Alphonso Lingis

Emmanuel Levinas sets up alterity as a fundamental ontological category, irreducible to being and nothingess. There are two difficulties in understanding this ontological alterity. On the one hand, Levinas formulates it with negative terms - infinition, abstraction, ab-solutenes, trace of a past that has never been present. On the other hand, Levinas invokes the notions of the superlative, the Good, and God. These notions are very difficult to separate from the notion of a redoubling of the positivity by which the things of the world are posited in their own subsistent being. The quasi-concepts with which Levinas has thematized the alterity of the others who face us in an ontological sphere of infinition, absoluteness, and abstractness have determined negatively what he envisions as beyond negativity and positivity. They reduce the determinateness of the wants and needs of another, and reduce the otherness of one other from other others. In addition, the positivism with which Levinas eliminates the imperatives with which the elements summon us and the material imperatives with which the things put demands on us effaces the phenomenality of the other whose want and needs are inscribed on the susceptibility and vulnerability of his surfaces of skin.

The philosophy of mind envisions belief as a mental act, the individual mindtaking specific propositions to be true. But we, and scientists, do not really“believe” observation-statements about the perceived, and scientificallyobserved world. Michel de Certeau envisions belief as a social act, a sort ofcontract, that has practical effects. De Certeau’s conception of thecontractual and practical nature of belief may illuminate religious belief.Anthropologist Clifford Geertz argues that it is in ritual that the convictionthat religious conceptions are veridical and that religious directives are soundis somehow generated. De Certeau and Geertz show since the 18th centuryreligious belief came to be understood as the intellectual adherence to certainempirically or logically unverified or unverifiable propositions. They showhow this mode of religious belief has lost its credibility.I find some difficulties in de Certeau’s and Geertz’s conceptions.There are also forms of belief that isolate one from others, eventually allothers, and there is a distinctive and fundamental kind of belief that is beliefin oneself.But the harrowing perplexities that confound common sense understandingand threaten the ability of people to orient themselves and act effectively inthe world, and which have led humans to believe in a fundamental reality, ina different sense and a different way from the way the common sense worldis real, have not disappeared. They recur, in new forms. I identify threepractices pursued today outside of common sense, impractical, practices thatare haunted by the intellectual, existential and ethical dilemmas that recur innew forms in our secular, scientific society, our globalized postindustrialsociety

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Impulsive Forces in and Against WordsAlphonso Lingis (bio)In his lecture "Nietzsche, le polythéisme et la parodie" given at the Collège de Philosophie in 1957 and published in 1963 in his Un si funeste désir, Pierre Klossowski explicated certain radical passages from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, a work he had newly translated into French (two prior translations existed). In the philosophical world of France where perception seemed to have found its definitive elucidation in the phenomenology of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945), Nietzsche's exposition of sensory experience, as Klossowski laid it out, was so radically different from that phenomenology that it could not be assimilated. In his Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux, published in 1969, Klossowski worked on texts Nietzsche left unpublished and which date from the years of The Gay Science onward. Philosophers, Nietzsche had written, do not simply coordinate and justify the works and science of society; they break at least in part with the common language by formulating their own aggressivity, tolerance, intimidation, anxieties, need of solitude, or need to forget themselves. And Nietzsche too speaks not of what is common and communicable but of what he experienced inwardly. Now Klossowski presented Nietzsche's exposition of sensory experience as an exposition of the experience peculiar to Nietzsche, in the most troubled period of his life. This experience, moreover, Klossowski aimed to show, was wholly premonitory of Nietzsche's final state, in which he could no longer say what he was experiencing nor who he was.The environment is not simply passively impressed upon our sensory surfaces; we have to awaken, move our eyes, and focus on things and circumscribe their contours with our look, and assume a posture that enables us to advance our look. When we are born, and when we awaken each day, that is, are born again to the world, we are needy and vulnerable, to be sure; the organism is porous and needs to replenish fluids and substance lost. But our organisms are material systems that generate excess energies; it is because excess energies have to be discharged that the organism moves into the environment and depletes its substance, and needs develop. Nietzsche calls these excess energies impulses, also multiple wills to power, that is, not conscious drives to acquire power, but positive forces that expand and exist only in expansion. They seek resistances on which to discharge themselves. They push against one another and become multiple.For the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the movements of perception are intentional; they are from the first correlative with objects, or, for Merleau-Ponty, intersensory things, Gestalten agglomerated by an intrinsic intelligible essence or sensory meaning, arising against a background of potential objects or latent things. Yet every glance around us encompasses innumerable unnamed and unnameable shapes, hues, textures, slidings, illuminations. Do not in fact the excess energies of life open upon an environment of swarming sensory patterns, streamings, scintillations, and shadows which quicken life before or without acquiring meaningful identities? [End Page 60]What in classical epistemology were called sensations were the information bits these forces impressed on our sensory surfaces, resulting also in sensory affects of pleasure or pain, according to the passive conception of our sensibility. For Nietzsche the multiple impulses that confront the forces of the environment are active and not reactive; confronting what is not from the first meaningful but resists or empowers, they laugh and weep, bless and curse. And it is these multiple and conflicting impulses, not a conceptual grasp of the essences of things, that know environmental events, know the forces exerted by the multiple hues, textures, glows, savors, reflections, halos, echos, projections, and shadows scattered about us.The impulses do more than know all that; they exalt and consecrate events of the world, they put over each an azure bell of blessing, they give them a space to stand forth and to dance—"they come and offer their hands and laugh and flee—and come back."1 They give themselves form and multiple forms and dance with all things. They are Apollonian and Dionysian.What is called conscious thought is elaborated in words of the common...

Enlightenment ideals of a society rooted in liberationist reason and morality were trampled in the wake of the savagery of the Second World War. That era's union of cold technology and ancient hatreds gave rise to a dark, alternative reason--an ethic that was value-free and indifferent with regard to virtue and vice, freedom, and slavery. In a world where "the unthinkable" had become reality, it is small wonder that theorists would turn to the writings of a man whose eighteenth-century imagination preceded twentieth-century history in its unbridled exploration of viciousness, perversion, and monstrosity: the Marquis de Sade. Klossowski was one of the first philosophers in postwar Europe to ask whether Sade's reason, although aberrant and perverted to evil passions, could be taken seriously. Klossowski's seminal work inspired virtually all subsequent study of Sadean thought, including that of de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Bataille, Blanchot, Paulhan, and Lacan