"Foreign Bodies" analyzes how our culture elaborates for us the bodies we have by natural evolution. Calling on the new means contemporary thinkers have used to understand the body, Alphonso Lingis explores forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity.
The book contrasts the findings of theory with the practice of the body as formulated in quite different kinds of language--the language of plastic art (the artwork body builders make of themselves), biography, anthropology and literature. Lingis explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, attitudes, gestures and purposive action; how our susceptibility to pain and excitability by pleasure acquiesce in and resist the ways they are identified and manipulated today; how cultures code our sensuality with phallic and with fluid identities; how others dress appeals to and puts demands on us.

In this new book, the philosopher and critic Alphonso Lingis extends a question that has occupied him throughout his career: how are we to understand the strangeness of our bodies? Weaving together philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, Lingis explores how the body might be more richly understood in terms of parts. Moving from ethics to fetishism, from the functions of genitals to the distinctiveness of good actions, this is a unique and thought-provoking book.

"Foreign Bodies" analyzes how our culture defines our naturally-evolved bodies. The author calls upon contemporary ways of understanding the body to explore forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The theory is then contrasted with the practice of the body as found in quite different kinds of language - the language of plastic art (body building as the creation of an artwork), biography, anthropology and literature. This book explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, gestures and attitudes; how pain and pleasure are no longer what they once were; and how our sensuality is coded by identities that are either phallic or fluid. The author illustrates how we make our bodies foreign to ourselves and envisages the sort of bodies we may become.

In this new book, the philosopher and critic Alphonso Lingis extends a question that has occupied him throughout his career: how are we to understand the strangeness of our bodies? Weaving together philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, Lingis explores how the body might be more richly understood in terms of parts. Moving from ethics to fetishism, from the functions of genitals to the distinctiveness of good actions, this is a unique and thought-provoking book.

A selection of the writings of Alphonso Lingis, showcasing a unique blend of travelogue, cultural anthropology, and philosophy Alphonso Lingis is arguably the most intriguing American philosopher of the past fifty years—a scholar of transience, someone who has visited and revisited more than one hundred countries and has woven this itinerary into his writing and allowed it to give form to his thinking. This book assembles a representative selection of Lingis’s work to give readers a thorough sense of his methodology and vision, the diversity of his subject matter, and the unity of his thought. Lingis’s writing evinces the many kinds of knowledge and subtle forces circulating through human communities and their environments. His unique style blends travel writing, cultural anthropology, and personal accounts of his innumerable experiences as an active participant in the adventures and relationships that fill his life. Drawing from countless articles, essays, and interviews published over fifty years, editor Tom Sparrow chose works that follow Lingis’s engaging, often intimate reflections on the body in motion and the myriad influences—social, cultural, aesthetic, libidinal, physical, mythological—that shape and animate it as it moves through the world, among people and places both foreign and domestic, familiar and unknown. In a substantial Introduction, Sparrow provides a biographical, critical, intellectual, and cultural context for reading and appreciating Alphonso Lingis’s work. An extended encounter with the singular philosopher, The Alphonso Lingis Reader conducts us through Lingis’s early writing on phenomenology to his hybrid studies fusing philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, communication theory, aesthetics, and other disciplines, to his original, inspired arguments about everything from knowledge to laughter to death.

..". a more compelling reading of Kant than any I have ever seen." David Farrell Krell

In this provocative book, Alphonso Lingis argues that not only our thought is governed by an imperative, as Kant had maintained, but, rather, our sensual, sensing, perceiving, and emotional life is continually regulated by imperatives that come to us from the world around us. Through a series of phenomenological sketches drawn from life experiences, Lingis shows that there are directives in the natural world and in our interactions with others that govern our thought and behavior."

..". thought-provoking and meditative, Lingis s work is above all touching, and offers a refreshingly idiosyncratic antidote to the idle talk that so often passes for philosophical writing." Radical Philosophy

..". striking for the clarity and singularity of its styles and voices as well as for the compelling measure of genuine philosophic originality which it contributes to questions of community and (its) communication." Research in Phenomenology

Articulating the author s journeys and personal experiences in the idiom of contemporary continental thought, Alphonso Lingis launches a devastating critique, pointing up the myopia of Western rationalism. Here Lingis raises issues of undeniable urgency."

In his latest book, the prolific writer and thinker Alphonso Lingis brings interdisciplinarity and lyrical philosophizing to the weight of reality, the weight of things, and the weight of life itself. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, religion, and science, Lingis seeks to uncover what in our reality escapes our attempts at measuring and categorizing. Writing as much from his own experiences and those of others as from his longstanding engagement with phenomenology and existentialism, Irrevocable studies the world in which shadows, reflections, halos, and reverberations count as much as the carpentry of things. Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, war and disease, the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings, surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs. Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses? Lingis's investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds.

A selection of the writings of Alphonso Lingis, showcasing a unique blend of travelogue, cultural anthropology, and philosophy Alphonso Lingis is arguably the most intriguing American philosopher of the past fifty years-a scholar of transience, someone who has visited and revisited more than one hundred countries and has woven this itinerary into his writing and allowed it to give form to his thinking. This book assembles a representative selection of Lingis's work to give readers a thorough sense of his methodology and vision, the diversity of his subject matter, and the unity of his thought. Lingis's writing evinces the many kinds of knowledge and subtle forces circulating through human communities and their environments. His unique style blends travel writing, cultural anthropology, and personal accounts of his innumerable experiences as an active participant in the adventures and relationships that fill his life. Drawing from countless articles, essays, and interviews published over fifty years, editor Tom Sparrow chose works that follow Lingis's engaging, often intimate reflections on the body in motion and the myriad influences-social, cultural, aesthetic, libidinal, physical, mythological-that shape and animate it as it moves through the world, among people and places both foreign and domestic, familiar and unknown. In a substantial Introduction, Sparrow provides a biographical, critical, intellectual, and cultural context for reading and appreciating Alphonso Lingis's work. An extended encounter with the singular philosopher, The Alphonso Lingis Reader conducts us through Lingis's early writing on phenomenology to his hybrid studies fusing philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, communication theory, aesthetics, and other disciplines, to his original, inspired arguments about everything from knowledge to laughter to death.

Brian Evenson has added an O. Henry Award-winning short story, "Two Brothers," to this controversial book and a new afterword, in which he describes the troubling aftermath of the book's publication in 1994.

Alphonso Lingis is an original among American philosophers. An eloquent and insightful commentator on continental philosophers, he is also a phenomenologist who has gone to live in many lands. "Dangerous Emotions" continues the line of inquiry begun in "Abuses," taking the reader to Easter Island, Japan, Java, and Brazil as Lingis poses a new range of questions and brings his extraordinary descriptive skills to bear on innocence and the love of crime, the relationships of beauty with lust and of joy with violence and violation. He explores the religion of animals, the force in blessings and in curses. When the sphere of work and reason breaks down, and in catastrophic events we catch sight of cosmic time, our anxiety is mixed with exhilaration and ecstasy. More than acceptance of death, can philosophy understand joy in dying? Haunting and courageous, Lingis's writing has generated intense interest and debate among gender and cultural theorists as well as philosophers, and "Dangerous Emotions" is certain to introduce his work to an ever broader circle of readers.

Part travelogue, part meditation, Abuses is a bold exploration of central themes in Continental philosophy by one of the most passionate and original thinkers in that tradition writing today. A gripping record of desires, obsessions, bodies, and spaces experienced in distant lands, Alphonso Lingis's book offers no less than a new approach to philosophy-aesthetic and sympathetic-which departs from the phenomenology of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting." Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Part travelogue, part meditation, Abuses is a bold exploration of central themes in Continental philosophy by one of the most passionate and original thinkers in that tradition writing today. A gripping record of desires, obsessions, bodies, and spaces experienced in distant lands, Alphonso Lingis's book offers no less than a new approach to philosophy—aesthetic and sympathetic—which departs from the phenomenology of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting." Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

In his latest book, the prolific writer and thinker Alphonso Lingis brings interdisciplinarity and lyrical philosophizing to the weight of reality, the weight of things, and the weight of life itself. Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, religion, and science, Lingis seeks to uncover what in our reality escapes our attempts at measuring and categorizing. Writing as much from his own experiences and those of others as from his longstanding engagement with phenomenology and existentialism, Irrevocable studies the world in which shadows, reflections, halos, and reverberations count as much as the carpentry of things. Whether describing religious art and ritual, suffering, war and disease, the pleasures of love, the wonders of nature, archaeological findings, surfing, volcanoes, or jellyfish, Lingis writes with equal measures of rigor and abandon about the vicissitudes of our practices and beliefs. Knowing that birth, the essential encounters in our lives, crippling diseases and accidents, and even death are all determined by chance, how do we recognize and understand such chance? After facing tragedies, what makes it possible to live on while recognizing our irrevocable losses? Lingis's investigations are accompanied by his own vivid photographs from around the world. Balancing the local and the global, and ranging across vast expanses of culture and time, Irrevocable sounds the depths of both our passions and our impassioned bodies and minds.

Among the first and foremost of American continental philosophers, Alphonso Lingis refines his own thought through a topic usually deemed unworthy of philosophical examination-passion. Lingis criticizes traditional scientific accounts of the emotions as dividing or disrupting our lives and argues for passion as a unifying force, a concept which invites philosophical exploration. The book's structure is twofold. First, it offers an examination of Lingis's most recent developments through the topic of passion with essays from some of the most 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 interweaving 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.

Encounters with Alphonso Lingis is the first extensive study of this American philosopher who is gaining an international reputation to augment his national one. Lingis's books have already been translated into nearly a dozen languages, and writers from many disciplines are finding his works a source for fresh philosophical and scholarly inquiries. The distinguished contributors to this volume reflect on their own encounters with this unique American thinker as they engage his work from their various critical perspectives. They address most of the central themes found in his writings including singularity and otherness, death and eroticism, emotions and rationality, embodiment and the face, excess and the sacred. In the book's first section, the contributors discuss Lingis's significance as a contemporary philosopher, particularly with regard to such renowned figures as Dante, Kant, Nietzsche, Foucault, and the major existential and phenomenological thinkers of the past century. In the second section, they focus on Lingis's ideas as the basis for inquiries into additional fields, such as art, literature, cultural studies, and politics. The book closes with a new essay by Lingis himself."

Encounters with Alphonso Lingis is the first extensive study of this American philosopher who is gaining an international reputation to augment his national one. Lingis's books have already been translated into nearly a dozen languages, and writers from many disciplines are finding his works a source for fresh philosophical and scholarly inquiries. The distinguished contributors to this volume reflect on their own encounters with this unique American thinker as they engage his work from their various critical perspectives. They address most of the central themes found in his writings including singularity and otherness, death and eroticism, emotions and rationality, embodiment and the face, excess and the sacred. In the book's first section, the contributors discuss Lingis's significance as a contemporary philosopher, particularly with regard to such renowned figures as Dante, Kant, Nietzsche, Foucault, and the major existential and phenomenological thinkers of the past century. In the second section, they focus on Lingis's ideas as the basis for inquiries into additional fields, such as art, literature, cultural studies, and politics. The book closes with a new essay by Lingis himself."

Alphonso Lingis's engaging book studies the phenomenological and postphenomenological theories of sexuality of six contemporary French philosophers: Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. After centuries of philosophical silence on the matter, these writers, during the last fory years, have undertaken the first extended exploration of human sexuality in Western philosophical literature. Lingis presents the arguments developed by the six philosophers, critically assesses them, and offers his own explanation of how the libidinal body can be characterized, what the libidinal drive is, and what alterity commands in the erotic imperative."

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

Alphonso Lingis's singular works of philosophy are not so much written as performed, and in "The First Person Singular" the performance is characteristically brilliant, a consummate act of philosophical reckoning. Lingis's subject here, aptly enough, is the subject itself, understood not as consciousness but as embodied, impassioned, active being. His book is, at the same time, an elegant cultural analysis of how subjectivity is differently and collectively understood, invested, and situated.
The subject Lingis elaborates in detail is the passionate subject of fantasy, of obsessive commitment, of noble actions, the subject enacting itself through an engagement with others, including animals and natural forces. This is not the linguistic or literary subject posited by structuralism and post-structuralism, nor the rational consciousness posited by post-Enlightenment philosophy. It is rather a being embodied in both a passionate, intensifying activity and a cultural collective made up of embodied others as well as the social rituals and practices that comprise this first person singular.