Alphonso Lingis

Part 1. Spaces within spaces -- 1. Extremes -- 2. Nature abhors a vacuum -- 3. Space travel -- 4. Learn to say -- 5. Metaphysical habitats -- 6. Departures -- 7. Plumage and talismans -- 8. Inner space -- Part 2. Snares for the eyes -- 9. The fallen giant -- 10. The stone -- 11. The voices of things -- 12. Nature and art -- 13. Nature -- 14. In touch -- Part. 3. The sacred -- 15. Sacrilege -- Part 4. Violence -- 16. Material culture -- 17. Orders -- 18. Filth -- 19. Fake fetishes, disrobed mannequins -- 20. Wallowing in glory -- 21. The art of war -- Part 5. Splendor -- 22. The face of death -- 23. The emergence of dance -- 24. Collective performances -- 25. War and splendor.

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

Microorganisms luxuriate in, plants push through, the humus, that is, the corpses of plants, insects, birds and mammals. Insects, fish, birds, and mammals nourish themselves with the flesh of plants on hand, and also with that of insects, fish, birds, and mammals. In the natural world, everything assimilates and is assimilated. Every animal, from amoebas to the blue whales, feels moments of fear, for they know they are vulnerable and mortal. As they eat what is at hand they sense that what will eat them is already at hand.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experiences of MortalityPhenomenology and AnthropologyAlphonso LingisMartin Heidegger set out to elucidate our experience of being mortal, beneath the interpretations that he would take as metaphysical. He dismissed the dying that Socrates had taken to be liberation, a transfiguration, a passage to a higher kind of existence. Yet Socrates had argued that this liberation is an experience, anticipated in the asceticism of the body that is the very practice of philosophy.Anxiety and NothingnessHeidegger finds my experience of my mortality in anxiety, which, he says, anticipates my experience of dying. He interprets anxiety to reveal that my dying is passage from existence to nothingness, annihilation; it is annihilation, for me, of the world about me. Heidegger confronts humans with their mortality in the most radical sense, forcing us each to see that our death is pure nothingness, that we are destined to be nothing. Humans are, through and through and in their most essential definition, "the mortals."Anxiety can be fled or covered over. But when acknowledged and accepted, it converts, Heidegger says, into resoluteness. Feeling myself adrift in the void, nothing supporting me, nothing to hold on to, I am thrown back upon the powers that still subsist in me, the powers that are my own. No longer counting on the support of the world or of others, taking up the powers that are my own, I now resolutely act on my own, exist on my own. Thus Heidegger sees the most negative experience, the experience of nothingness itself, converting into the most positive experience, the experience that posits my existence on its own.But does anxiety really identify death to be nothingness? What is distinctive of anxiety, as contrasted with fear, is that anxiety has no identifiable object. [End Page 69] It is a foreboding concerning what is indeterminate. What I am anxious about is the unknown—not something that I know to be nothingness.We could compare the situation that arouses anxiety with our edginess in the night. What makes the night disquieting is not a perception of something dangerous but the fact that possible dangers are not localizable in things. We no longer perceive things; their contours are dissolved by the night. But this no-thingness is not nothingness; there is left the darkness of night, which fills space, and invades, is within as much as without. The dissolution of contours and boundaries makes whatever dangers the night harbors be possibly anywhere, everywhere.The deep uneasiness before the unknown that afflicts me does not turn into a recognition that I exist on my own and can, must, act on my own. I would instead overcome, or at least endure, anxiety by seeking support in what is known, even though it is now out of reach.The fact that death is not evidently nothingness, that anxiety is not experienced as manifestly a sinking into nothingness but rather as a foreboding regarding what is unknown, ungraspable, motivates the efforts, in so many cultures, to know what the state of death is.Anxiety, Heidegger observes, can be fled or covered over, and it is so concealed in everyday preoccupations. But when we see that death is unmistakably imminent, our existence would be nothing but the dull pounding of anxiety, driving the resolute plunge into nothingness. Yet anthropological research in many cultures, including our own, has shown that many people sink calmly and peaceably into death, and many cultures have elaborated practices that help people to die without anxiety. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an example.We have had a premonition of this calm. When we go to the forests and the meadows, to mountains and glaciers, when we descend into the coral reefs of the oceans, when we contemplate the movements of the clouds, we find ourselves not in the Heideggerian "world" of implements and objectives, pathways and obstacles, but in nature. A nature that we are not surveying with a circumspection governed by our interests; our gaze drifts among beings, seeing them as they are, as they exist on their own. There is a dissolution of any governing and integrating force in our consciousness, and the systole and diastole of our consciousness disconnect...