attempt to rise above the supposedly distant barbarity of earlier times in which punishment was corporal and public. This is a “utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain.” 1 This judicial sleight of hand is utopic not in that Foucault believes imprisonment to be an improvement on public dismemberment, but rather in that it is impossible to deprive a person of all rights and also avoid inflicting pain on her. This is implicitly acknowledged, Foucault suggests, in the deliberate stealth with which punishment occurs to this day. While there is public glory in concealed punishing, the techniques of punishment of the disciplinary sort are hidden out of shame on the part of those who administer them. 2 As Tyrone Werts, himself a former prison inmate, puts it: the prison wall “isn’t there just to keep me in, but to keep you out.” 3 Discipline is intended to be a secretive affair. This mode of supposedly hidden punishment executes just as quietly as it incarcerates. “A death that lasts only a moment—no torture must be added to it in advance, no further actions performed upon the corpse; an execution that affects life rather than the body.” 4 The practice of capital punishment does not necessarily live up to this sterile, medicalized model, complete with an attending physician “whose task it is to end life.” 5 Indeed, execution can last much longer than a moment, as was the case with the execution of Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire in January of 2014. (According to numerous reports, Dennis McGuire gasped and suffocated, taking possibly nineteen minutes to die at the hands of a process suppos105

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edly just and painless.) This is to say nothing of the routine sexual violence found in the everyday procedures of prisons run privately and publicly. 6 If the ideal of disciplinary power is to snuff out a life without forcing prison administrators or the public to think about the implications of such carefully orchestrated deaths, hidden executions do not fulfill such hopes. Nevertheless, Foucault is asking the reader to consider the difference between the purported aim of punishing a body—publicly through such methods as burning and dismemberment—versus the aim of punishing a life—by stifling her communication and touch and other forms of bodily movement. Foucault makes it clear that he does not mean to be the one juxtaposing life and body. No, it is this new regime which juxtaposes them. It purports to punish one (life) and, somehow, not the other (body). How else could this new mode of punishment, a shifting of public torture to the tortures of confinement, ever have been conceived as “non-corporal”? 7 This interest in the punishment of life leads some to wonder whether Discipline and Punish attests to the power of bodies at all. Perhaps, some wonder, as it is life which becomes the site of punishment, bodies are shaped and trained in ways that no life could possibly remain transparent enough to herself to want to resist. A life on this view could be constrained, its possibilities for self-direction thwarted, even as the body in question becomes, grows, according to cultural valuations of that body. But this is to forget that Foucault’s point is precisely the folly of distinguishing between life and body. In contrast to this tendency to wonder where the powers of bodies are, given the ubiquity of their disciplinary normalization, the readings of disciplinary power by Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingis explore the implications of his critique of the distinction it presumes between life and body in aiming to punish only life. Unlike Butler, however, Lingis’s reading centers on the inescapable tension in Foucault between life (as body) which is inherently resistant to the norm of “individuality” and disciplinary power which seeks naively to instill this individuality. Lingis suggests that in Foucault the disciplinary imperative of individuality is one of fungibility and a soul-like neutrality with respect to cultural-material norms. It is on this view engaged in a necessarily never-ending struggle to instantiate soul-like fungibility in bodies which are distinct as bodies. I will argue that in this way Lingis suggests another reading of Foucauldian “life” in Disicipline and Punish and History of Sexuality I: as everspecific materiality subject to an irrevocable variation. Jane Bennett has recently asked, “Why did Foucault’s concern with ‘bodies and pleasures’ . . . not count as materialist? Why is there not a more robust debate between . . . contending accounts of how materiality matters to politics?” 8 Lingis suggests the same rhetorical question. He offers a reading of Foucault’s concern with bodies and pleasures as precisely materialist: he finds that in Discipline and Punish discipline responds from all angles

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precisely to bodies which it can neither predict nor control. Biopolitics, of which I take disciplinary power to be one mode, is a perpetual struggle to order material life. 9 In what follows I compare Butler’s widely influential reading of Foucault by considering her work culminating in The Psychic Life of Power as well as her recent interview with George Yancy, “What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter’?” 10 On Butler’s reading, Foucauldian bodies are docile in spite of themselves, and paying attention to the pervasive power of juridical regimes is a crucial way of releasing oneself from the fantasy of freedom from others, the fantasy of “giving an account of oneself,” 11 as she will later put it, outside of the norms of a community. It is along these lines that Butler criticizes Foucault for inconsistency: she argues that he occasionally attributes a “non-normalizable wildness” to bodies, a supposed wildness which for Butler represents a totalizing hope for freedom from the laws of others. 12 While this account picks up on crucial aspects of Foucault’s bodies, namely how they are produced through discipline, I worry that it leaves open the question of why such production is unjust and what is happening in the impulse to discipline, to make individual or fungible. I then turn to a different reading, one offered in Foreign Bodies. There Lingis attends to the ways that materiality not only incites but also resists the imperative of the “individuated disciplined body” waged by those engaged in biopolitics. Butler and Lingis are perhaps talking past each other, and yet it is Lingis’s prescient attention to the dangerous imperative of individuation that allows his reading to balance attention to the very unevenly distributed dangers of biopolitics with attention to the shifting elemental powers it seeks to contain. BUTLER AND THE PROBLEM OF ACCOUNTING FOR RESISTANCE Butler explains that subjectivation in Foucault means not just becoming a subject, a “social placeholder, a structure in formation,” 13 but it also means becoming subject to the social process by which one develops as a subject. 14 In other words, a person’s capacity for self-understanding is a function of a specific social world according to which his or her life has meaning. I cannot think for myself except through the discourse by which I have come to understand myself and others. This production of oneself as a subject is also the production of oneself as a body. Subjectivation takes place “centrally through the body.” 15 A body is not inert matter which is constructed or shaped by disciplinary power. Instead “body” is another word for a simultaneous production and destruction “on the occasion of which a subject is formed.” 16 This subject is a body, a body that takes and makes its own shape in the context of a specific and shift-

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ing confluence of political and ecological demands. Power, dispersed and culturally specific, is the production of bodily selves. Butler’s interest is precisely in how it is that Foucault can account for resistance given this understanding of power. And conversely, how it is that some grow attached “to precisely the kind of state-linked individuality that reconsolidates the juridical law.” 17 If disciplinary power is the means by which I become—if it is me in fact—the second question seems less mysterious. Even if discourse bounds all of the political identities by which I might possibly understand myself—as disabled and/or black and/or brown and/or white and/or queer and/or female—that some develop an “attachment to subjection,” an attachment to precisely these identity categories would seem automatic. To see Butler’s way of thinking about attachment, we might think of her recent interview with George Yancy on the movement that travels under the statement that Black Lives Matter. This movement thematizes black as a way of mobilizing attention to the life expectancy of black transwomen, the percentage of black women living in poverty, and the incarceration rates of black people of all genders in the U.S. 18 The movement clearly does not mean to reinforce the idea of blackness as an inherent trait of human bodies. Rather, they intend to call into question the associations of criminality and hypersexuality regularly associated with black and brown bodies, leading to disproportionate unemployment, homelessness, police brutality, incarceration. Nevertheless they mobilize black as a way of insisting on the power of a racializing discourse which recreates color and ethnicity as an excellent predictor for example of workplace discrimination. Black is a “lens and filter, one that can quite easily construe a black person, or another racial minorality, who is walking toward us as someone who is potentially or actually, threatening, or is considered, in his very being, a threat.” 19 Even when a black or brown person is “down, already on the ground, and seeks to lift himself, or seated against a subway grate, and seeks to speak on his own behalf, or is utterly subdued and imperiled by a chokehold, he never stops looming as a threat” to white morphology, to security, to white morphology as security. 20 In the phrase of resistance “Black Lives Matter” a disciplining term becomes a site of resistance by means of the subjection (for example, as black and female) that constitutes it as discourse. This discursive space of U.S. culture presupposes that some white bodies, especially straight, ideally masculine, and ideally abled bodies that can be designated as white emblematize justice, reasonability, and tamed sexuality. 21 By means of such language and the psychosexual 22 world that that language conveys, bodies become: for example, differential biomedical and life expectancies appear. The examples that Butler uses in The Psychic Life of Power have to do with the threat of white queer genders and sexualities. She asks the reader to consider the myriad ways in which “woman” and “queer” get used both to pathologize as well as to contest the pathologization of the people who identify

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and are identified with them. Butler’s point is that you can’t have the capacities for shaming that these words convey without opening up the potential for distinct challenges to them. She takes this to be a Foucauldian point: “For Foucault . . . the disciplinary apparatus produces subjects, but as a consequence of that production, it brings into discourse the conditions for subverting that apparatus itself.” 23 Discourse “spawns versions of itself” which can reinforce but also contest regimes of power. 24 What is far more difficult in Butler is to account for the emergence of resistance given this understanding of power as both destructive and productive. Another way to put this question might be to ask what is being destroyed by discipline: surveillance, suspicion, confinement. How is it possible to account for the violence of these efforts? Butler’s answer to this question is that “the subject produced and the subject regulated or subordinated are one.” 25 The production of a body-as-subject (to borrow a very affinitive image from the work of Ann Cahill) 26 is its restriction to a specific morphological world, a world in which black is seen repeatedly as psychosexual threat, but is not itself inherently anything at all. For Butler, humans abhor a vacuum of meaning: there is no skin, no hair, no genitalia without imposed, inventive, productive meaning. Such meaning enables some and murders others. Butler worries that Foucault himself does not stick strictly enough to this point; he suggests sometimes that resistance appears in the form of a “non-normalizable wildness,” a moment of resistance that exceeds and challenges normalizing aims, outside of the imposition of meaning. 27 Such moments in Foucault Butler takes to be inconsistent with his theory of resistance as the unintended effect of power. In an earlier essay which explores this point in more detail, Butler argues that this amounts to a paradox in Foucault’s writing. 28 He argues in The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 that, as Butler puts it, “there could be no body before the law, no sexuality freed from relations of power.” 29 These are the grounds for his rejection of the very idea of the repression of sexual drives; so-called repression in fact always produces drives, identities, selves. But at the same time bodies would seem to constitute a preexisting “indefinite generality” that dynamically resists cultural norms and in so doing is “the inevitable limit and failure of cultural construction” to make properly gendered bodies-as-subjects. 30 Onto this indefinite generality, Foucault inconsistently suggests, presuppositions of racial, sexual, and class difference are projected. Butler takes this paradox to be the lesson of Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”: there is and there isn’t a body before the law. There is in the sense that bodies and desires are shaped culturally; in other words there is something there that can possibly resist being shaped, and there isn’t in the sense that these very same bodies are created fundamentally by such shaping. 31 As

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a way of resolving this paradox in her own work, Butler argues that the cogency of Foucault’s work resides in the latter claim. For Butler it is crucial to appreciate the dependency, the openness to the psychophysical lives of bodily others, offered by analysis of discourse and attention to its power. Discourse is not expressed by passive bodies, but rather by bodies-as-subjects who “enjoy intelligibility only to the extent that they are, as it were, first established in language” 32 as identities that they take part in elaborating in context. Butler is particularly interested in the fact that no human body is ever matter in the mode of inorganic or even other sorts of organic matter. Whatever sort of animal a human is, it is quite different from others. What’s more, there is no such thing as “the body,” if what this means is something anonymous and neutral with respect to discourse. 33 Bodies are always animated, animating, guided, guiding, shaped, shaping. They understand themselves in specific, discursive, linguistic, political modes. She finds in Foucault a way of articulating precisely how it is that bodies would appear sometimes to be “docile.” They are not in fact docile; people do not in fact ever passively take up norms which undermine or enable them. To suggest, as Butler worries that Foucault sometimes does, that bodies ever act in radical absence of the discursive space by which they become selves is to suggest a radical psychosomatic autonomy that is not politically possible. Butler’s reading of Foucault is not one in which active discourse sculpts passive bodies. It is instead an articulation of political life in which discourse is affective and relational. Disciplinary regimes often fail as description but repeatedly succeed as ways of understanding affective political dynamics. Resistance is neither a mimicking nor a spontaneous autonomous rejection, but a response to the conditions of its own emergence. LINGIS AND MAKING INDIVIDUAL Butler’s reading of “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History” holds that bodies in Foucault are paradoxical: they are and aren’t the product of history. But Foucault’s essay expresses this tension as the violence of the will to knowledge, of which biopolitics is a political expression. In doing so, Foucault suggests a different image of resistance than that of Butler. Instead of being the response of a body-as-subject to the dynamics that make it possible, resistance in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History” would seem to be an inherent thwarting of the aims of biopolitics by material life (as body). The will to knowledge in that essay characteristically denies the power that knowing is—a power to undo what it seeks to study, to shape what it seeks merely to observe. Foucault writes, “We believe . . . that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is

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molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances.” 34 Clearly this is the theme in Foucault in which Butler is interested: history “multiplies our body and sets it against itself.” 35 And yet, it should be noted that while his claim is certainly that bodies are not immune to the influence of history, neither is his claim that bodies are exclusively molded by it. Whereas Butler holds that the body-as-subject produced and the bodyas-subject regulated or subordinated are one, Foucault suggests that they are not identical. What Butler takes to be a paradox, Foucault seems to regard as a tension, the very tension constituting the lives (bodies) targeted for the purported soul-punishment of what Mike Davis first called the prison industrial complex. 36 That the prison industrial complex of the early twenty-first century is in fact corporal punishment is masked precisely by the idea of the prison as a punishment for the soul and the soul as the animating source of an inert body. In fact bodies cannot sustain confinement—thwarted from touching a friend or partner or child or aunt or uncle for months or years, thwarted from speaking to anyone for months or years. For Foucault this setting of a body against itself is possible precisely because, as he puts it later in the same essay, “nature,” including the nature that we ourselves are, “does not allow for mastery.” 37 The instinct for knowledge, Foucault argues, is a historical emergence that is unjust and malicious as well as in fact the height of naivety: “Even in the greatly expanded form [the instinct for knowledge] assumes today, the will to knowledge does not achieve a universal truth; man is not given an exact and serene mastery of nature. On the contrary, it ceaselessly multiplies the risks, creates dangers in every area; it breaks down illusory defenses; it dissolves the unity of the subject.” 38 Human bodies are no more the exclusive result of history than they are the exclusive result of “physiology.” Exceeding the attempts of disciplinary power and biopower to order and reorder life, nature dissolves the unity of the subject. It frustrates all consistent figuration. The difficulty is that to ask in what this “nature” consists—in complex combination of course with “history” (rhythms of work, rest, holidays, food, values, eating habits, moral laws, 39 the “historical reality of the soul” 40)—is to engage in a will to knowledge which denies its own body, which aspires to “a faceless anonymity,” 41 a bodilessness. What is “nature”? Clearly it is affected by history. Yes, life’s (a body’s) qualities alter under changes in the rhythms of work and rest. But life also resists the rhythms of work and rest demanded or eliminated in biopolitical societies. Without this tension between the will to knowledge and that life which escapes its efforts to know and therefore contain—the better to know and the better to contain for reasons that seem to exceed the rationality or utility of the profit motive 42—there would be neither resistance nor injustice. Foucault is protesting the violences of biopower precisely by insisting on a “na-

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ture” which exceeds its mastery, not as something pure which resists from beyond biopower, but rather as the materiality and concomitant heterogeneity of life (body). It is precisely this tension—between biopolitics and heterogeneous life—which Alphonso Lingis explores. “Foucault’s history is a materialist history,” writes Lingis. 43 “It is as a sensitive substance, a substance that produces pain and pleasures in itself, that a body is a subject of and subjected to power and discourse.” 44 Bodies that speak are not blank surfaces “upon which its own gestures draw signs.” 45 Human bodies are products “of natural evolution, but also of our own history.” 46 This history is collective as well as temporal; it is driven as much by “body-ideals” as by bodies which depart from those ideals. What it is to become as a body is to constitute with others a terrain of incitements of and susceptibilities to pleasures and pains. While Lingis would seem to agree with Butler that self-understanding is fundamentally social, no body inhabits precisely the same linguistic space or lives the sensibilities and sensations of another. Individuality—fungibility is fundamentally foreign to Lingis’s images of human bodies. There is no recourse to “the body” in Lingis. What Butler suggests is a paradoxical “indefinite generality,” dynamically resisting culture in an amorphous curtailing of normative power, on Lingis’s reading is corporeal “variation.” 47 As in Butler, this variation is produced circularly. The morphologies producing variation are a reflection of disciplinary power. And yet Lingis suggests that it is the powers of bodies (lives) deemed criminal which biopolitics targets in an ongoing battle to establish “the individuated disciplined body.” 48 It is to the asymmetrical powers of bodies—those engaged in biopolitics and those who cannot help but resist biopolitics in being alive—to which our attention should turn. Lingis compares the power of making bodies variable to Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between “meaning” and “value”: a word has a meaning with respect to its referent while it has value in relationship to other words. Lingis writes that bodies engaged in discipline mark “the individuality of the individual by a degree of approximation to the norm, but the norm itself is nothing but the measure of the mean range of variations.” 49 In other words, discipline seeks to establish the individuality of another body, treating this body as if it has no life, as if it is not life. But it does so by comparing that body to other bodies, seeking a “mean range of variations” against which each body has a value. But in fact this forced individuality has no meaning; it has no referent. The criminality projected onto black bodies of all genders, the example that Lingis explores at length, has no referent. The non-neutrality of human bodies—hetergeneous in virtue of living, breathing, thinking from the specific bodies that they are—inspire and exceed such discipline, and the articulation of variation is forced via inherently meaningless differential valuations of bodies (lives). But this enforcement of indi-

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viduality seeks nevertheless a disciplined body which has a generic, fungible value. Lingis would seem to agree with Butler that disciplinary power seeks to order the life that a body is, implicitly appreciating that life while also expecting it to be soul-like in its pliable obedience. But Lingis additionally suggests that the source of the violence of this is found precisely in the attempt to make individuals out of fundamentally nonfungible lived bodies. Bodies (lives) exceed all attempts to make them individual, to make bodies interchangeable instantiations of the values attributed to them. In this way the reading balances attention to the uneven manner in which the dangers of biopolitics are spread throughout a community of people. Not all bodies become targets for surveillance; not all bodies stand to gain financially or morphologically from surveillance. Biopolitics in the form of mass incarceration, enabled by the emergence of disciplinary punishment, has a differential impact on bodies differently made variable. Biopower is not a way of understanding subjectivication so much as it is a way of understanding the effects of the attribution of criminality and hypersexuality to the bodies of some. Contrary to the notion that the morphological work of prisons—their supposed sexuality and intrigue—arises due to the “successive exclusion from the social order” of those deemed criminal, Lingis argues that the prison is established as a social necessity precisely “through successive inclusions under ever more insistent surveillance,” 50 surveilling that constantly presumes criminality, that “imputes crime to color” in the words of Frederick Douglass. 51 What is surveilled is bodies via a tactile vision that criminalizes them. Under such vested watching, double binds abound—on streets, in homes, in courtrooms, in suburbs, in cities, in rural towns. As Jared Sexton writes, “One is imminently open to police encounter. . . . Simply walking away from the police is now grounds for a stop and frisk, despite the supposed constitutional right to do so. Standing still is also grounds for a stop.” 52 There is no such thing as observation; there is only the vertigo of surveillance. 53 Prisons, Lingis writes, are “both the failure of the disciplinary archipelago and its loci of concentration. Today the prisons, ever multiplying, are not enough. Torture is being reinvented everywhere, and in republican societies” 54 in the form of the criminalization of drug use, the incarceration of people suffering from addiction to illegal drugs, and “supermax” prisons. Such methods of making individual, making fungible, develop through the legal terminology of rights, which presupposes a life autonomously responsible for its health. But the professionalization of torture proliferates due to “the appropriation of positive forces of life by power and by knowledge, conducted in view of the incitement, reinforcement, surveillance, and management of forces, the increase of potentialities and results.” 55 White morphologies (whose productions are disavowals of every attempt at black and brown morphology) and a specific

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black body regulated or subordinated are here clearly not one and the same. Whereas Butler considers those bodies that can be made docile, bodies that seek more or less to gain through docility or compliance with the differential productions of disciplinary and biopower, Lingis is interested in the implications of such docility for those whose bodies cannot be other than objects of surveillance under biopower. On Lingis’s view Black Lives Matter will be all the more powerful for making reference to a term that indicates a significant, if not the only, factor in the flourishing of prisons: white morphologies that enable only some bodies. Black is a value, an image, that tracks the variations biopolitics targets. Following Foucault, Lingis takes biopower, in its emergence as the exponential growth of prisons, to be the legacy of the timetable, which was supposed to represent a “new age for penal justice.” 56 How is it possible for the exponential growth of prisons to emerge from punishment via timetables? Lingis suggests it is this: one cannot direct the life as body of another. There are after all “powers in [a] body over which that body [itself] does not exert power.” 57 This follows from what it is to be a body, and yet human bodies do not have to deal uniformly with the negative valuations of disability, of black, of brown, of female, of transgender, of queer. “Nature,” the nature that I am, dissolves the unity of the subject articulated against such materiality. It is not so much that biopower is somatophobic, as that it is the expression of strict denial of bodies, a commitment to the destruction of bodies, which display these valuations of raciality, gender, sexuality, ability that eliminate the fantasy of homogeneous bodiless life. Such violent norms are precisely the sort in which Butler is also interested. And yet in Butler, to the extent that she denies that there is anything about me fundamentally contra to disciplinary power, it is not clear where such resistances to the norms of biopolitics come from. Are they really strictly the presuppositions of biopolitics itself? Even Butler seems to regard these as bodily, insofar as there is no viable distinction in her work between life and body. Perhaps exploration of the morphology of biopolitics is necessary, not exploration of its pure presuppositions but of the bodily sensations from which it draws. To what does biopower respond? In Lingis, it is bodies, not bodies somehow wildly apart from discourses which define them, but inevitably variable and non-neutral bodies precisely in that discourses try to instruct them into sameness, equivalence, and neutrality, which trouble the hope of timetables, and later prisons, to instruct a soul, to guide it to manageable bodiless “individuality.” Even if biopower is an expression of a morphology both white and male, it cannot on Lingis’s reading be a pure expression that produces the myriad objects of its own disavowal. Surveillance might be inspired by a mirage of criminality, projected and profuse. But another way to approach the same point, by focusing attention on the bodies (lives) benefitting from biopolitics, is to suggest as Lingis does that biopolitics mobi-

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lizes forces of life (bodies). This is precisely, I suggest, what leads Jared Sexton to argue, “We must lend more attention to the pleasures of militarism itself, the pure enjoyment of collective destruction, the social fantasies of death and dismemberment, the delights of martial law.” 58 Surveillance is a nonconsensual, or rather an asymmetrical, pleasure. CONCLUSION The docility of bodies in Foucault is an important theme, but this cannot account for the violence and injustice of biopower. Foucault in fact argues that bodies are the result neither of unchanging laws of physiology nor are they the result of rhythms of work, rest, holidays, food, values, eating habits, moral laws, 59 the “historical reality of the soul.” 60 Whereas Butler regards the docility and resistance of bodies as a paradox in Foucault, Lingis suggests that the tension between these two themes is what makes for the violence of biopolitics. And yet this violence is not distributed evenly. For Butler, resistance to this violence is the production of bodiesas-subjects who must take up biopolitical norms as part of the language of subjectivity. In Foreign Bodies, attention to the imperative of individuality and its lack of identity with bodies that biopolitics seeks to make docile as individual—fungible, interchangeable—provides a different theory of resistance than that of Butler. Butler is particularly interested in the docility that biopolitics can produce, while Lingis focuses on the inevitable failure to make docile bodies that are in conflict with the biopolitical morphology of raciality. What might happen to this account if an intersectional method were at play, exploring not only racialization but also dualistic fundamentalist gendering, not only biomedical disabilityproliferating but also discrete pathological sexuality-making? Such a method could magnify the already careful attention in Lingis to the disparity of sensation produced by the prison industrial complex—the pleasures of militarism, the torture of confinement—allowing Lingis’s reading of Foucauldian bodies to locate a figuring of their material resistance, produced in the contexts of discipline and control and yet always troubling their hopes for mastery. NOTES 1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 11. 2. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 9–10; Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56. 3. The Inside Out Center,” College of Liberal Arts Temple University, accessed February 12, 2015, www.insideoutcenter.org/. 4. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 12. 5. Ibid., 11.

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6. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 63. 7. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 29. 8. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi. 9. Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 256. While Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between disciplinary and control societies, he does so by arguing that the latter are characterized by a complete collapse between the individual and that individual as a dot “within a mass.” For Foucault each would seem to be the flip side of the other, even with a disciplinary society. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–78. 10. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Judith Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” in The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Donn Welton (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); George Yancy and Judith Butler, “What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter’?” New York Times, January 12, 2015, accessed March 2, 2015. opinionator. blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/whats-wrong-with-all-lives-matter/?_r=0. 11. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 12. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 92. See also Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 58. 13. Ibid., 10. 14. Ibid., 83. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 92. 17. Ibid., 102. 18. “About Us,” Black Lives Matter, accessed February 13, 2015. blacklivesmatter. com/about/. 19. George Yancy and Judith Butler, “What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter’?” 20. Ibid. 21. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 157. 22. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, “War Within: A Prison Interview,” in Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, ed. Joy James (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 84. 23. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 100. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 84. 26. Ann Cahill. Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 35. 27. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 92. 28. Judith Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” 308. As in The Psychic Life of Power, Butler cites Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). Here she additionally considers “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard and trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64. 29. Ibid., 308. 30. Ibid., 307. 31. See especially Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” 148. 32. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 11. 33. Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” 307. 34. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” 153. 35. Ibid., 154. 36. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 84; Mike Davis, “Hell Factories in the Field: A Prison-Industrial Complex,” The Nation 260.7, February 20, 1995.

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37. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” 163. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 153. 40. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 29. 41. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” 158. 42. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 16. 43. Lingis, Foreign Bodies, 54. 44. Ibid., 54. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., vii. 47. Ibid., 60. 48. Ibid., 58–60. 49. Ibid., 60. 50. Ibid., 62. 51. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 30. 52. Jared Sexton, “Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control” in Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, ed. Joy James, 200. 53. Ibid., 199. 54. Lingis, Foreign Bodies, 63. 55. Ibid., 68. 56. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 7. 57. Lingis, Foreign Bodies, 58–59. 58. Sexton, “Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control,” 198. 59. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” 153. 60. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 29.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bin Wahad, Dhoruba. “War Within: A Prison Interview.” In Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, edited by Joy James. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Black Lives Matter. “About Us.” Accessed February 13, 2015. blacklivesmatter.com/ about/. Butler, Judith. “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions.” In The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Donn Welton. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. ———. Giving An Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. ———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Cahill, Ann. Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics. New York: Routledge, 2011. College of Liberal Arts Temple University. “The Inside Out Center.” Accessed February 12, 2015. www.insideoutcenter.org/. Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Davis, Mike. “Hell Factories in the Field: A Prison-Industrial Complex.” The Nation, February 20, 1995, 260:7. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations, translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ———. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

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———. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard and translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Huffer, Lynne. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Lingis, Alphonso. Foreign Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1994. Sexton, Jared. “Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control.” In Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, edited by Joy James. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Stone, Alison. Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Yancy, George, and Judith Butler. “What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter’?” New York Times, January 12, 2015. Accessed March 2, 2015. opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2015/01/12/whats-wrong-with-all-lives-matter/?_r=0.

TEN Imperative Innovations Randolph C. Wheeler

It is an understatement to say that Alphonso Lingis’s body of work is marked by innovation. 1 Lingis’s very method is innovative. By beginning with vibrant details that illustrate his ideas, Lingis reverses the usual order of philosophical elaboration that proceeds from concepts to details. 2 This approach situates his method squarely in the “really existing” world, in which his explication of concepts enhances our understanding of the world, and re-enhances the world. For Lingis, philosophy is fundamentally phenomenological: “I have always experienced philosophy as a kind of revelation. . . . I learned to see things. . . . For me philosophy was really a revealing discourse and not simply a critical or secondary discourse that goes back over discourse to clarify concepts or criticize.” 3 An opulent example of rendering the universal in the concrete comes from The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common in an encounter with a Sandinista border guard: The skin of his face was not mobile, nervous, like that of journalists and editorialists, but weathered like hide by a childhood spent, no doubt, laboring to harvest coffee, cotton, or sugar on a finca, and by months or years spent on guard in the cold fog of the cloud forests or the swampy lowlands of the Mosquito Coast. . . . His shoes were not military, but were his own, that is, the rough rawhide shoes of laborers, of the land, of everyone. He was sitting near you, and said nothing to you. Only by his impassive face, his bared arms, his clothing, and his shoes was he exposed to you. . . . not his rational faculty . . . not his body diagramming no stand and attitude before you; but his face marked only by the brush in the swamps and the winds in the cloud forests, his hands mishandled by the land such that they barely have the dexterity to turn 119

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Where to begin with this remarkable passage so “typical” of Lingis’s style? We simultaneously encounter the layout of the purely rational Kantian world (and the practicality of Heidegger’s network of equipment) while being affected by the intimate contact of Levinas’s alterity and elements, all with a deeply humanist politics to boot. In one gesture, Lingis contrasts Kant’s rationality as speech with Levinasian proximity: “He was sitting near you, and said nothing to you.” Next, he proceeds to Levinas’s disclosures that do not require reason: “Only by his impassive face, his bared arms, his clothing, and his shoes was he exposed to you.” He even slips in a criticism of Heidegger’s claim of Dasein’s fundamental relation to the world to be through tools and our manipulations of them: “his hands mishandled by the land such that they barely have the dexterity to turn the pages of the newspaper.” Casting the concrete as a conceptual critique of Kant via Levinas, Lingis concludes “not his rational faculty, like your own . . . but his face marked only by the brush . . . have afflicted you.” Lingis closes the distance of rational perspective through the affective encounter with alterity—all done so seamlessly that one might not initially realize that he is explicating crucial concepts. With this methodology of the concrete, Lingis takes up phenomenology’s battle cry “back to the things themselves” more directly and deeply than Edmund Husserl’s idealism could. Finding the extraordinary in the everyday, Lingis notes the daily acts of quiet courage taking place in nursing homes and hospitals as patients face their own deaths. Lingis’s concerns are not with sterile debate or theoretical commentary: “I think in my life almost everything that counted was illuminated by philosophy.” 5 In a similar spirit of innovation, Lingis synthesizes of two major schools of thought, phenomenology and Kantism. He accomplishes this fusion through a rectification of Kant’s understanding of the imperative. Via phenomenological description, Lingis is able to explicate the original force that makes imperative form possible—a force that Kant’s rationalism could neither explain nor address. But, in a debt to Kant, Lingis finds that the imperative supplies the starting point that phenomenology and existentialism have lacked. Instead of beginning with the world as simply given, Lingis begins with the world “given as imperative.” 6 Here he discovers that our subjectivity begins in subjection to imperatives. This explication of imperative force is thematized by Emmanuel Levinas as our sensitivity and contact with alterity. Lingis then gives us another innovation—the relocation of Kant’s rational interiority to Levinas’s imperative contact with exteriority and sensation. Finally, Lingis’s insights into Friedrich Nietzsche’s birth of values as exclamatory affirmations illustrate the unifying aspects of imperative passion, in which emotions supply

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motives for moral valuations. In sum, these imperative innovations can be seen as the rectification and rehabilitation of Kant’s imperative, as a criticism of Levinas’s purportedly unassailable ethical alterity, and as the elucidation of the “dangerous emotions” at the heart of Nietzsche’s doctrine of human values. Finally, Lingis’s elucidation of passion uncovers an organizing imperative force, for which neither Kant’s rationalism nor Levinas’s alterity can give any account. INTELLIGIBILITY OF IMPERATIVE FORCE Lingis’s reading of Kant’s categorical imperative is not only a rectification but a revival. Although he rejects Kant’s categorical claim of reason’s absolute necessity in thought and moral action, Lingis finds the imperative to articulate the starting point that phenomenology and existentialism have lacked. Phenomenology takes the world as simply given. Martin Heidegger begins with “the given,” Edmund Husserl’s eidetic foundation is given in apodicticity, Jean-Paul Sartre takes subjectivity to be given in originating with its own free initiatives, and Jean-Luc Marion begins with a “pure given.” 7 Lingis, however, offers an explication of the world as not simply given, but “given as imperative.” Acknowledging Kant’s organizing form and original force of the imperative, Lingis asserts that “the imperative is the first fact that organizes all other facts.” 8 Finding the imperative’s roots driven even more deeply than Kant had imagined, Lingis determines that subjectivity begins in subjection. Ethically and epistemologically, the subject arises and is constituted in subjection to the imperative’s original, orienting force. Even while rectifying the exclusive rationalism of Kant’s imperative, Lingis agrees that reason has intrinsic importance. What he objects to in Kant is his categorical claim of reason as the exclusive basis of imperative ethics. Further, Lingis does what Kant himself could not: explicates of binding force that precedes the reason’s form. The approach needed is a phenomenological one, explicating the force that first commands our obedience, which then allows any rational imperative to be formulated. For Kant, rational duty is the only legitimate motive of our moral actions; otherwise, Kant suspects the incentives of amoral self-interest to be at work. Kant himself, however, had written much on the binding motive of the categorical imperative as Triebfeder. 9 And he understood that concrete actions were not universals but were to be motivated by the maxims of reason applied to the individual actions. But Kant did not, and could not, consider the motivating force of obedience to the imperative that first constitutes imperative formulation. It lay dormant, undetected and undetectable by rational investigation. Lingis, however, is able to describe the intersection of this pre-rational force and rational autonomy: “The principles can be formulated only

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because they are obeyed.” 10 As Jean-François Lyotard notes, “Realized or not, this order is listened to before being heard or understood.” 11 This force necessarily precedes the imperative’s rational form. Obedience to thought is first obedience to its imperative force, which binds us to think consistently, coherently, and causally. Simply put, for Lingis “thought is obedience.” 12 But against Kant, Lingis argues that the rational does not equate with the required. 13 Imperative urgency itself directs and commands our appropriate responses to situations. Rational justifications of actions may be pointless and, in fact, falsify the imperative involved. It is the intrinsic importance of a situation that requires action, intruding with a force of imperative urgency with what one has to do. In fact, “to insert reasoning between that imperative force and my action is only to dally and hold up the urgency of what I have to do.” 14 Arguing against the formalism of Kant’s rational moral law, Lingis contends that these situations are contingencies and not principles; nonetheless, the imperative involved is not merely hypothetical, nor is it categorical or rational. Because these contingencies emerge without reason, our actions concerning them do not require rational justification, yet they still have commanding force. With another innovation, Lingis is able to provide a phenomenological explication without resorting to rationalist reductionism. By investigating the force that makes rational form possible, Lingis finds the imperative’s doctrinal importance to extend further and perhaps more deeply than Kant himself had realized (and is it not a mark of great thinkers that their thoughts have significance beyond what they originally intended? 15). When Lingis claims that subjectivity begins in subjection, it is a subjection to the imperatives of things and objects, other persons, and situations—not only to a rational imperative. In sum, we are subjected to the world; we become who we are in our responses, and in our responsibilities, to it. This subjection holds not only for rational, selfreflexive Cartesian subjectivity, to which Kant adheres, but also for the Levinasian subject who arises in the “accusative,” called out by the other. Against Michel Foucault’s claim of subjectivity being erased like a face drawn in the sand, Lingis counters in Deathbound Subjectivity: “In the midst of this major deconstruction of subjectivity in our time, we have set out to locate and promote the imperative that constitutes our subjectivity, that orders it to order.” 16 Lingis’s innovation here is to have simultaneously rectified and revived Kant’s imperative in the defense of subjectivity by seeing “subjectivity as subjection.”

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PRELUDE TO PASSION: MORALITY AND MORTALITY It is with his account of force and its original imperative orientations that Lingis probes the form of the categorical imperative—the supreme imperative for Kant. Kant’s imperative is, of course, generated by human reason, and Kant insists that it is first and foremost a formal principle. But Lingis finds Kant’s doctrine wanting in terms of explaining the imperative’s original binding force, from which its form follows. As Lingis sees it, the imperative is obeyed before being understood. Here he finds pre-rational, pre-thematized force in our affective sensibility—the pain of self-restraint in Kantian respect—and discovers our morality to originate in our mortality. Even though an imperative weighs on the understanding from the beginning, Lingis argues that its force is obeyed before it is understood. In order for our reason to express formulations, our affective sensibility must first obey the force of reason, must first be bent toward it before we understand it. Against analytic thought, form does not monopolize intelligibility—force supplies an original orientation and along with its intelligible directives. Force is what first allows form to be formulatable. In emphasizing the mind’s receptivity, which first feels the force of the imperative that precedes its form as a concept of the understanding, Lingis takes up Levinas’s theme of subjectivity’s affective response and origin in the imperative placed on it by alterity. Because of this antecedent obedience, the intellect is born out of this feeling of subjection and subjugation. Citing Kant’s definition of respect as an activity that is not simply cerebral but one of affectivity, Lingis writes: “Kant calls it the sentiment of respect. The mind thinks out of respect for law. Respect is, Kant says, something like fear, something like inclination. The law affects, pains our sensuous nature and our natural appetites. There is fear of the law in the mind.” 17 It is in fact this receptivity of force that precedes and makes possible the autonomy of the mind. On force and receptivity, Lingis notes that this rational activation of the will has the immediate effect of reducing the sensuous impulses and appetites to passivity and suffering. Here the thinking subject is not deadened but mortified. Lingis calls this “the underside of the feeling with which the psychic apparatus knows its receptivity for the imperative of the universal and necessary,” and immediately “I sense respect for the law in effect in the mortification the core sensory-motor blocked from its object knows.” 18 The effect of imperative respect is thus truly an affect. It is our receptive affectivity that first feels the force of the imperative of respect that weighs on our sensibility and restricts our desires. In his analysis of respect as mortification, Lingis offers a phenomenological explanation of the primacy of the moral imperative (in a way not possible in Levinas’s own doctrine). The mortification of my physical sensibilities

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arises in response to the mortality of the other. Through contact with the other, especially his or her pain and vulnerability, morality is constituted in mortality, a mortification that is immediately felt in respect. Against utilitarian accounts of pleasure and happiness at the base of ethics, we can see Lingis, Kant, and Levinas as connoisseurs of moral and mortal pain. IMPERATIVE EXPLICATION WITHOUT REASON—BETWEEN TOTALITY AND INFINITY By elucidating the previously unseen primacy of force, Lingis generates an innovative synthesis of Kantian rationality and Levinasian alterity. Kant argues for the archē or principle of reason as having moral primacy and moral purpose, whereas Levinas characterizes his ethics as an “anarchē” that retains the imperative’s characteristics although changing Kant’s entire rational system. 19 The common thread that Lingis sees running through the archē of reason and the “an-archeology” of alterity is phenomenological force found in alterity and sensation that lies at the origin of rational form. In this spirit, Lingis’s more concept-specific innovation is found in his reading of Kant’s imperative. Here Kant’s rational imperative is rectified by Levinas’s rehabilitation of sensation via alterity. What Lingis maps out is new territory for the imperative, between the well-surveyed continent of Kantian rationalism and the unchartable terrain of Levinasian alterity. Kant’s rationality falls short, Levinas’s infinity extends too far, and Lingis’s imperative ground lies somewhere between the totality of rational duty and the infinity of “an-archic” alterity. Criticizing Kant, Lingis agrees that reason has intrinsic importance but argues that the rational does not equate with the required. For instance, in caring for a braindamaged child who cannot accede to reason, the child’s parent clearly submits to an imperative—not a rational one, but an ethical one. Criticizing Levinas’s claim of infinity as the “proper dimension of ethics” as the human face carries a trace of God’s infinite unknowability, Lingis finds an ultimately “unexplicated and unexplicatable” 20 metaphysics of morals. Yet, Lingis agrees that the imperative of alterity singles me out in a distinctive way found neither in Kant’s generic rational agency nor in Heidegger’s call to resoluteness in Dasein’s discovery of the destiny of its own death. Lingis’s imperative innovation via Levinas extends to subjectivity’s ethical agency. Unlike Kant’s generic ethical agent generating itself in autonomous rationality, Levinas shows that subjectivity begins in the accusative with the other who calls me out, not in the nominative of selfreplicating reason. The other singles me out in a way distinct from the rational responses of duty, in which I do what anyone would have to do.

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It is I alone who must respond, I alone who stands above all the others. This dynamic is reminiscent of Heidegger’s call of authenticity in my own death, as no one else can die for me. But with Levinas it is not my deep “ownness” that singles me out, but the other’s appeals to me, the other’s imperatives that command me from the start (which are not merely hypothetical demands 21). Lingis’s many contributions to the philosophical literature include his English translations of Levinas’s two greatest works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. These works can be seen to provide the “imperative forces” of sensation and alterity that inform Lingis’s reading of Kant. Levinas himself claimed that his own teaching was largely fashioned in the same spirit as Kant’s imperative moral commands. But because of alterity, the entire architecture is changed. Levinas’s moral approach is less theoretical than Kant’s because the former is immediate and an-archic—i.e., without principle and resists reduction to any selfsame, universal law. The force of alterity is such that the other is not reducible to any universality, in the same way that the other is not reducible to an alter ego for me or my consciousness. This irreducibility is exemplified in the human face that carries traces of God’s unknowable infinity. This is why Levinas deems infinity to be the only “proper dimension of ethics.” 22 Further, for Levinas, our encounter with the face of the other is not simply one phenomenon among others; it is an ethical epiphany carrying the primacy of the imperative “thou shalt not kill.” As the source of ethics, the face resists reduction to empirical or phenomenological descriptions; its infinite ethicality is exempt from any ethical criticism, assessment, or judgment. Whereas Levinas exempts the face from ethical judgment, Lingis reinstates the possibility of its ethical assessment. Undeniably, there are faces that emit ethicality: the Buddha’s infinite innocence emanates from that ceaselessly serene screen, Bob Marley’s irresistible charisma radiates from his joyous smile. But there are faces with suspicious eyes that emit dark forces, faces whose gazes poison everything that comes within their scope of vision—think of Peter Lorre’s criminally furtive face in Fritz Lang’s M or Dick Cheney’s clamped jaw when questioned about waging an unjust war and sanctioning torture. By inserting the imperative into Levinas’s phenomenology of sensation, Lingis challenges Levinas’s infinitely “unassailable” ethics at its foundation. Instead of an infinity of alterity that resists categorization as another phenomenon, Lingis finds two quite “explicatable” phenomena in the human face. First, Lingis claims that the human face belongs to the sustaining medium of “the elemental” instead of an absolute transcendence. Second, ethical values, instead of being traced back to Levinas’s unknowable ethical infinity of God, can be found right on the faces of others. Instead of exempting the absolute infinity of moral values from further ethical assessment, Lingis finds the phenomenon of value to occur

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in the medium of the face itself and to generate its own imperative directives. The face does not only merely demand things; its eyes shine, radiate directives, and actively command that we become a source of support for the very ground of the other—the elemental ground on which our encounters take place. This ground carries its own elemental imperative, an imperative that sustains our encounters with others in the medium of sensation. In another innovation, Lingis has mapped out the sustaining elemental ground that supports encounters with alterity, the ground that Levinas has overlooked. In a word, imperative ground sustains and is what first makes any encounter with the other possible. In this way, Lingis finds the proper ethical dimension to be elemental in opposition to Levinas’s claim of ethical infinity. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF FORCE IN VALUES In criticizing Levinas’s doctrine of the face as ethically unassailable, Lingis takes inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher of values and their creation. For Lingis, the other carries and generates ethical values right on his or her face—good or evil, or beyond these, or perhaps simply “bad.” Because these values, expressions, and cultural codes are not infinitely or univocally ethical, they can be judged and assessed. Per Lingis, people’s faces are open or closed, sending immediate signals, imperatives really, for how we are respond to them. Lingis calls these open and closed faces idols and fetishes, respectively. “The face, locus of expression and of valuation, is also [the] locus of self-valorization—idolization. And, in a caricature of idolization, it also fetishizes itself.” 23 Citing Nietzsche’s source of values as the affirmation and overflow of life itself, Lingis observes: “The idol is noble; the fetish is servile.” 24 In this way, Lingis affirms Nietzsche’s priority of noble values (those that reflect and understand the overflowing inexhaustibility of elemental life) over the values of resentment against life. The primary values are active and lifeaffirming; the values of reaction and resentment are derived from this first set, as a caricature of “true” values (i.e., values that have some distinction). Lingis finds forces on faces—imperative forces. These forces are not mere reactions to boundaries but respond to other forces. They are exclamatory acts of positive valuation, standing on their own, unlike comparative or utilitarian acts, 25 which truly merely reactions. The affirmative valuation is a confirmation—not of information already known but an intensification of forces. To say “How beautiful you are” does not work on the recipient as a re-cognition of what is already known, but summons forth and incites the beautiful one’s own forces: “she will move

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and speak more beautifully in the space made luminous by the rainbowcolored word arching over it.” 26 With Cartesian precision, Lingis catalogs the vast variance of cultural codings, from joy to abjectness, as recognizable values on the faces and bodies of others: “The other stands in military erectness, moves with Japanese glides, nods with Turkish affirmation and negation, shrugs her shoulders and purses her lips in French kinesics, sits on chairs in Victorian demureness, or on his haunches in Indian posture. The other smiles in the bureaucratic or secretarial manner, laughs at accidents the Javanese way, feels Christmas joy or Songkran hilarity, or feels Islamic indignation or Scandinavian loneliness.” 27 These codings direct our responses to the values that the others have placed on themselves and inhabit. Distinguishing these self-generated “value forces” from mere physiological effects, Lingis adds: “It is on the faces of others that we discover their values. It is not in the meaning of their expressions but on the figure they materialize, shaped not by the pressures of the world but by the joyous or rancorous inner force in them, that we see what their sensuality idolizes or fetishizes.” 28 The imperative forces of values on others’ faces also act on us. Our responses here are not reactions but intensifications of our own forces. We can become downcast in the downcast eyes of someone in the throes depression. We can be inspired by the shining light in the others’ eyes or affirm the infectious force of their smiles and laughter as we too begin to smile and laugh. Their directives are forces of contagion. At once, we feel ourselves caught up in the range of that passion. 29 SENSATION AND ITS ELEMENTS Continuing his criticism of Levinas’s unassailable ethicality of the human face, Lingis revisits one of Levinas’s great, and often overlooked, contributions to phenomenology—the legitimization of the realm of sensation. In the translator’s introduction to Levinas’s Existence and Existents, Lingis gives a succinct summary of the significance of the doctrine of the elements of sensation. Instead of beginning with the perception of objects, Levinas begins with the elements that support “being in the world.” Lingis writes: “If the world is a field of things, there is then something else in subjectivity besides being in the world; there is a relationship with the terrestrial, with the light—and with the sensuous element, which, before being taken as so much data for cognition, is savored, is assimilated, nourishes and contents life. There is the elemental; and an existence finds itself and rests in the elemental, and thus finds itself, prior to awakening to the world.” 30 Our subjectivity first finds its existence in the elemental before awakening to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s world of perceptual objects or Martin Heidegger’s Zeug or equipment. To be used at all, the hammer that Heidegger sees as disclosing the relation in the totality of

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roofs, nails, and shingles centering around Dasein as the nexus of “care” must first be used in a sustaining, elemental rhythm of hammering. Lingis’s priority of the elemental imperative in sensation and perception sharpens his criticism of Levinas’s ethical separation of alterity and the elemental. For Lingis, the elemental precedes the ethical and shapes our ethical responses and responsibilities. Bringing an elemental perspective to our encounter with others, Lingis writes: “The body that stands before one, at the distance of alterity, that demands one take a position, . . . makes itself the figure in which the ground demands that one ground. In undertaking to answer responsibly, in undertaking to secure the ground for what one says and does, it is first to the imperative for ground that the stand of an Other addresses to one that one responds.” 31 But in order to make this stand, we must be supported by some elemental ground. In this way, our support carries over from the sustaining medium that supports any encounter with the other. Theories of perception are largely directed at things and objects, but Levinas emphasizes the primacy of sensation, the very medium that sustains perception. Perception can only take place within some medium, and this medium is so ever-present that it is easily overlooked. 32 Because the elements are the sustaining medium for objects and the levels of perception, they are not perceived in the same way as things or objects. The “elements” of this medium include the ground (as the support of the earth beneath our walking feet and reclining bodies during sleep), the light, the dark, the warmth, the damp, the wind, the air itself (dry and cold or heavy and humid), and the night. As an example of the sustaining quality of the elemental, take walking, for instance. Walking is not “controlled falling,” as some incremental thinkers and artists may claim. Walking has a cadence that is sustained by an elemental rhythm or gait. To lose that sustaining rhythm is to walk haltingly, and only then does it become something like controlled falling, but only then. We walk well, feeling light on our feet, sustained by our rhythm; or we walk haltingly, in broken rhythm, when approaching a task that we will do only with reluctance. In elemental rhythm, our relation to the elements is not that of distance as with perceptual objects but immersion in a medium. 33 Sensation begins with the elements and our sensibility ends in them by returning to them. Lingis argues that this immersion further carries with it an “elemental imperative” that sustains it in that medium. Levinas, too, finds an original orientation in the mode of sensibility and characterizes it as enjoyment, ultimately resulting in the closed elemental sphere of contentment and satiety. 34 In enjoyment, perceived things revert into elements; things end with the given, which envisions no future or possibility. “As material or gear the objects of everyday use are subordinated to enjoyment—the lighter to the cigarette one smokes, the fork to the food, the cup to the lips. Things refer to my enjoyment.” 35 In this way, Levinas discerns

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that sensation precedes and makes perception possible. Furthermore, he finds some imperative here, in which the objects of everyday use “are subordinated to enjoyment.” Enjoyment is our response to the imperative in our use of things as they revert to the elemental. What Levinas is also able to disclose in the elemental is our subjective affectivity, an affective sensitivity in our sensibility from the very start of sensation. For Levinas, affectivity underlies all sensation and perception, including elements, and objects, including the epiphanies of other faces. Thus, affectivity applies not only to sensation and perception but also to ethics. In this way, Levinas extends the moral boundaries of Kant’s rational imperative. Moral subjectivity begins for Levinas in affectivity’s exposure to exteriority in general, and with the subject’s sensitivity and susceptibility for the other in particular. Our affectivity (or “affective substance” as Lingis calls it) is what makes us susceptible to imperative force in the first place. Any formulation of the imperative, as with Kant’s doctrine, begins with its force on affectivity, Lingis argues. Force precedes form, and thought proceeds from our initial affectivity. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas holds that the other contests our contentment in sensation with the imperative order of alterity, summoning us out of our immersion in the elemental. Lingis, however, objects to Levinas’s absolute ethical transcendence of the elemental and, in a doctrinal nod to Kant, substitutes the elemental imperative for it. Lingis concludes that the move that Levinas makes from elemental boundlessness to the infinity of ethical alterity leaves the relationship between our sensibility for the elemental and for alterity phenomenologically unexplicated and unexplicatable. Lingis’s elemental imperative clears the path that was blocked between Levinas’s regions of contentment in sensation and its contestation by the other. Through his innovative phenomenological explanations of the elemental imperative, Lingis has found something deeper in Kant’s imperative—the imperative to deepen ourselves to become causes and commencements as exemplars of imperative sovereignty. In yet another synthesis, Kant’s formula of autonomy and Nietzsche’s “long story of responsibility” share this view of sovereignty, respectively, as the will that is “commanded to be in command” 36 and as “the late fruit of a long will of responsibility.” 37 What is new in Lingis is his locating what is best in great thought, making this thought even better. And is there not an existential imperative in life—that is, that life must be lived? Lingis’s own thought on the imperative comes full circle, deepening itself: “Is not our stand which enjoys the support of earth also subjected to its order; to support and to ground? Does not the vertigo that gives itself over to the abyss that descends and descends without end obey, not the imperative of the depth to maintain surfaces, but another imperative that depth promotes and is: to deepen?” 38

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PASSION: IMPEDIMENT OR IMPERATIVE? Lingis’s explication of passion is also a critique of the centrality of Kantian rationality, similar in spirit to Levinas’s account of the original orientation of sensation and alterity. Contact with the other occurs not through reason but in passion. 39 But here Lingis again offers some criticism of the ethical exclusivity of Levinasian alterity. With his view on passion, Lingis allows the self to “make claims” on others: “In impassioned states the self arises, a force that confronts, makes claims on others and on the world.” 40 Levinas limited ethical contestation to the other’s challenges of my contentment. Now a rectified Kantian reciprocity is brought to bear on Levinas’s unidirectional force of ethical alterity; an ethics that answers Lingis’s accusation that Levinasian alterity is unexplicatable with its gap between self and other, the human and the divine. Kant speaks at some length on passion in his Anthropology and, like Lingis, distinguishes passion from emotion. For Kant, emotion is an almost necessary, but temporary, part of life. Emotions can even be an aid in the development of practical reason. Kant found passions, however, to be an irremediable impediment to reason: “passions are not, like emotions, merely unfortunate moods teeming with many evils, but they are without exception bad.” 41 Emotions may obscure the clarity of our thought at times, but passion distorts our thinking outright and prevents us from becoming autonomous, i.e., sovereign: “To be subject to passions and emotions is probably always an illness of mind because both emotion and passion exclude the sovereignty of reason.” 42 Kant insists: “One can easily see that passions do the greatest harm to reason.” 43 Thus, passion is an incurable illness in Kant’s diagnosis. Here passions are, in fact, “cancerous stores for pure practical reason, and most of them are incurable because the sick person does not want to be cured.” 44 Emotions are temporary setbacks, but passions are permanent: “Emotions produce a momentary loss of freedom and self-control. Passion surrenders both.” 45 For Kant what is human is what is rational. Leaving aside the excesses of the sublime, we can see that Kant set strict limits on what is humanly intelligible. Lingis and Levinas, however, expand the realm of intelligibility beyond Kant’s rational limits. With the imperative’s original orienting force, they find pre-rational directives of alterity and the elements, respectively. Kant, however, equates what is intelligible (and moral) to what is rational, giving us in effect a rational reductionism. Although he was diligent in separating “the ought” of rational duty from “the is” of empirical ontology, for Kant possibilities other than “what is” rationally intelligible are simply unimaginable, unthinkable, and incomprehensible. In this way, Kant may be seen to smuggle in a hidden rational ontology. Lingis and Levinas open up the human terrain through contact, which commands its responses other than through rational reason.

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In “Aconcagua,” Lingis develops his phenomenological rectification and innovations of Kant’s imperative commands that he began in The Imperative (1998). In that earlier work, Lingis succinctly proclaims that subjectivity begins in subjection. And with his more recent explication of passion, he locates the singular unifying force in which subjectivity arises. “Impassioned states give us the experience of being self-identical and undivided. Mind and body are one.” 46 The singularity of passion continues: “It is striking that passionate attachments are exclusive. Of the hundreds of women one meets over the years, one falls passionately in love with this one.” 47 This love is not only undergone but makes a claim on the other. In this way, Lingis’s synthesis of Kantism and phenomenology continues as a rehabilitation of sensation, the senses, and the sensual, and even passion. With the imperative of passion, I am wholly involved and unified in a way not found in either Kantian duty or Heideggerian resoluteness: “Rage saturates the mind and is felt throughout the body.” 48 A passionate state, which fills mind and body, disconnects from the patterns of the past and blocks foresight of consequences, shuts off the warnings and counsel of prudence and rationality. But this disconnection for the rational directives of things and instruments retains the categorical imperative’s singularity, for instance: “Rage snuffs out fear.” 49 These imperatives are as equally important as, and even beyond, the rational and categorical. In the spirit of Nietzsche and Bataille, Lingis finds imperative commands in the experience of passion opening up the domain of the festive “outside of the sphere of reason and work.” 50 Offering us an imperative of joy in “the anxiety and the exhilaration of transgressing the boundaries set by nature and society,” 51 we respond not only to the rational but to the irrational imperatives of life that we encounter. As a final innovation, Lingis shows us that if we submit to the imperatives of trust and joy, we can approach ethics and thought in a way that Kant and Levinas could not: “We must trust our joy, for joy is the most truthful state.” 52 NOTES 1. Dedicated to my lifelong friend and mentor, Walt Fuchs. An earlier version of this article was originally presented at Towson University’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies’ 37th Annual Colloquium in Honor of the Eightieth Anniversary of Alphonso Lingis’s Birth, October 23, 2013, Towson, MD. 2. W. Wolfgang Fuchs, personal communication. 3. Wolfgang W. Fuchs and Alexander E. Hooke, eds. Encounters with Alphonso Lingis (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 35–36. 4. Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 35–37. 5. Fuchs and Hooke, Encounters with Alphonso Lingis, 35–36.

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6. See Randolph C. Wheeler, Kantian Imperatives and Phenomenology’s Original Forces (Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2008), 197. 7. Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1–6. 8. Lingis, The Community, 16. 9. For a further discussion of the fundamental role of Kantian Triebfeder, see “Triebfeder: Zwang und Zweck (Force and End)” in Wheeler’s Kantian Imperatives and Phenomenology’s Forces, 22–30. 10. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 181. 11. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Interest of the Sublime.” In Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, Jeffrey S. Librett, trans. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 123. 12. Lingis, The Imperative, 3. 13. Ibid., 219–20. 14. Ibid., 220. 15. W. Wolfgang Fuchs, personal communication. 16. Alphonso Lingis, Deathbound Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 2. 17. Lingis, Excesses (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 114. 18. Lingis, The Imperative, 184. 19. See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 129. 20. Lingis, “The Elemental Imperative,” Research in Phenomenology (18; 1988), 17. 21. For the respective distinctions of commands versus demands, law versus rules, and categorical versus hypothetical imperatives, see Randolph C. Wheeler, “Kant on Untruths and Lying,” Teaching Ethics 8, 1 (2007): 56–58. 22. If we examine the phenomenon of the person, long understood as the self, the self-reflexive subject, we find a surprising implication of alterity. In Latin, persona means an actor’s mask or a character in a play, implying otherness at the origin of subjectivity, just as Levinas contends “I am another.” And persona was derived from the Greek prosōpon, meaning mask or face, another’s face masking one’s own. 23. Lingis, The Community, 46. 24. Ibid., 45. 25. Utilitarianism is largely confined to the sphere of causality and what Kant called the hypothetical imperative. Its liberty is not, and cannot be, concerned with Kantian autonomy or existential freedom. 26. Lingis, The Community, 48. 27. Ibid., 24. 28. Ibid., 66. 29. Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, 17. 30. Alphonso Lingis, Translator’s introduction, in Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988), 10–11. 31. Lingis, “The Elemental Imperative,” 20. 32. See Plato’s Republic (507d) on light being easily overlooked—the third thing needed for perception. 33. This immersion and its sustaining medium is in contrast to the Christian baptism ritual, which emphasizes submersion and subsequent purification. 34. Perhaps there is a parallel between Levinas’s amoral sphere of enjoyment in its totalizing contentment and Kant’s amoral, natural physical side of the human “rational animal.” 35. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 133 (italics added for emphasis). 36. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 38; as the third formulation of the categorical imperative.

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37. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), Second Essay, §2, 58–59. 38. Lingis, “The Elemental Imperative,” 19. 39. See, e.g., Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. 40. Alphonso Lingis, “Aconcagua,” in Passion in Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Alphonso Lingis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2106), 6. 41. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. H. H. Rudnick, ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 174. 42. Ibid., 155 43. Ibid., 172. 44. Ibid., 173. 45. Ibid., 173–74. 46. Lingis, “Aconcagua,” 6. 47. Ibid., 11. 48. Ibid., 6. 49. Ibid., 8. 50. Presencing EPIS: A Scientific Journal of Applied Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, and Critical Theory (online). 51. Lingis, “Aconcagua,” 14. 52. Ibid., 13.

ELEVEN Amor Fati The Tragic Passion Anne Freire Ashbaugh

Already in 1977, Alphonso Lingis recognized the affective and tragic dimensions of Nietzsche’s will to power: “for Nietzsche, power—being not a solitary upsurge in being but a differential element in a field of force—is essentially affective . . . the upsurge of life, of power, is also a reverberation of happiness, of joy.” 1 In this essay, I hope to show the equally affective and tragic dimensions of Nietzsche’s amor fati. This affirmation of life, which reverberates with another affirmation, the eternal recurrence, is both an expression of primal joy in the face of adversity and an act of embracing the tragic conjunction of the Apollonian and Dionysian urges Nietzsche introduces in The Birth of Tragedy. Amor fati is not simply an affirmation that particularizes eternal recurrence into my individual life; it is that, for sure, but in addition, it is a love that reaches out to every pulsating beat of life, which through our choices, we have woven into the fabric of time. Amor fati, furthermore, commits the will to overcoming all resentment provoked by the irreversibility of our past and clears a path for self-affirmation. Amor fati, I believe, is the passion that frees all passions from the ascetic shackles the tradition imposes upon them. Freed, passions support life and eradicate from the will the last vestiges of ascetic and Christian moral motivations. How do we arrive at that place where we gather into ourselves the powers of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos? That is, how do we come to the point of experiencing amor fati? In response to the question, this account proceeds in three stages designed to open old and new perspectives from 135

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which to experience Ecce Homo, the strange autobiographical text wherein Nietzsche, after demanding that we become what we are, introduces amor fati. The first stage wrestles with three symbolic characterizations of a will’s power to advance the process of becoming what one is. The second considers fully the affirmation that underpins amor fati, that is, the affirmation of the eternal recurrence. The third and final stage concerns the willing that brings about the affirmation of amor fati. In the end, we will see that amor fati is, indeed, the tragic passion. FIRST STAGE: SYMBOLIC RENDITIONS Greek gods and animals involved in “self-overcoming” and intent on introducing multiple perspectives from which to relate to external entities and to inner capacities comprise the symbolic renditions that this section will examine. The gods in question are two brothers: one young and luminous yet frightening in his clarity, the other bearded, mysterious and darkly terrifying. The animals embody three transformations that Nietzsche identifies as “three metamorphoses of the spirit.” 2 Finally, the third symbolic rendition, self-overcoming, makes possible the creative shift from willing truth to willing power and from human to overcomehumanity. The three symbolic embodiments interrelate and overlap, particularly in respect to the experiences which each sets out to awaken. In Nietzsche’s work many more symbolic gestures express shifts in perspectives and overwhelm the force of ascetic ideals, but for the purpose and scope of this essay, it seemed preferable to limit the account as indicated. Nietzsche introduces Apollo and Dionysus as the symbolic dramatis personae of his own tragic composition, The Birth of Tragedy. 3 Although later in his life, Nietzsche became strongly self-critical of this work and denounced his devotion to Wagner and Schopenhauer expressed in that text, readers have found in the two opposed urges, the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses, potent symbolic renditions from which to analyze and most importantly, experience passion. In order to grapple with the question of how life is “will to power,” for example, Lingis returned to these urges tapping the sexual frenzy of Dionysian dance and the Apollonian longing for order to explain that “for Nietzsche an ego issues from a will, and multiple egos issue from the essentially rhythmic Dionysian compulsion” (TNN, 51). I take the importance of these urges to also reside in Nietzsche’s demand that they be maintained within the self in tension, both working together, neither preferred. Held together, albeit in tension, these urges prevent ascetic ideals from taking hold in the will since ascetic ideals require an exclusive diet of Apollonian values. In addition, the two divine impulses symbolize two processes crucial for grasping the force of amor fati and gathering the courage to give reins to that passion: self-individuation and dissolution of the individual self.

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Shaping and eradicating shape, as in art, become indistinguishably intertwined in self creation. Interlocking the two urges, tragedy takes us to a place where the terrifying weight of responsibility, and the monstrously frightful sense of losing oneself, together, empower us to heal from pessimism and to revalue life in all its force. The tragic experience of the irrevocable entanglement between these impulses, furthermore, strengthens any will weakened by fear or resentment of death. The body of Dionysus torn to pieces, then, reconstituted by the very earth where it laid scattered, reveals the earth as a place of value and an accomplice of Apollo qua form giver. The process of individuation, irremediably Apollonian in character, springs from a will to experience the self apart from others, standing out, existing. Thus, in Greek tragedy, the appearance of the god Dionysus on the stage is possible by the presence of an actor who individuates the god. That is, Dionysus can only manifest his distinctiveness through an Apollonian device. Likewise, the self-hatred, which in The Genealogy of Morals is said to culminate in the formation of first, the Christian moral ideal, then a bad conscience, cannot be sustained in the face of the two urges awakening the life, and thus power also, within the will. Consider for a moment. The weak-willed moralists who grew to resent strong-willed persons rather than seek to become strong, the same weak-willed persons who reversed the values of the noble morality and created a slave morality, could only invent two constructs, which consistent with their weakness exalted their condition. The first construct, a punishing god intolerant of human strength awakened in the weak a resentment similar to that felt towards strong humans. The second, a happy fault, an act of weakness so severe that only the death of that god could atone, allowed the weak to seek revenge against god. In one swoop, the weak-willed wreaked vengeance against the resented strong-willed persons and against the god they invented for their punishment. Nevertheless, their somewhat clever plot backfired because divine redemption left them with an unsurmountable debt from which their self-hatred shaped the bad conscience. Notice that all the moves thus far, including the sacrifice of the god, all rely exclusively on Apollonian urges: the drive to give form to a perfect god and to envision life as if it were unfolding in a dream where everything made sense. Were the Dionysian impulse to interject elemental experiences of frenzy, body-rending, and orgiastic joy, neither guilt nor ascetic ideals could take hold in the human will. Most likely, with the two impulses nicely in place, the will would choose this earth and this life over any other and the body as the seat of value. The two gods united, therefore, intensifying the value and the tension between creation and dissolution stand as reminders of the perils of excess in either direction and express the very flux of life itself.

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Consider the animals. In “The Three Metamorphoses” (TSZ, 16–17), Nietzsche explains self-overcoming through three animal experiences, that of a camel, a lion, and a child. Together, the images offer a device for interpreting our actions as well as Nietzsche’s works. The three metamorphoses, furthermore, nicely characterize Nietzsche’s critique of Western tradition, a perspective that we embrace like camels but must attack like lions. What makes these images so powerful is their link to the will through affirmation and negation. Turned camel, spirit affirms traditional values unquestioningly. Its strength lies in accepting the heaviest burdens, humbling experiences like “lowering of oneself to hurt one’s pride” and sacrifices like “wading into dirty water when it is the water of truth” (TSZ, 16). The acquiescence of spirit in this stage takes the form of saying “yes” but in a slavish way. The burdened camel takes its load into the desert where the lion tears camel and load apart. In the desert, the carrying spirit becomes a lion, “wants to hunt down its freedom” (TSZ, 16) and be the determining force over itself and the desert. I understand the lion to be that stage during which we say “no” to traditional values that impair life. The lion is a critical voice, a nay-saying form that never affirms. The lion is intent on devouring whatever is nourishing and leaving behind what is toxic or harmful to life. Though in the desert the spirit encounters the dragon, “Thou shalt,” “whom the spirit no longer wants to call master and god” (TSZ, 17), the beast of prey desists from carrying burdens. The lion is not vulnerable to the words “Thou shalt” shining on every scale of the dragon. Zarathustra asks, “Why is the lion required by the spirit? Why does the beast of burden, renouncing and reverent not suffice?” (TSZ, 17). The spirit wants to create new values and though as lion, spirit cannot create values, the lion is needed to reject the dragon’s claim that all values have already been established by divine decree. That the lion is a Dionysian element becomes clear when Zarathustra says that the spirit that once “loved ‘thou shalt’ as its most sacred” in its camel stage, “must find delusion and despotism even in what is most sacred to it, in order to wrest freedom from its love by preying” (TSZ, 17). The lion tears apart the love of “thou shalt” from the camel and rends the god that the camel spirits worship. Established meaning, set forms, essential predicates that hold together what being human entails, all these dissolve just as the Dionysian tragic chorus dissolved individuality. In the desert, the camel falls under the burden of hyper-determination. Preying supplants praying and for that the spirit must be lion. The lion, however, cannot create values. Its role is to say “no” to burdens. A third metamorphosis is required. The preying lion must become a child. This animal transformation introduces a “sacred yes” which is in fact the “yes” of creation not the “yes” of camels or slave moralities. In the few sentences that describe the child, Nietzsche allows Zarathustra to anticipate the eternal recurrence and to pithily state the work of selfovercoming. Zarathustra says that “The child is innocence and forgetting,

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a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred yes-saying. . . . The spirit wants its will . . . ” (TSZ, 17). We will see the image of the wheel reappearing when we discuss eternal recurrence. For now, consider the importance of the characterization of the child’s disposition. The description vividly and quite accurately captures children: they play, they create structures out of wood blocks, and then, delight in kicking the structure and creating all over again. The child at play does not resent injury by another child also at play. Adults seek permanence and resent wrongs. The child is ready to play again and forgets. During this metamorphosis, therefore, the spirit sheds all resentment for the sake of creation. The child’s sacred yes-saying affirms, not burdens, by the power of the creative will. As a “wheel rolling out of itself,” the spirit crafts a new freedom, not the illusory free will that the camel thought to enjoy while accepting every “thou shalt,” nor the freedom from the burden of the nay-saying lion. The child’s freedom, guided by the body, manifests itself in the child’s creations. This is the freedom that the spirit enjoys while it creates forms and destroys them, gives itself constraints and removes them, until free from resentment or from ideals, the child affirms her sacred yes and “wins its own world” (TSZ, 17). I take that affirmation to be amor fati. In its move to each of its metamorphoses the spirit engages in selfovercoming. The child, however, is the metamorphosis that remains dynamic without needing to shed its form. The child builds and destroys and delights in both, not seeing these activities as opposites but rather living them as complementary plays that support his enjoyment. Since the child is self-propelled, she wills without need of commandments and is thus self-willed. The image of self-overcoming supplants the traditional notion of autonomy taken to mean self-governing and simultaneously connects willing to living both because the process of undoing her own creation by the child is renewing and because that is how nature lives: growing and decaying, evolving. In the traditional scheme, self-governed persons rely on the rule of reason to motivate their wills to choose some course of action because the will is taken to be a dumb faculty and being a dumb faculty is taken to be a flaw. Self-overcoming, on the other hand, relies on will because of its ability to calibrate its motions with those of life. SECOND STAGE: SACRED AFFIRMATIONS The child’s innocence and forgetting support two central affirmations, the affirmation of the eternal recurrence and the affirmation of amor fati. The affirmations sustain each other, and no specific order or hierarchy attaches to them. The innocence and forgetfulness of Zarathustra’s animals and of the spirit turned child, respectively, render the affirmations

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sacred. Their sacredness, therefore, is no longer the result of being consecrated to a god or golden dragon, it stems from having been consecrated to life. That is, the two affirmations, as we shall see, calibrate the motions of the will to the natural rhythm of life: coming to be and passing away, shedding skin and bone matter to build skin and bone matter. Instead of escaping becoming, in her innocence and forgetting, the child propels becoming. It requires the child’s play to overcome the fear of coming to be. It requires a child’s play to lay aside the intoxicating desire to “create a world before which you could kneel” (TSZ, 88). Zarathustra does not reason to the affirmation of eternal recurrence. His animals teach Zarathustra the affirmation because the animals’ bodies, undisturbed by human consciousness, reasoning from premises, or cultural constraints, already move to the rhythm of recurrent life and do not fear losing themselves in the kinship with all becoming things that the eternal recurrence demands. The animals, furthermore, do not reason to the assertion. They simply experience Zarathustra and recognizing him as its teacher, utter it. In this respect, the animals speak in the same way that life unfolds. In a section of The Gay Science entitled “Life not an argument,” Nietzsche decries the intelligible world that we have created in order to live and wherein we posited “bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content” as if these were “articles of faith.” 4 To that world he contrasts life as a state that includes errors, after all, “matter is as much of an error as the god of the Eleatics” (GS, 110). Avoiding the rational scaffolding that supports the moral ideal of a best possible world created by a perfect god, the will is able to align with matter and with “de-deified nature” (GS, 110). The affirmation of the eternal recurrence does not rely on intelligent design. It mirrors life pulsating through a body. 5 Consider first, Zarathustra’s animals. An eagle and a snake accompany Zarathustra’s solitude. The eagle represents access to the panoramic view which humans believe thinking through categories provides. The snake’s whole body slithers across the earth and represents the perspective that humans believe to gain through sensations and access to particulars. Zarathustra calls them his pride and his wisdom. Although it is his pride that has the panoramic perspective from above all things, both animals share that perspective because sometimes the eagle carries the snake high up, curled around its neck. Thus, Zarathustra’s wisdom is experiential, particular, but his pride gives that wisdom a different perspective, from above, but still animal and still bound to experiences rather than to categories or ideals. The fact that Zarathustra’s pride and not his wisdom enjoys the panoramic perspective accomplishes three reversals: (1) The ground that hosts the snake’s body gains value as locus of wisdom, a value traditionally attributed to high places. (2) Carrying the snake around its neck, the eagle and consequently pride itself, leads Zarathustra’s wisdom to the experience of the interconnections of things as

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seen from above or categorically; that is, the will as seat of pride and courage occupies the place normally assigned to reason, and (3) up and down share equally in value. Zarathustra’s animals, therefore, both overcome and serve as symbolic expressions of the overcoming of the values set by the dichotomies dictated by the Christian moral ideal. The relationship between the eagle and the snake, in fact, operates outside will to truth since the snake/wisdom needs the eagle/pride to reach the heights from which truth, traditionally understood, can be grasped. Overcoming dichotomous valuations of perspectives, like up and down, the animals allow Zarathustra to creep into “the very heart of life and into the roots of its heart,” there to hear from life itself its secret, “I am that which must always overcome itself” (TSZ, 89). 6 It is precisely that self-overcoming that the affirmation of the eternal recurrence supports. Zarathustra introduces his animals shortly before “going under” or beginning his speeches, the first of which presents the three metamorphoses of the spirit discussed above (TSZ, 15). The animals also accompany Zarathustra when he retires to his cave and to his longing for human companionship, and they are his guides (TSZ, 63). They are present, too, when after returning to his cave, Zarathustra wakes up in terror, screaming like a madman, in a futile attempt to awaken a thought deep asleep within him, his “abysmal thought” (TSZ, 174). Zarathustra collapses under the weight of the thought, and as he convalesces his animals’ babble heals him and provokes Zarathustra to celebrate the power language has to create an illusion of contact among persons and things destined to remain separate. In their illusions, words “tell lovely lies” about those things that share the greatest similarities “because the tiniest gap is the hardest to bridge” (TSZ, 175). It is from this perspective of celebrating the linguistic illusion of contact with all that is outside our bodies, the distancing of language from truth, that the announcement of the eternal recurrence by the animals takes place. They reaffirm the perspective, saying first that “to those who think as we do” (TSZ, 175) is given the experience of having everything approach and retreat from them, dancing joyfully. Then, the animals affirm the eternal recurrence presenting first the recurring to each other of the different, then, the recurring of the same to itself, and finally time and space curving to allow the two other returns. The latter introduces a new perspective from which to relate to all things and to ourselves: that of circular time and circular space. This transformation, in particular affects every perception. The recurring of the different to each other is experienced in an assertion of a flux in which “[e]verything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally” (TSZ, 175). Thus, to those who believe that all things remain apart but relish the illusory bridges wrought by words, “all things approach dancing” (TSZ, 175) yet remain

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apart. Their separateness cannot be bridged except by affirming their joyful recurrence. This assertion of eternal recurrence of differentness binds things together not in a shared essence or provable theory of nature but in a joyful yes-saying that affirms them as part and parcel of our lives. The affirmation of the eternal recurrence conjoins all living things. There is a crucial shift of perspective in this assertion that we need to consider further to uncover a sense of this affirmation that allows it to be that, just an affirmation, not a cosmological or metaphysical theory, not even a truth. Consider as an example of perspectival shift the one enacted in the very first lines of the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ, 3). After ten years spent in the mountains, “his heart transformed, . . . he arose with the dawn, stepped before the sun,” and addressed the sun saying, “You great star! What would your happiness be if you had not those for whom you shine?” (TSZ, 3). Zarathustra does not thank the sun. Instead, he joyfully demands its gratitude. That is, Zarathustra speaks as one who has self-worth but has also connection with his world. He does not behave like a hermit. In fact, we learned when he meets a hermit that Zarathustra is his complete opposite. In the mountains, he is inwardly alone yet fully surrounded by living things (including his animals) and aware of the nature around him. The hermit, on the other hand, distanced himself from all living beings, particularly humans, and attained only physical isolation. He filled himself with god’s presence and remained unaware of god’s death (TSZ, 5). Thus filled, he cannot assert the eternal recurrence because he lives under the illusion that what he ignores around him does not exist and what he invents within him has perfect being. Nothing would return to him because nothing is precisely what he can affirm. The hermit spirit wills as a camel, Zarathustra as a child. The second part of the affirmation of the eternal recurrence pertains to a self’s relation to itself, a dance of sameness. Thus, the animals announce that “[e]verything breaks, everything is joined anew; the same house of being builds itself eternally. Everything parts, everything greets itself again.” (TSZ, 175). This part of the affirmation joins a self to itself and relates directly to amor fati, though in fact, in amor fati, the self gathers all in the instants of its life, and thus, the tragic passion relates to all three parts of the affirmation. Importantly, however, this part of the affirmation pertains to self-overcoming. As we discussed earlier, self-overcoming requires the camel to become lion and the lion, the child. It is the child who can affirm self-recurrence because it is the child whose will does not require truth to value life or to create. Self-overcoming demands dispassion towards truth and passion towards becoming because “[w]hatever I may create and however I may love it—soon I must oppose it and my love” (TSZ, 90). Truth resists opposition. It cannot recur, it must simply be. The second part of the affirmation of eternal recurrence, furthermore, collects Zarathustra’s affirmation to the dwarf in “On the Vision and the

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Riddle” (TSZ, 123–27). Zarathustra speaks of two paths that contradict and offend each other, one moves back and the other outward. The moment is the name he gives to the gateway that leads to both paths. We find, therefore, that the first part of the affirmation of the eternal recurrence gathered all that followed the outward road. The second gathers the inward road, and the third gathers the gateway. The perspective from which the recurrent self-affirmation flows is that of the shepherd who bit off the head of the snake that crawled into his mouth, then, laughing with joy, became “a transformed, laughing being” (TSZ, 127). Zarathustra alludes to that scene twice in his discussion with his animals. Noticeably, we see this when two thoughts crawled in his throat and threatened to choke Zarathustra. The first thought required Zarathustra to face the dismal realization that since “human beings recur eternally” (TSZ, 177) so also does the last man. The second thought carried a realization still more terrifying, that “all is the same” (TSZ, 176) and thus recurring does not introduce novelty. The section, then, not only provides a formulation of the affirmation, it also exposes the pain of self-overcoming involved in facing eternal recurrence and simultaneously, its most positive moment. Most saliently, the animals recognize in Zarathustra the same kind of transformation that he recognized in the shepherd. His animals tell him also that they know “who you are and must become; behold, you are the teacher of the eternal recurrence—that now is your destiny!” (TSZ, 177). Since that destiny is also his danger and his sickness, Zarathustra also needs to affirm his tragic passion, amor fati. The third part of the affirmation of eternal recurrence transforms time, space, and the relationship among all things spatiotemporal. The animals affirm that “[i]n every Instant being begins; around every Here rolls the ball There. The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.” Time, space, and being bend to support the affirmation which carries with it still another perspective: circular time/space/being. Through linear time we lost the past and grew to resent the time that robbed us of our history, secured it away from our touch, and then stole also our future. To revenge against the ravages of time, ascetic priests promised eternal happiness. Faced with eternity, time seemed worthless, powerless. The price we paid for that invention was the devaluing of our own bodies, our lives, and the earth. Technically, we could not become eternal because that would contradict what eternity entails: no beginning and no end. So, we became hollow, insignificant in our being but with the promise of eternity if we suffered enough. The third part of the affirmation of the eternal recurrence reclaims time from ascetic resentment and situates eternity in time. All eternity is only a recurring. The affirmation of that recurring, therefore, heals the will from any desire to revenge against time and presents to the will an eternity it can will without undermining the power of willing. As such, the affirmation demands a new way of willing. That new willing forms part of another

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doctrine that defined Zarathustra as teacher, mainly, the overman or selfovercoming, the doctrine that “[h]uman being is something that must be overcome” (TSZ, 5), which we discussed above. The new willing desires beyond good and evil but not beyond the earth and not against the body. It is a willing not honed on truth but keen on life, a willing that aligns all passions so that the will may create the self that we are. The perspective from which all parts of the affirmation of eternal recurrence emanate, consequently, is that of a self whose experience of difference and sameness is neither dichotomous nor hierarchical and whose will thrives not on truth but by living. That “all things recur eternally and we ourselves along with them, and that we have already been here times eternal and all things along with us” (TSZ, 178) is neither claimed as a true proposition nor as a hypothesis to be tested scientifically. How could Zarathustra teach anything in those terms, or Nietzsche, for that matter? 7 The affirmation of the eternal recurrence, furthermore, speaks of a kinship of all things, an entanglement of all selves with their world that is unbreakable. Thus, though souls die, “the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs—it will create me again” (TSZ, 178). Were it to end there, the affirmation could be easily confused with a bizarre new ideal combining metempsychosis and Christian doctrine in equal measures. It does not end there. The affirmation adds that I do not return to a better or worse life but “to this same and self-same life” (TSZ, 178). The addition anticipates the affirmation of amor fati. THIRD STAGE: AMOR FATI Amor fati arises as the passionate affirmation through which the will appropriates and individualizes eternal recurrence. In the affirmation of the eternal recurrence of all things, every moment carries within it all moments and through this temporal nexus connections form with other living beings. This may explain why, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes that to become what we are we must not have the slightest idea of what we are, a Dionysian warning of the state of our interconnectedness. Eternal recurrence, in this sense, functions as a choral affirmation and amor fati as the individual actor on the stage. We become ourselves in amor fati. In the recurrent nexus we cannot sort ourselves. Amor fati allows passion to overflow into my life as an individual. It is each instant of my life that I will to happen exactly as it happened before for the sake of this moment—whatever I am doing in that moment, however boring or seemingly trivial. The willing that affirms amor fati, indeed, recreates all “it was” into “thus I will it.” Regarding these two attitudes towards time and life, Zarathustra notes that the first “is called the will’s gnashing of teeth and loneliest misery. Impotent against that which has been . . . an angry spectator of everything past” (TSZ, 111).

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In amor fati, the passive watching ceases. A passage in The Gay Science (Section 276), made remarkable by the sheer joy it conveys, describes amor fati as a love that secures joy at the core. The passage reads, “Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war with ugliness. . . . And, all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer!” (GS, 157). Importantly, albeit cryptically, the passage corroborates an aspect of the relation between eternal recurrence and amor fati. Eternal recurrence connects all things, and amor fati individuates the connection. Eternal recurrence, however, cannot remove the heaviest burden, the realization that ugliness and terrible things recur and that in respect to it, I am a spectator that can only bite the head of the snake choking my will. Through amor fati, however, the will ceases to be an observer or a dumb faculty driven by commandments or drives. Loving one’s fate transforms willing into a creative faculty, the will becomes an agent. The activity in which the will engages is that of appropriating every single moment of its life and valuing each for the sake of the very living moment in which the will loves its fate. That is, so worthwhile is each moment of my life, even a moment of apparent terror, that for its sake, I willingly would live my whole life. So interconnected are the moments of my life, that without one of them, the rest would crumble. To so view one’s life entails a major transformation away from habits of resentment, self-loathing, bad conscience, and petty or large disgusts. Affirming amor fati, therefore, the will removes the heaviest burden from the affirmation of the eternal recurrence. Past ugliness and cruelty, for example, remain ugly and cruel, but they now can be appropriated into my life as affirmations of this life, not lessons. Another indication that the will has ceased to be a spectator appears in the movement backwards and forwards that amor fati entails. Willing amor fati moves the past forward. For that reason, Nietzsche calls amor fati, his “formula for greatness” and gives content to the formula as follows: “that you do not want anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just to tolerate necessity, still less to conceal it . . . but to love it.” 8 Consider more closely what such loving and such willing require. What does Nietzsche mean by loving fate? The affirmation appears as the conclusion of the section entitled “Why I am so clever” and as such, we should consider amor fati as a clever move. Cleverness is a heroic virtue or excellence that we see perfected in Odysseus and in Oedipus. 9 How is Nietzsche’s cleverness Odyssean or Oedipal, that is, tragic? Like Odysseus, Nietzsche distrusts promises of pleasure that cost us our life and sense of self. Odysseus in Calypso’s island, for example, matches Nietzsche’s struggle against the Christian moral ideal. Both Calypso and the ideal promise immortality. Both require that we cease to be what we are in order to earn the immortality. When Calypso offers immortality to Odysseus, a deathless life of pleasure in the company of Calypso, the hero weeps by the shore (Od. 5). He would rather face

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all the dangers involved in returning home than remain bound to the divine temptress. He tells Calypso that though his wife Penelope is neither as tall nor as beautiful as Calypso, he would rather return home to her (Od. 5.6 ff). Odysseus sees the promised immortality as a threat to who he is. Likewise, Nietzsche, when promised immortality by his Lutheran moral tradition, recognizes danger in the promise and refuses the offer. In The Gay Science (223–24), Nietzsche acknowledges the revenge against the spirit entailed in Christian morality and the shame in one’s existence that it provokes. Nietzsche does not weep by a shore, he criticizes the tradition to its core and counters the offer for immortality with an insertion of eternity into the passing of time and passion into his life. We see in the parallel with Oedipus both the strength and the difficulty of amor fati. Oedipus’s and Nietzsche’s cleverness manifest in relation to the experience of time. Oedipus’s cleverness defeated the sphinx answering a riddle about human embodiment of time: crawling, walking, and walking with the help of a cane. Like Oedipus, Nietzsche solves the riddle of his self by marking the passing of his life in his body. Unlike Oedipus, who recognized what being human entailed but had no clue about being Oedipus, Nietzsche knew that vanquishing the sphinx was not enough. Nietzsche defeated the new sphinx with the affirmation of the eternal recurrence. He realized, however, that the personal life, too, had to be appropriated in amor fati. The formula, then, manifests cleverness. What does the love entail? Nietzsche’s characterizations of love do not form a coherent whole. Why should they? There is, however, one kind of love, the desire to possess, which directly relates to amor fati and fuels it. Love as appropriation appears primarily in The Gay Science (40, 70, 118). There, too, we learn that as desire to possess, love carries an undercurrent of desiring novelty since an item once possessed ceases to be of interest. As such, love is “a fleeting passion” (GS, 40). Coupled with destiny in the complex passion called amor fati, however, love ceases to be fleeting because each moment of life promises, not newness, but difference to the appropriated life inserted into the now. Each willing of one’s life not wanting anything to be different is itself a distinct moment fraught with tension from ignoring whether or not spirit will have the strength to will backwards and forwards, and love again. Thus, fate stabilizes the love. Love, in turn, releases fate from being some objective force or deus ex machina, and turns it into the object of love. In thus loving one’s fate, we recognize that we would miss it if it were not there, or miss life, “until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again” (GS, 186). Love, furthermore, cannot be disinterested. 10 As such, then, amor fati entails selfishness as Nietzsche defines this virtue in Ecce Homo (96–97). Shortly before introducing amor fati, Nietzsche characterizes selfishness as “masterpiece in the art of survival” (EH, 96) and tells us he must

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discuss selfishness because he cannot postpone much longer facing “the question of how you become what you are” (EH, 96). Presumably, self-becoming requires that we do not know what we are. That is, self-becoming is not a matter of reaching a prescribed goal or fulfilling a meaning already assigned to our nature and waiting to be discovered. That error led us right into the bad conscience and self-loathing. If we do not know what we are, willing, not reason evaluates our actions. Our errors can be clever moves to dodge the tyranny of dogma. Thus conceived, “the governing ‘idea’ keeps growing deep inside, . . . it slowly leads back from out of the side roads and wrong turns, it gets the individual qualities and virtues ready” (EH, 97) without reference to any goal or purpose or meaning. Therein lies joy, “viewed in this light, my life is just fantastic” (EH, 97). The selfishness in that self-becoming is literally self-love. Nietzsche the non-heroic hero is at home with himself. Loving himself, he writes, “necessity does not hurt me; amor fati is my innermost nature” (EH, 143). How, then, is amor fati the tragic passion? Notice that I do not call amor fati a tragic passion among many but the tragic passion. Already we saw an intimation of this uniqueness when we discussed the relationship between the two elements in this passion, mainly love and fate. We also can add, after our discussion above, that no other passion gathers all one’s life as the object of one’s love, and as such, collects also all loves backwards and forward. It is the one passion, furthermore, that through its relation to the eternal recurrence situates the will into the becoming of all things and allows willing to appropriate its own particular life. In particularizing one’s own life, amor fati, too becomes particular. Because it proceeds without the guidance of reason, amor fati allows the will to play. In fact, shortly before giving content to amor fati, Nietzsche admits that he “do[es] not know any other way of handling great tasks than as play: as a sign of greatness and cheerfulness, this is an essential presupposition” (EH, 99). 11 The reference to play intimates the child. In that third metamorphosis we experience self-overcoming as play, as a creation, rather than as a fearful prospect, as are repentance and atonement in the Christian moral ideal. The child, as her forgetting and wheel rolling out of itself indicate, shows that to appropriate a life, amor fati does not require an examination of conscience and listing of faults or achievements or any other priestly device. In amor fati, the child plays with whatever remains in spirit of its camel stage or its lion metamorphosis. As the child appropriates her life, the camel and lion too regain value. In amor fati, the will allows the present moment to bring all other moments in their already given worth. Amor fati, then, is an unconditional love of one’s life that doesn’t stop to judge what it can only assert or deny. The past can be told but not changed. Asserting whatever is in a life or appropriating even the most embarrassing moments perceived even as shameful heals the spirit from within. That is a revaluation proper of the

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child’s metamorphosis that bears longer consideration. Suffice it for now to note that revaluation of values, like eternal recurrence joined with amor fati, involves a global and a personal dimension of affirmation. Just as it implicates the three metamorphoses, amor fati involves the two tragic urges discussed above. That is, the love wrenches a life from all life and the fate reconnects and blends it into the whole. The love particularizes what it appropriates and the appropriated destiny throws the subject back into the fray. Here as in the affirmation of the eternal recurrence, time is the Dionysian element. In a wonderful reversal that subverts usual dichotomies, it is the love in amor fati that manifests Apollonian urges. Involving both Apollonian and Dionysian instincts in one affirmation, therefore, amor fati not only is itself fundamentally tragic, it serves to replace the healing power of ancient Greek tragedy. Largely, that healing power rested in the twofold possibility of dissolving individuality through the chorus and sustaining it through the individual actors. The first allowed for metaphysical comfort, the second for experiencing suffering without perishing from it. Not catharsis but healing from the weight of what he, later, in The Genealogy of Morals, identified as the bad conscience is what is at issue in Nietzsche’s account of tragedy. It is precisely that healing that amor fati brings about. I am not suggesting that Ecce Homo is a Greek tragedy, but I am suggesting that it is a tragic autobiography. That is, Ecce Homo is Nietzsche’s own appropriation of his own life, at least in part. In it, Nietzsche the narrator becomes a tragic hero affirming amor fati. He is also the agent of the tragedy and the force behind the affirmation. He no longer requires Apollo because the individualizing power of that god is in the loving. He no longer needs Dionysus because the force of that god is in the new kind of fate, in amor fati, in a willed irrevocability. NOTES 1. Alphonso Lingis, “The Will to Power,” in David B. Allison, ed. The New Nietzsche (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), 51. From here on referred to as TNN. Alphonso Lingis’s contributions to philosophy are vast and varied. His philosophy has guided and inspired us for many years. It is for me a particular pleasure to celebrate his eightieth birthday in this book. 2. This is the first speech of Zarathustra. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Adrian Del Caro, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 16–17. From here on referred to as TSZ. 3. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ronald Speirs, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–116. From here on referred to as BT. The work stirred a controversy that led to the professional disparagement of Nietzsche after Wilamowitz attacked the book for its lack of scholarship and its author for being neither a philologist nor a philosopher. Nietzsche lost his students and finally his professorship at Basel. For a full and clear discussion of Wilamowitz’s thirty-two-page attack of Nietzsche’s BT, see, J. H. Groth. “Wilamowitz-Möllendorf on Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1950), 179–90.

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4. Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Josephine Nauckhoff, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 117. From here on referred to as GS. 5. In GS, 109, entitled “Let us beware,” Nietzsche warns against theorizing about the nature of the world and more specifically states: “Let us beware of assuming in general and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance at the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not much coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc.” He refers to those attempts as “shadows of god” that “darken us.” 6. It is worth noting that this section of TSZ, entitled “On Self-Overcoming” advances in summary form most issues that will later take shape in the Genealogy of Morals. 7. For a detailed and clear discussion of various interpretations of the eternal recurrence as a cosmological or metaphysical thesis, see: Alexander Nehamas, “The Eternal Recurrence.” Philosophical Review, Vol. 89, No. 3 (1980), 331–56. 8. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 99, in Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, Judith Norman, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 69–152. From here on referred to as EH. 9. I am not suggesting that Nietzsche claims to be a hero. In Ecce Homo (97) he states clearly, “I am the opposite of a heroic nature.” In that section, however, he is opposing the notion of willing as if it were striving for a goal. That is not the sense of hero that I am using in the essay. I take cleverness to be a heroic virtue both because Odysseus embodies it and because it is a virtue that allows him to retain his life and his identity. 10. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Judith Norman, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112. From here on referred to as BGE. 11. I owe this insight about play to K. C. Ashbaugh. For a fuller discussion see: K. C. Ashbaugh, “Art for the Body’s Sake: Nietzsche’s Physical Aestheticism,” in Kelly Comfort, ed. Art and Life in Aestheticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 109–21.

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————. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Lewisohn, Mark. Tune In: The Beatles, All These Years, Vol. 1. New York: Crown, 2013. Lingis, Alphonso. Abuses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. ————. “Aconcagua.” In Passion in Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Alphonso Lingis, edited by Randolph C. Wheeler. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. ————. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ————. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ————. Deathbound Subjectivity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. ————. “The Elemental Imperative.” Research in Phenomenology 18, 1988. ————. Excesses: Eros and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. ————. The First Person Singular. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. ————. Foreign Bodies. London: Routledge, 1994. ————. The Imperative. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1998. ————. Libido: The French Existential Theories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. ————. Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1996. ————. “Sex Objects.” SubStance 23 (1994): 30–45. ————. Translator’s Introduction. In Existence and Existents, by Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001. ————. Translator’s Introduction. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, by Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. ————. Trust. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ————. Violence and Splendor. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011. ————. “The Will to Power.” In The New Nietzsche. Edited by David B. Allison. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Interest of the Sublime.” In Of the Sublime: Presence in Question. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. Marcus, Greil. “The Beatles.” In The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll. 2nd ed. New York: Random House, 2007. Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962. Nehamas, Alexander. “The Eternal Recurrence.” Philosophical Review 89 (1980): 331–56. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. ————. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ————. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Translated by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ————. Ecce Homo. In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, by Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ————. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. ————. The Gay Science. Translated by Josephine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ————. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1969.

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————. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Translated by M. Cowan. Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 1962. ————. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1968. ————. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Plato. Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Portanova, Stamatia. “The Complexity of Collabor(el)ation,” Inflexions, December (2008): 1–17. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Translated by George Becker. New York: Schocken Books, 1965. ————. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992. Schmitt, Carl. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. Translated by G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Sexton, Jared. “Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control.” In Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Edited by Joy James. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Shenk, Joshua. Powers of Two. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Stone, Alison. Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Wheeler, Randolph C. “Kant on Untruths and Lying.” Teaching Ethics 8 (2007): 51–65. ————. Kantian Imperatives and Phenomenology’s Original Forces. Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2008. Wild, John. “Speaking Philosophy: John Wild’s Commentary on Totality and Infinity.” In The Promise of Phenomenology, edited by R. I. Sugarman and R. B. Duncan. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. Yancy, George and Judith Butler. “What’s Wrong with ‘All Lives Matter’?” New York Times, January 12, 2015, accessed March 2, 2015. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2015/01/12/whats-wrong-with-all-lives-matter/?_r=0. Zhuangzi. The Essential Writings. Translated by Brook Ziporyn. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009.

List of Works by Alphonso Lingis

SEPARATELY BOUND PUBLICATIONS Translation and Introduction, The Visible and the Invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Translation, Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Translation and Introduction, Existence and Existents by Emmanuel Levinas. The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978. Translation, Images Poems by Nicole Janicaud. Vence: Pierre Chave, 1980. Translation and Introduction, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence by Emmanuel Levinas. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Excesses: Eros and Culture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983. Libido: The French Existential Theories. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985. Phenomenological Explanations. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986. Editor, Translation, and Introduction, Collected Philosophical Papers of Emmanuel Levinas. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. Deathbound Subjectivity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. Translation and Introduction, Sade My Neighbor by Pierre Klossowski. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. Abuses. Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1994. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. Foreign Bodies. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility. New York: Humanities, 1996. Abusi, Viaggio tra i dannati della Terra. Translated into Italian of Abuses by Roberto Festa, Milan. Paratiche Peditrice, 1997. L’ivresse des profondeurs et autres excès. Translated by Dominique and Nicole Janicaud of Excesses. Paris: Belin, 1997. N ieko bendra neturinciuju bendrija. Translated into Lithuanian of The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Vilnius, Lithuania: Baltos Lankos, 1997. Ortak bir Seyleri Olmayanlarin Ortakligi. Translation of The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, into Turkish by Tuncay Birkan. Istanbul: Ayrinti Yayinlari, 1997. The Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Translated into Japanese, 2002. Pavojingos Emocijos, Kaunas: Poligrafija ir Informatika, 2002. Translated into Lithuanian of Dangerous Emotions by Ieva Skarzinskaité. Berkeley: University of California, 2000. Susturulmuslar. Ankara: Dost, 2002. Translated into Turkish of Abuses by Figon Dereli. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Trust. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture. New York: Routledge, 2005. The First Person Singular. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007.

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Bendra kalba, paskiri balsai. Translated into Lithuanian by Danute Baceviciute of the Vilnius lecture cycle delivered in English in 2003 as “Common Language, Purposeful Voices.” Vilnius, Lithuania: Baltos Lankos, 2010. Contact (in Lithuanian). Vilnius: Baltos Lankos, 2010. Wonders Seen in Forsaken Places: An Essay on the Photographs and the Process of Photography of Mark Cohen. Charleston: CreateSpace, 2010. Violence and Splendor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOOKS “On the Essence of Technique.” In Heidegger and the Quest for Truth, edited by Manfred S. Frings. Chicago: Quadrangle Books (1968): 126–38. “The Elemental Background.” In New Essays in Phenomenology, edited by James M. Edie. Chicago: Quadrangle Books (1969): 24–38. “Non-Violence as Historical Action.” In Violence in Contemporary American Society, edited by Hale B. Harris and John A. Sample. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press (1969): 231–37. “Intentionality and Corporeity.” In Analecta Husserliana, Vol. I, edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht, The Netherlands and New York: D. Reidel (1970): 75–90. “Hyletic Data.” In Analecta Husserliana, The Later Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology, Vol. II, edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht, The Netherlands and New York: D. Reidel (1972): 96–101. Translation of J. Taminiaux, “Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s Late Work.” In LifeWorld and Consciousness, edited by L. E. Embree. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1972): 370–22. “Being in the Interrogative Mood.” In The Horizons of the Flesh, edited by Garth Gillan. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press (1973): 78–91. Also published by Feffer & Simons, Inc., London and Amsterdam. Translation of Henri Birault, “Beatitude in Nietzsche.” In The New Nietzsche—Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, edited by David Allison. New York: Dell Publishing Co. (1977): 219–31. “A Time to Exist on One’s Own.” In The Self and the Other. Analecta Husserliana, Vol. VI, edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht, The Netherlands and New York: D. Reidel (1977): 31–40. “The Will to Power.” In The New Nietzsche—Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, edited by David Allison. New York: Dell Publishing Co. (1977): 37–63. “Association.” In Analecta Husserliana, The Human Being in Action, The Irreducible Element in Man, Part II, Investigations at the Intersection of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Vol. VII, edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht, The Netherlands, Boston, and London: D. Reidel (1978): 215–34. “Authentic Time.” In Crosscurrents in Phenomenology, edited by Ronald Bruzina and Bruce Wilshire. The Hague, Boston, and London: Martinus Nijhoff (1978): 276–96. “Old and New Forms of the Will to Power.” In Philosophy of the Humanistic Society, edited by Alfred E. Loenig. Washington, DC: University Press of America (1981): 39–40. “Abject Communication.” In Interpersonal Communication: Essays in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, edited by Joseph J. Pilotta. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America (1982): 161–71. “The Language of The Gay Science.” In The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XI, edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka. Boston: D. Reidel (1982): 313–19. “Theory and Idealization in Nietzsche.” In The Great Year of Zarathustra (1881–1981), edited by David Goicolchea. Lanham, MD: University Press of America (1983): 257–78.

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“Effets de language.” In Nouvelles lectures de Nietzsche, edited by Dominique Janicaud. Lausanne, Switzerland: l’Age d’Homme (1985): 50–57. “The Pleasure in Postcards.” In Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, edited by Hugh J. Silverman and Don Idhe. Albany, NY: SUNY Press (1985): 152–64. “Mastery in Eternal Recurrence.” In Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXI. The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition, Part II. The Meeting Point Between Occidental and Oriental Philosophies. Ed. A.-T Tymieniecka. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel (1986): 89–101. “The Sensuality and the Sensitivity.” In Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard Cohen. Albany, NY: SUNY Press (1986): 219–30. Translation of Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other.” In Deconstruction in Context, edited by Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1986): 345–59. “A Phenomenological Approach.” In Theories of Human Sexuality (Perspectives in Sexuality), edited by James H. Geer and William R. O’Donohue. New York and London: Plenum Press (1987): 127–61. “The Din of the Celestial Birds or Why I Crave to Become a Woman.” In Psychosis and Sexual Identity, edited by David Allison, Pardo de Oliveira, Mark Roberts, and Allen Weiss. Albany, NY: SUNY Press (1988): 130–42. “Deleuze on a Deserted Island.” In Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty, edited by Hugh J. Silverman. New York and London: Routledge (1988): 152–73. “The Sensitive Flesh.” In The Collegium Phaenomenologicum. The First Ten Years, edited by J. C. Sallis, G. Monetz, and J. Taminiaux. Dordrecht, The Netherlands, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers (1988): 225–40. “Substitution.” In Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy, edited by Hugh Silverman and Donn Welton. Albany, NY: SUNY Press (1988): 26–33. “The Final Kingdom.” In Phenomenology and Beyond: The Self and Its Language, edited by H. A. Durfee and D. F. Rodier. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers (1989): 11–25. “Self-Presentation.” In American Phenomenology: Origins and Developments. Vol. XXVI, edited by Eugene F. Kaelin and Calvin O. Schrag. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers (1989): 252–56. “Morele vaarden. Over het eerste hoofdstuk van ‘Zur Genealogie der Moral.’” In Nietzsche als Arts van de Cultuur, edited by Paul van Tongeren. Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok Agora (1990): 185–215. “Autrement qu’être.” In Emmanuel Levinas, edited by Catherine Chalier and Miguel Abensour. Paris: Cahiers de l’Herne (1991): 163–84. “The Destination.” In Eros and Eris: Contributions to a Hermeneutical Phenomenology LiberAmicorum for Adriaan Peperzak, edited by Paul van Tongeren, Paul Sars, Chris Bremmers, and Koen Boey. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers (1992): 263–72. “Being Elsewhere.” In Falling in Love with Wisdom, edited by David D. Karnos and Robert G. Shoemaker. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press (1993): 256–61. “Tenochtitlán.” In Questioning Foundations: Truth/Subjectivity/Culture, edited by Hugh J. Silverman. London: Routledge (1993): 213–36. “Levinas and the Elemental Response.” In Joyful Wisdom, Glory and the Ethics of Joy, Studies in Postmodern Ethics, Vol. 3, edited by David Goicoechea. Ottawa: Thought House Publishing Group (1994): 42–51. “The Society of Dismembered Body Parts.” In Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski. New York and London: Routledge (1994): 289–303. “Extremities.” In Being Human in the Ultimate: Studies in the Thought of John M. Anderson, edited by N. Geogopoulos and Michael Heim. Amsterdam: Rodopi (1995): 189–206. “Hands Detach Themselves.” In And Yet, edited by Russell Dumas. Sydney: Dance Exchange Incorporated (1995): 11–13.

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“Heidegger’s Conception of the Technological Imperative: A Critique.” In Continental and Postmodern Perspectives in the Philosophy of Science, edited by Babette Babich, Debra Bergoffen, and Simon Glynn Brookfield. Hong Kong and Singapore: John Avebury Press (1995): 227–45. “Intentionnalité et impératif.” In L’intentionnalité en question, edited by Dominique Janicaud. Paris: Vrin (1995): 367–82. “The Society of the Friends of Crime.” In Sade and the Narrative of Transgression, edited by David B. Allison, Mark S. Roberts, and Allen S. Weiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1995): 100–21. “Autrement qu’être.” In Emmanuel Levinas, Cahiers de l’Herne, edited by Jacques Rolland. Paris: Livre de Poche (1996). “The Body Postured and Dissolute.” In Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting, edited by Véronique Foti. New Jersey: Humanities Press (1996): 60–71. “Wonders Seen in Forsaken Places,” CD-ROM. State College, PA: Chester Perkowski (1996). “Anger,” In On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy, edited by Darren Sheppard, Simon Sparks, and Colin Thomas. London and New York: Routledge (1997): 197–215. “Love Song.” In Articulations of Difference, edited by Dominique D. Fisher and Lawrence R. Schehr. Stanford: Stanford University Press (1997): 167–84. Translation into Japanese of “Pura Dalem.” In Tabi no hazama, edited by Keijiro Suga. Tokyo: Iaanami Shoten, Tokyo (1997): 38–56. “The Sovereign’s Table.” In Taste Nostalgia, edited by Allen S. Weiss. New York: Lusitania Press (1997): 111–16. “Appetite.” In Eating Culture, edited by Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (1998): 121–31. “Black Stars: The Pedigree of the Evaluators.” In Critical Assessments: Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Daniel Conway. London and New York: Routledge (1998). “Foreign Bodies.” In Foreign Dialogues, edited by Mary Zournazi. Anandale, Australia: Pluto Press (1998): 169–88. “Schizoanalysis of Race.” In The Psychoanalysis of Race, edited by Christopher Lane. New York: Columbia University Press (1998): 176–89. “What is at Stake in Conversation.” In Interkulturelle Philosophie und Phänomenologie in Japan, edited by Tadashi Ogawa, Michael Lazarin, and Guido Rappe. Munich: Iudicium (1998): 139–52. “Naked Eyes, Stained Surfaces.” In Clark Lunberry, Naked Eyes Stained Surfaces, Photographs in the Philosophy of Alphonso Lingis, a website text, 142 pp. “Bestiality.” In Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, edited by H. Peter Steeves. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (1999): 37–54. “Deadly Pleasures.” In Must We Burn Sade?, edited by Deepak Narang Sawhney. New York: Humanity Books (1999): 31–49. “Ecological Emotions.” In Earth Matters, edited by Robert Frodeman. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall (1999): 175–87. “Innocence.” In Becomings, Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, edited by Elizabeth Grosz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1999): 201–16. “Segmented Organisms.” In Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, edited by Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (1999): 167–82. Translation of Emmanuel Levinas “Reality and Its Shadow.” In A Continental Aesthetics Reader, edited by Clive Cazeau. London and New York: Routledge (1999). “The Unlived Life Is Not Worth Examining.” In Portraits of American Continental Philosophers, edited by James R. Watson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1999): 119–25. Translation in Neue amerikanische Philosophinnen in Selbstdarstellungen. Ed. James R. Watson. Wien: Verlag Turia and Kant (1998). “The Elemental Imperative.” In Rereading Merleau-Ponty, edited by Lawrence Hass and Dorothea Olkowski. Amherst: Humanity Books (2000): 209–32.

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“The God of Evil.” In Evil Spirits: Nihilism and the Fate of Modernity, edited by Gary Banham and Charlie Blake. Manchester: Manchester University Press (2000): 40–51. “The Last Hours.” In The Limits of Death, edited by Joanne Morra, Mark Robson, and Marquard Smith. Manchester: Manchester University Press (2000): 144–63. “Satyrs and Centaurs: Miscegenation and the Master Race.” In Why Nietzsche Still?, edited by Alan Schrift. Berkeley: University of California Press (2000): 154–69. “Armed Assault.” In Aesthetic Subjects, edited by Pam Matthews and David McWhirter. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2001). “Cues, Watchwords, Passwords.” In The Politics of Community, edited by Michael Strysick. Aurora, CO: The Davies Group (2002): 15–30. “Eye on the Killer,” Preface to Brian Evenson, Altman’s Tongue, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (2002). “Obstacles to Dialogue Today.” In Dialogue among Civilizations. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (2002): 81–86. “Language and Persecution.” In Between Deleuze and Derrida, edited by Paul Patton and Johyn Protevi. London, Continuum (2003): 169–82. “Love Junkies.” In High Culture: Reflections on Addiction and Modernity, edited by Alexander and Mark S. Roberts. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (2003): 279–96. “Trust.” In Encounters with Alphonso Lingis, edited by Wolfgang W. Fuchs and Alex E. Hooke, Lanham MD: Lexington Books (2003): 175–85. “Violations.” In Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God, edited by S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler. New York: Fordham University Press (2006): 15–34. “The Fundamental Ethical Experience.” In Radical Passivity: Rethinking Ethical Agency in Levinas, edited by Benda Hofmeyr, Springer (2009): 81–93. “Doubles.” In Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis, edited by Bobby George and Tom Sparrow, Brooklyn NY: Punctum Books (2014): 61–67. “Bataille’s Contestation of Interpretative Anthropology and of the Sociology of Religion.” In Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion, edited by Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall. New York: Fordham University Press (2015), ch. 10.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS “The Aesthetic as Aesthetic.” Duquesne Review (Spring, 1963): 22–25. Translation of Paul Ricoeur, “The Historical Presence of Non-Violence.” Cross Currents 14 (1964): 15–23. Translation of Jacques Sarano, “The Spirit, Sexuality and the Beast.” Cross Currents 14 (1964): 214–27. “Sensation and Sentiment: On the Meaning of Immanence.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 41 (1967): 69–75. “Man as a Symbol Maker: The Face and the Things.” Worship 44 (1970): 475– 87. “The Perception of Others.” Research in Phenomenology 2 (1972): 47–62. “Truth and Art, Heidegger and the Temples of Constantinople.” Philosophy Today 16 (1972): 122–34. “The Perception of Others.” The Philosophical Forum 5 (1974): 460–74. “The Origin of Infinity.” Research in Phenomenology 6 (1976): 27–45. “The Void that Waits. The Force of Anxiety.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 6 (1976): 153–62. “Sense and Non-Sense in the Sexed Body.” Cultural Hermeneutics 4 (1977): 345–65. “L’Origine de l’infini.” Le Savoir Philosophique, Annales de la Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Nice 32 (1977): 59–72. “A Time of One’s Own.” Dialogoss: Revista del Departmento de Filosofia Universidad de Puerto Rico 11 (1977): 113–22.

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“Difference in the Eternal Return of the Same.” Research in Phenomenology 8 (1978): 77–91. “Emmanuel Levinas and the Intentional Analysis of the Libido.” Philosophy in Context (1978): 60–65. “The Last Form of the Will to Power.” Philosophy Today 22 (1978): 193–205. Translation of Jacques Derrida, “Speech and Writing According to Hegel.” Man and World 2 (1978): 107–30. “The Difficulties of a Phenomenological Investigation of Language.” The Modern Schoolman 57 (1979): 56–64. “Face to Face, A Phenomenological Meditation.” International Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1979): 151–63. “An Infinite Time of One’s Own.” Eidos 1 (1979): 180–97. “Kajuraho.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 62 (Spring 1979): 52–69. “Phenomenology in Middle Age.” Review of Once More—From the Middle, A Philosophical Anthropology by James F. Sheridan Jr. Athens: Ohio University Press (1973), Human Studies 2 (1979): 77–85. “The Imperative to be Master.” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 11 (1980): 95–107. “A New Philosophical Interpretation of the Libido.” SubStance 25 (1980): 87–97. “On Phenomenological Explanation.” The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 11 (1980): 54–68. “Rangda.” Metmenys 39 (1980): 10–27. Translation into Lithuanian by Algis Mickunas. “Sensations.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 42 (1981): 160–70. “Intentional Libido, Impulsive Libido.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 12 (1982): 51–62. “Intuition of Freedom, Intuition of Law.” The Journal of Philosophy 79: 10 (1982): 558–96. “The Fatality of Consciousness.” Philosophy Today 27, no. 3/4 (1983): 247–57. “In This Country Called El Salvador, War of Rich, Poor.” The Daily Collegian 84, no. 47 (1983): 8. “The Assignation.” Philosophy in Context 14 (1984): 70–79. “The Incommunicable.” Art & Text 18 (1984): 108–13. “Oedipus Rex: The Oedipus Rule and Its Subversion.” Human Studies 7 (1984): 91–100. “The Signs of Consciousness.” SubStance 42, 13 (1984): 3–14. “The Truth Imperative.” Auslegung 2 (1984): 317–39. “The Visible and the Vision.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 15 (1984): 155–63. “The Imperative to be Master.” Cogito 111 (1985): 69–82. “Orchids and Muscles.” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 13 (1986): 15–28. “The Other Death.” Phenomenological Inquiry 10 (1986): 92–108. Translation of “Sade or the Philosopher-Villain by Pierre Klossowski.” SubStance 15 (1986): 5–15. “The Self in Itself.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 54 (1986): 529–34. “The Elemental Imperative.” Research and Phenomenology 18 (1988): 3–21. “L’ivresse des profondeurs.” Po&sie (Paris), 51 (1989): 85–94. “Painted Faces.” Art & Text, Special Issue: Art Brut (Paddington, NWS, Australia), 27 (1989): 80–92. “Black Stars: The Pedigree of the Evaluators.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 15 (1991): 67–91. “From Under Dismembered Bodies.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 11 (Spring, 1991): 289–97. “The Irrecuperable.” International Studies in Philosophy 23 (1991): 65–74. “We Mortals.” Philosophy Today 35 (Summer 1991): 119–26. “The Mortals.” Dialogos: Revista del Departmento de Filosofia Universidad de Puerto Rico 59 (1992): 7–18. “The Society of Dismembered Body Parts.” PLI Warwick Journal in Philosophy 4 (Oct. 1992): 1–19. “La vérité qui babille.” LeCOQ—HéRON 124 (March 1992): 39–43.

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“Bodies That Touch Us.” Thesis 11 (1993): 159–67. “Henrykkelsen ved dybet.” (Translated by Claus Bech.) Den Blå Port 25–26 (1993): 57–66. Translation of Henri Birault, “Nihilism and Beatitude.” Epoché 1 (1993): 65–76. “Carnival in Rio,” in Vulvamorphia, Lusitania 6 (1994): 59–63. “In Orbit.” Journal of Social Philosophy, 25 (Winter 1994): 165–80. “Intentionality and the Imperative.” International Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1994): 289–300. “The Postmodern Economic High-Growth Society,” Theory, Culture & Society, 11, no. 1 (February 1994): 171–87. “The Real Haiti.” The Daily Collegian 95 (Oct. 24, 1994): 8. “Some Questions about Lyotard’s Postmodern Legitimation Narrative.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 20 (1994): 1–12. “Sex Objects.” SubStance 75, 22 (1994): 30–45. “Death Drive.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 29 (1995): 217–29. “The State of the World,” Al-Ahram (Cairo), 13–19 (April 1995): 14. “The World as a Whole,” Research in Phenomenology 25 (1995): 142–59. “Hands Detach Themselves…” Writings on Dance 15 (Winter, 1996): 68–70. “Joy in Dying.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 19 (1996): 99–112. “Juodieji dievai.” Baltos Lankos 7 (1996). Animal Body, Inhuman Face.” Social Semiotics 7 (August 1997): 113–26. “The Misunderstanding.” Parallax 4 (1997): 79–88. “Practical Necessity.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 20 (1997): 71–82. “Travelling with Lingis,” An Interview with Alphonso Lingis, by D. J. Huppatz, Ananda Rubens, and Sarah Tutton, in Melbourne Journal of Politics 24 (1997): 26–40. “Animal Bodies.” Discourse 20 Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in This World (Fall 1998): 194–203. “Fateful Images.” Research in Phenomenology 28 (1998): 55–71. “A Phenomenology of Substances.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1998): 505–22. “Fantasy Space, Private Myths, Visions.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 30 (Fall, 1999): 94–108. “Objectivity and of Justice: A Critique of Emmanuel Levinas’ Explanation.” Continental Philosophy Review, 32 (1999): 395–407. “Reply to Peter Jackson,” in Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context (Dec. 1999). “Word of Honor.” Paragraph 22 (July 1999): 146–63. “Objectivity and Justice.” Continental Philosophy Review 32 (Oct. 1999): 395–407. “Arouane.” Antioch Review 60 (Winter, 2000): 87–93. “The Dreadful Mystic Banquet.” Janus Head (Fall, 2000): 192–212. “Ecological Consciousness.” Budhi 4 (2000): 1–16. “The Private Myth of Dignity.” The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 31 (Jan. 2000): 4–20. “Quadrille.” Performance Research 5 (Summer, 2000): 5–14. “The Return of Extinct Religions.” Budhi 4 (2000): 17–31. “The Return of Extinct Religions.” New Nietzsche Studies 4 (2000): 15–28. “To Die with Others.” Diacritics, 30, Post-Mortem: The State of Death as a Modern Construct (Autumn, 2000): 106–13. “Ecological Consciousness: Reflections on Hominids and Other Thinking Animals.” Critical Horizons 2 (2001): 282–300. “Flesh Trade.” Parallax 18 (Jan.–Mar. 2001): 48–63. “The Return to, the Return of Peoples of Long Ago and Far Away.” Angelaki 6 (2001). “The Song of the Norias.” Sandwich A (Autumn, 2001): 1–6. “Vakarietiök mit era pasaulyje gali greitai baigtis.” Lietuvos rytas/ 2001 m. gegu es 19, no. 116. “AsmensTapatumas,” Problemos 61 (2002): 9–17.

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“Ecological Consciousness.” Discourse, 24, Nature Art and Urban Spaces (Spring 2002): 3–17. “Past and Future Forms of Culture.” Phenomenological Inquiry: A Review of Philosophical Ideas and Trends 26 (2002): 153–64. “Personal Identity (in Lithuanian).” Problemos: Mokslo darbai (Problems: Research Papers) 61 (2002): 9–17. “Petra,” The Journal of Visual Culture 1 (April 2002): 47–55. “Recalling Lacan: The Unstamped Letter.” The Semiotic Review of Books 13 (2002): 16. “Cues, Watchwords, Passwords.” International Studies in Philosophy 36 (2004): 49–64. “Divine Illusions.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Hemeneutics and Postmodern Thought (Revue canadienne pour l’herméneutique et la pensée postmoderne) 8 (2004): 53–56. “Theoretical Paradox and Practical Dilemma.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 12 (2004): 21–28. “Impulsive Forces in and against Words.” Diacritics 35, Whispers of the Flesh: Essays in Memory of Pierre Klossowski (Spring, 2005): 60–70, “Our Uncertain Compassion.” Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts 9 (2006): 25–32. “The Sublime Action.” Problemos: Mokslo darbai (Problems: Research Papers) 69 (2006): 128–41. “Contact: Tact and Caress.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 38 (2007): 1–6. “Detotalization and Finitude.” Philosophy Today 51 (2007): 152–58. “Subjectification.” Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007): 113–23. “The Torturers and Their Public.” South Central Review, 24, On Torture (2007): 91–94. “The Outsiders: The Search for Authenticity.” Qui Parle 17, Special Issue: Thinking Alterity, Reprise (Fall/Winter 2008): 199–221. “Experiences of Mortality: Phenomenology and Anthropology.” Philosophy Today 53, Suppl. (2009): 229–32. “Experiences of Mortality: Phenomenology and Anthropology.” The Pluralist 4 (2009): 69–75. “The Inner Experience of Our Body.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 40 (2009): 83–88. “Three Objections to Levinas’ Philosophy.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2009): 189–95. “The Environment: A Critical Appreciation of Levinas’s Analysis in ‘Existence and Existents.’” Levinas Studies: An Annual Review 5 (2010): 65–81. “Strange Emotions in Contemporary Theory.” Symplokē, 18 (2010): 7–14. “Truth in Reconciliation.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 8 (2011): 239–43. “Crossings: A Conversation with Alphonso Lingis.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 45 (2012): 1–19. “Return of the First-Person Singular: The Science of Subjectivity and the Sciences.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy: A Quarterly Journal of History, Criticism, and Imagination 26 (2012): 163–74. “Sacrilege.” Philosophy Today 56 (2012): 135–40. “Six Problems in Levinas’s Philosophy.” PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 7 (2012): 30–40. “Violence and Splendor: At the Limits of Hermeneutics.” Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices 64 (2012): 85–95. “The Metaphysics of the Face.” Philosophy Today 57 (2013): 337–42. “Anthropology as a Natural Science: Clifford Geertz’s Extrinsic Theory of the Mind.” Open Journal of Philosophy 4 (2014): 96–106.

Index

accusative, 81, 82, 86, 88, 122, 124 Adorno, Theodor, 100 affect, xi, xiv, 6, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23–24, 24, 28, 67, 68, 74, 103, 105, 110, 120, 123, 129, 135, 141 affect theory, 67–68 affirmation, xii, 10, 32, 38, 40, 59, 69, 120, 126–127, 135, 138, 139–140, 141–146, 147–148 alterity, xiii, 18, 22, 23, 39, 40, 41, 42, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132n22. See also other amor fati (love of fate), xiv, 135–136, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144–148 Anaximander, 84–85 angst, 33, 54 animals, xiii, 13, 38, 91, 93, 103n1, 110, 132n34, 136, 138, 139–143 Antarctica, xii, 7, 14, 29, 31–32, 34 anxiety, xiii, 5, 10, 13–14, 19–20, 28, 57, 85, 131. See also angst apeiron, 85, 101 Apollo, 135, 136–137, 148 Arendt, Hannah, 97 Aristophanes, 41 Aristotle, 30, 51 astronomy, 65, 75, 101 autonomy, 32, 59, 68, 110, 113, 121, 123, 124, 129, 130, 132n25, 139 Badiou, Alain, 33, 73–74 banality, 17, 31, 32 Barad, Karen, 32 Bataille, Georges, 10, 13, 30, 32 The Beatles, 59, 66, 72–75 beauty, xii, 13, 43, 65, 66, 67, 73, 75 Beauvoir, 26n27, 74 Being and Nothingness, 46n7, 59, 61n11

Being and Time, 18, 25n4, 25n5, 25n7, 25n10, 25n15, 30, 31, 78 Bennett, Jane, 106 biology, 6, 23, 34, 58, 75 biopolitics, 106, 107, 110–113, 114, 115 biopower, 111–112, 113–114, 115 black bodies, 112, 113 Black Lives Matter, 108, 114 body, xiii, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 18, 20–22, 23, 24, 26n29, 26n34, 28, 38, 39, 42, 43, 58, 59, 68, 69, 92, 93, 100, 105–114, 115, 116n10, 116n28, 116n29, 116n33, 119, 127, 128, 131, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 146, 149n11 boredom, 19–20 brotherhood, 54, 55, 56–57 Butler, Judith, xi, xiii, 106–111, 112–113, 114, 115 Cahill, Ann, 109 Cambodia, 102, 103 care, 8, 17, 39, 96, 98, 127 Cerro Aconcagua, 3, 14, 28 Chapman brothers (Jake and Dinos, artists), 67, 68, 75 child(hood), 13, 41, 68, 70, 83, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 110, 119, 124, 138–139, 141, 142, 147 Chomsky, Noam, 97 collaboration, xii, xiv, 65, 66–68, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75–76 competence, 21–22, 24, 26n34 conscience: bad, 52, 137, 145, 146, 148 consciousness : self, 37, 67 contact, 20, 22, 23, 24, 42, 67, 84, 120, 123, 130, 141 Count Yorck, 30 courage, 6, 8, 9, 24, 29, 32, 33, 45, 51, 53, 57, 70, 71, 120, 136, 140

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164

Index

Dasein, 18, 19–20, 33, 85, 120, 124, 127 Davis, Mike, 111 death, 5, 8, 10, 24, 29, 41, 57, 69, 78, 80, 84, 105, 114, 120, 124, 137, 141, 145; of philosophy, 60, 81, 85. See also mortality Deleuze, 11, 67, 116n9 Descartes (Cartesian), 18, 39, 58, 122, 127 desire, xii, 17, 21, 24, 37, 38, 39–41, 44, 93, 95, 99, 109, 123, 139, 143, 146 diachrony, 82, 83 Dilthey, William, 30 Dionysus, 61, 136–137, 148 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 105, 106 disconnection, 5, 6, 7, 8, 28, 31, 42, 100, 131 discontinuity, 43, 71, 85 discourse, xii, 14, 20, 30, 42, 70–71, 78, 79, 80, 95–96, 107, 108, 110, 112, 114, 119; legal and political, 6; on love, 37; medical, 103; and the other, 42, 78; private, 103; racializing, 108; rational, 79; scientific, 75 Douglass, Frederick, 113 duty, 96, 121, 124, 130, 131 ego(ism), 41, 43, 67, 68, 74, 81, 85, 87, 136 elements (elemental), 54–55, 57, 75, 101, 107, 125, 126, 127–129 elemental ground, 125–126, 128 emotions, xi, 4, 6, 9, 12, 17, 19, 23, 28, 99, 120, 130 enjoyment, 39–40, 41, 43, 44, 83, 95, 99, 100, 114, 128, 129, 132n34, 139 epistemology, 78, 82, 121 equipment (Zeug), 18, 32, 33, 34, 120, 127 erotic(ism), xii, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22–23, 24, 28, 38, 40, 41–44, 45, 68, 70 eternal recurrence, 99, 100, 135, 138, 139–140, 141–146, 147–148, 149n7 event, xii, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 21, 23, 28, 33, 49, 51, 60, 61, 65 excess, xi, 9–10, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 30, 34, 42, 53, 95, 99, 130, 137 Excesses, xii, 18, 20, 23, 53

exhilaration, xiii, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 24, 41, 74, 100, 131 existentialism, xi, 19, 22, 23, 38, 51, 54, 59, 69, 82, 88, 120, 121, 129 Existence and Existents, 78, 84, 89, 127 exteriority, 20, 23, 40, 41, 42, 81, 86, 120, 129. See also outside extraordinary, xii, 45, 50, 51–52, 55, 57–58, 60, 94, 120 face, xiii, 20, 30, 39, 40, 42, 54, 55, 69, 74, 80, 81, 83, 84, 88, 91, 92–94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 103n1, 126–127, 129, 132n22 faceless, 111, 119–120, 122, 124, 125 fear, 8, 11, 19, 29, 43, 44, 70, 123, 131, 137, 139, 140, 147 fecundity, 41, 42, 81, 85 feeling, xi, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 19, 123 finite, 40, 41, 95 flesh, 11, 39, 42, 45, 58 force(s), xi, xiii, 6, 8, 17, 21, 23, 24, 29, 32, 38, 42, 65, 71, 80, 95, 98, 112, 113, 114, 120–124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130–131, 132n9, 135, 136–137, 138, 146, 148 Foreign Bodies, 23, 73, 76n1, 107, 115, 115n2 Foucault, Michel, xi, xiii, 21, 66, 70–71, 105–112, 114, 115, 122 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 23, 38 friendship, 8, 12, 67, 100, 110 fungibility, 106, 107, 112, 113, 115 future, 5, 7, 12, 18, 28, 40, 41, 44–45, 71, 72, 80, 84, 85, 100, 101, 128, 143 Fuchs, Wolfgang W, xii, 131n1 genealogy: existential, 66, 69, 71, 74, 75, 76; historical, 66, 70, 75 God, xiii, 94, 99, 124, 125, 141 god(s) and goddess(es), 7, 12, 51, 61, 74, 136, 137–138, 139, 140, 148 good(ness), xii, 40, 41, 55; deeds, 66, 67, 75, 78, 87, 126 greed, 8, 29 grief, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 19, 29 Grossman, Vassily, 87 Guattari, Félix, 11, 67 guilt, 8, 29, 85, 137

Index happiness, 12–13, 30, 40, 85, 123, 135, 141, 143 hatred, 8, 29, 137 Hegel, xii, 37–38, 39, 40, 41, 83, 91, 95, 96, 99, 100 Heidegger, Martin, xi, 17, 18–20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 25n4, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 39, 49–50, 51, 60, 78–79, 84, 85, 89, 94, 120, 121, 124, 127, 131 Heraclitus, 51, 60 Hirschmann, Albert, 9, 15n6, 29 Hobbes, Thomas, 18, 29, 59 Homer, 9, 29 hope(s), 12, 17, 18, 24, 29, 30, 50, 51, 70, 85, 93, 101, 105, 107, 114, 115 hostage, 81, 88 Husserl, Edmund, 17, 19, 28, 31, 78, 79, 81, 89, 120, 121 Hut, Piet, 65, 76n2 identity, 6, 10, 28, 31, 32, 39, 40, 83, 84, 86, 108, 109, 110, 115, 131, 149n9; joint, 67; political, 108 immortality, 145 imperative, xii, xiii, 21, 24, 42, 53, 66, 67, 71, 74, 76, 78, 80, 87, 106, 107, 115, 119, 120–126, 127, 128–131, 132n21, 132n25, 132n36; categorical, 121, 122, 123, 131, 132n21, 132n36; elemental, 101, 104n2, 125, 128, 129; hypothetical, 122, 124, 132n21, 132n25; of justice, 69 incompetence, 21, 24 infinity, xiii, 40, 41, 78, 81, 83, 91, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 124, 125, 126, 129 infinition, 81, 85, 101 inhuman, 7, 14, 29, 31 injustice, 8, 84, 85, 111, 115 innovation, 66, 73, 81, 119, 120, 122, 124, 126, 129, 131 intentionality, 20–21, 23, 25n15, 30 interpretation, 40, 50, 69, 138; theory of, 83 instant, 28, 83, 84, 85, 142, 143, 144 intersubjectivity, 59, 69, 70, 86 Israel, 97 joy, xiii, 10, 13, 19, 100, 125, 127, 131, 135, 137, 141, 142, 145, 146

165

justice, 8, 45, 66, 69, 70, 71, 83, 86, 87, 96–97, 108, 114 Kant, Immanuel, xi, xiii, 7, 82, 94, 96, 97, 101, 120–121, 122–125, 129–131, 132n25, 132n34 Lacan, Jacques, 53, 99 Latour, Bruno, 32 laughter, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 30, 32, 42, 68, 71, 75, 127, 142 Levinas, Emmanuel xi, xii, xiii, 21, 22, 23, 38, 39, 40–41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 77–89 Lewisohn, Mark (Beatles’ biographer), 74, 76n21 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 21, 122 libido, 21, 22, 23, 26n27, 39 lifeworld (Lebenswelt), 19, 101 love, xii, xiv, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 30, 33, 37–42, 43–46; of the neighbor, 40; unrequited, 8, 29; of wisdom, 30 lover(s), 8, 11, 12, 39, 41, 44–45, 46 lust, xii, 6, 7, 10, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 73 Marcus, Greil, 74 Margulis, Lynn, 34 Massumi, Brian, 68, 76n5 maternity, 80 Merleau-Ponty, 17, 18, 21–22, 23, 25, 25n15, 58, 89, 127 mind, 5, 6, 7, 8, 23, 27, 28, 58, 81, 94, 123, 130, 131 mind and body, 5, 6, 7, 8, 28, 131 mood, xi, 6, 18, 19; vs. passion 19, 20, 25, 28, 33, 130 mortal(ity), 123. See also death mourning, 6, 7, 8, 9, 28, 29–30, 32 nature, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 29, 56, 67, 99, 100, 110–111, 114, 123, 131, 139, 140, 141, 149n5; human, 34, 78, 146 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xi, xiv, 10, 11–13, 15n7, 15n10–15n13, 46, 50–52, 70, 71, 84, 99, 100, 101, 102, 109, 110, 120, 126, 129, 131, 135–148 need(s), xiii, 9, 13, 23, 30, 38, 39–40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 67, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99

166

Index

objectivity, 6, 37, 38, 39 observation, xii, 6, 7, 11, 28, 57, 110, 113, 145 Odysseus, 145–146, 149n9 Oedipus, 145–146 On the Genealogy of Morals, 70, 137, 148, 149n6 ontic, 19–20 ontology, 19–20, 27, 33, 38, 39, 78, 79, 85, 130; object-oriented, 33; of passion, 27 ordinary, 17, 18, 24, 51, 56, 58, 60, 100; everyday life, 19, 29 orgasm, 22, 23 other, xii, xiii, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 33, 34, 38–39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44–45, 46, 56, 57, 65, 77, 78, 80, 81–83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 92, 94, 96, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131. See also alterity Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, xiii, 77, 78, 80, 81–82, 87, 88, 89, 90n3, 92, 125, 129 outside, 6, 9, 27, 31, 50, 81, 87, 91, 94, 95, 141. See also exteriority outsider, 67, 96 overcoming, 135, 136, 139, 140, 143; self, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142, 147, 149n6 ownness, 6, 8, 10, 11, 17, 28, 31 pain, 8, 14, 29, 70, 71, 81, 100, 105, 112, 123, 142 Palestine, 97 paradox, 27, 30, 31, 32, 73, 103n1, 109, 110, 112, 115 Parmenides, 60 passion, xi–xii, xiii, xiv, 5–7, 8–12, 13, 14, 17–18, 19–20, 21, 22, 23–24, 25, 27, 28–30, 31–34, 37, 43, 44, 53, 57, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 120, 123, 127, 130, 131, 135, 136, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147 past, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 28, 31, 44, 45, 49, 80, 83–85, 100, 131, 135, 143, 144–145, 147 perception, 21, 22, 23, 25, 91, 92, 93, 101, 127–129, 132n32, 141

perfection, 91, 99, 100, 137, 140, 141, 145 phenomenology, xi, xiii, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 30, 38, 42, 57, 58, 59, 77, 78, 80, 86, 89, 91, 94, 102, 103, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131 Phenomenology of Perception, 21, 25n15, 89 Phenomenology of Spirit, 37–38, 40 philosophy: end of, 81, 85 Plato, 37, 38, 78, 87 pleasure, 9, 10, 12, 14, 20, 21, 23, 24, 38, 42, 55, 93, 99, 106, 112, 114, 115, 123, 145 Portanova, Stamatia, 68 pre-rational(ity), 121, 123, 130 present, 7, 28, 70, 80, 81–84, 86, 87, 128, 147 prison, 66, 70, 97, 105, 110, 113, 114, 115 prison industrial complex, 110, 115, 116n36 profane, xii, 42, 43 queer, 108, 114, 116n9 rage, 5, 6–7, 8, 9, 19, 28–29, 31 rational(ity), xiii, 8, 28, 53, 79, 81, 94, 98, 99, 111, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 132n34, 140. See also reason; pre-rational(ity) reason, 18, 24, 43, 58, 83, 97, 100, 108, 111, 120, 121–122, 123, 124, 130, 131, 139, 140, 146, 147; practical, 97, 130. See also rationality; pre-rational(ity) representation, 22, 24, 33, 79, 83, 84 response(s), xiii, 17, 55, 79, 80, 83, 92, 95, 96, 110, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130 responsibility, xiii, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 78–80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 95, 96, 97, 113, 122, 128, 129, 137 resentment, 100, 126, 135, 137, 138, 143, 145 revenge, 137, 143, 145 sacred, xii, 13, 42, 43, 44, 138, 139 Sade, Marquis de, 53

Index Sartre, Jean-Paul, xii, 17, 21, 26n27, 31, 38–39, 41, 45, 52, 59, 74, 92, 94, 103, 121 satisfaction, 9, 38, 40, 42, 55, 78, 83, 95, 96, 99 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 112 Schmitt, Carl, 29 self, xi–xii, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 17, 20, 27, 28, 30, 31–34, 38, 41, 43, 44, 45, 55, 56, 57–58, 60, 61, 69, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86–87, 88, 93, 95, 96, 103, 106, 107–108, 112, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132n22, 135, 136–139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149n6 sensation, 20, 40, 112, 114, 115, 120, 124, 125, 127–129, 130, 131, 140 Sexton, Jared, 113, 115 sexuality, xii, 21, 39, 41, 42, 43–44, 45, 70, 85, 109, 113, 114, 115 shame, 8, 9, 29, 92, 105, 145, 147 Shenk, Joshua, 67, 74 singularity, xiii, 20, 24, 41, 44, 58, 59, 67, 69, 71, 86, 88, 131 Socrates, 17, 31, 52, 58 sovereignty, 11, 39, 46, 129, 130 space, 6, 7, 10, 20, 24, 28, 29, 31, 34, 44, 67, 75, 81, 85, 86, 92, 101, 126, 141, 143; discursive / linguistic, 108, 110, 112; outer, 7, 101 spiritedness: high, 5, 7, 12, 13 spirit(s), 12, 58, 136, 138–139, 141, 145, 146, 147 spiritual(ity), 13, 40, 41, 78 spiritual(ists), 58 stars: binary, 65–66, 67, 74, 75, 76n2 state, 29, 96, 97, 98, 108; Jewish, 97 Stewart, Kathleen, 17 subjectivity, xiii, 19, 23, 28, 32, 33, 39, 40, 59, 70, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84–85, 86, 87, 103, 107–112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132n22, 148 sublime, 101, 130 substance, 9, 14, 20, 30, 40, 43, 44, 80, 95, 103, 112, 129; anti-, 32 substitution, 80, 86, 87–88, 101 suffering, 8, 51, 71, 84, 85, 100, 113, 123, 143, 148

167

surface, 20, 55, 88, 112, 129 symbiosis, 27, 34, 36n35 symbol(ic), 10, 11, 30, 32, 135–136, 140 temporality (time), 6, 44, 80, 81, 84–85, 87, 141, 143. See also present; past; future; instant terror, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 28–29, 31, 69, 141, 145 third party, 81, 86, 87, 88, 96 Totality and Infinity, 77, 81, 83, 96, 125 transcendence, 21, 37, 38–39, 40, 41, 42, 81, 83, 84, 125, 129 transcendental deduction, 81 Triebfeder (moral drive), 121, 132n9 trust, 13, 23–24, 70, 71, 74, 75, 131 truth, xi, xii, 13, 30, 33, 40, 61, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73, 75, 78, 83, 102, 110, 131, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144 Truth and Reconciliation Committee (South Africa), 102 university, 51, 53 utilitarianism, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 28, 30, 32, 111, 123, 126, 132n25 voluptuousness, 11, 21, 23, 43 vulnerability, 11, 20, 24, 81, 82, 92, 97, 123, 138 Weber, Max, 96, 97 Weil, Eric, 95–96 Wheeler, Randolph C, 89, 132n6, 132n9, 132n21 Whitehead, Alfred North, 32 Wild, John, 77, 90n2 wisdom, 30, 140 wonder, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 29, 61 wrath, 8, 10, 11, 29 Yancy, George, 107, 108, 116n10, 116n19 Zarathustra, 13, 138, 139–141, 142, 144, 148n2 Zhuangzi, 61 Žižek, Slavoj, 99

Contributors

Anne Freire Ashbaugh is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Towson University. With specialties in Ancient Greek Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature, particularly Latin American women writers, and Nietzsche, she devotes her research to theory and aesthetics. In addition to her book on Plato’s Theory of Explanation (SUNY Press, 1988), she coauthored with L. Rojas and R. Romeu Mujeres ensayistas del Caribe hispánico: Hilvanando el silencio (Madrid: Verbum, 2007). Her most recent works include “Sensuous Virtue: The Power of Sophrosyne in Plato’s Erotics” (Rendezvous with the Sensuous, ed. J. Murungi, Cambridge Scholar Group, 2014) and “Fated Webs: Philomela, Helen, and Penelope” (Stitching Resistance, ed. M. Agosín, Solis Press, 2014). Fulbright, Ford Foundation, Mellon, and Research Council Scholarships allowed her to pursue postdoctoral studies in Spain (Madrid, and El Escorial), Italy (Padua, and Venice), and the UK (Cambridge). She is also a Recurrent Visiting Professor in Philosophy at Rutgers University. Wolfgang W. Fuchs (1942–2014) studied with Lingis at Penn State and was a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University from 1969 to 2013. He is the author of Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence (Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) and Encounters with Alphonso Lingis (co-editor, Lexington Books, 2003). Graham Harman is Distinguished University Professor at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism (2013), Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (2014), and Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (forthcoming, 2016). Alexander E. Hooke is a professor of philosophy at Stevenson University. He is co-editor of Encounters with Alphonso Lingis (Lexington Books, 2003). Some of his other writings on Lingis’s work have appeared in Philosophy Today, Continental Philosophy Review, Philosophy in Review, diacritics, and The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Science, and Technology (second edition). Alphonso Lingis is professor of philosophy emeritus at The Pennsylvania State University. He has published Excesses: Eros and Culture (1983), 169

170

Contributors

Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985), Phenomenological Explanations (1986), Deathbound Subjectivity (1989), The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994), Abuses (1994), Foreign Bodies (1994), Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (1995), The Imperative (1998), Dangerous Emotions (1999), Trust (2003), Body Modifications: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture (2005), The First Person Singular (2007), Contact (2010), and Violence and Splendor (2011). John Murungi is a Professor of Philosophy at Towson University, Towson, Maryland. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from The Pennsylvania State University and a law degree (J.D.) from the Law School at University of Maryland. He has an interest in comparative philosophy and teaches courses in Twentieth-Century Continental European Philosophy, Philosophy of Law, and African and African-American Philosophy. His current research is in African jurisprudence and in African aesthetics. He has a longstanding interest in Latin American Philosophy, especially the Philosophy of Liberation. He is the author of An Introduction to African Legal Philosophy and African Musical Aesthetics. He is a co-editor of Rendezvous with Sensuous, Symbolic Landscapes, Tensional Landscapes, Earthways, Transformations of Urban and Suburban Landscapes, Lived Topographies and their Mediational Forces, Ecoscapes, published by Lexington Press. He is the co-founder of the International Association for the Study of Environment, Space, and Place and the Founder of the Geo-Aesthetics Conference Series. Emily Anne Parker is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Towson University. Her work has appeared in the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy Today, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Trans-Humanities, and philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism. She is editor of a special issue entitled “Luce Irigaray: From Ecology to Elemental Difference” of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology and co-editor of a volume forthcoming with Oxford University Press rereading the relationship between the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. Tom Sparrow teaches in the department of philosophy at Slippery Rock University. He is the author of The End of Phenomenology (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Plastic Bodies (Open Humanities Press, 2015), and coeditor of Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis (punctum books, 2014). Richard I. Sugarman is Professor of Religion and Director of the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Vermont. Professor Sugarman’s fields are phenomenology, Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and the humanities, ancient and modern. His publications include Rancor against Time: The Phenomenology of Ressentiment (Felix Meiner, 1980), and

Contributors

171

(with R.T. Simone) Reclaiming the Humanities: The Roots of Self-Knowledge in the Greek and Biblical Worlds (Univ. Press of America, 1986). He has authored numerous articles on the religious philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, including an edition and annotation of John Wild, Speaking Philosophy: The Posthumous Papers of John Wild (2006) edited with R. B. Duncan. Randolph C. Wheeler is a faculty member of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University. He is the author of Kantian Imperatives and Phenomenology’s Original Forces (Council for Research and Values in Philosophy, 2008), which examines the relation of form and force—between the form of Kant’s categorical imperative and the forces explained in contemporary phenomenology by Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Lingis.