The Alphonso Lingis Reader

Description

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