Alphonso Lingis

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

Slavoj Žižek proposed an ethic of respect for the fantasy space of another. Under "fantasy" Jacques Lacan borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss the notion of a "private myth." But this fantasy is, Žižek says, illusionary, fragile, and helpless. Fantasy is the way everyone, each in a particular way, conceals the impasse of his desire. Psychoanalytic practice can be criticized as a radical destitution of the fundamental fantasy of the patient. The author argues that what Žižek analyzes as fantasy is a misfire of vision, and could only be recognized in a subject where visions are possible. But visions-the visions of visionaries and seers, and the visions of youth-have to be envisioned dynamically in their activity of formulating, shaping, and intensifying one's insights and one's feelings. Žižek assumes that the forces mobilized by drive, which takes hold of an organ and compulsively makes it repeat the same failed gesture, aim at the excessive and monstrous paroxysm of pleasure in pain, which is jouissance. The author argues that that jouissance can never appear as something possible in the organism, not because it would be a death drive for a finite and temporal organism, but because it is a by-product and not a goal

For Martin Heidegger the death that comes singularly for each of us summons us to exist on our own and speak in our own name. But Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari argue that it is a specific social machinery that summons us to speak in our own name and answer for what we do and are. This summons is a death sentence. They enjoin us to flee this subjectification, this subjection. They do recognize that the release of becomings in all directions can become destructive and self-destructive. There are several weaknesses in their conception.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 106-113 [Access article in PDF] To Die With Others Alphonso Lingis One dies as one dies—as anyone, everyone dies, as all that lives dies. Do we not know that when we lie dying—when, bedridden, hospitalized, removed from our home and workplace, we no longer exercise our skills, launch initiatives, are depersonalized, and can do nothing but wait for the end in increasing passivity and prostration? Did we not learn something of the death that will be our death from every death we witnessed or noticed about us? And when someone with whom we shared our life dies, do we not feel that something of ourselves has died too? In several senses of the word, we die with others. My Own Death It is strange then to see that in philosophy one's own death and the death of others have been separated. Socrates makes learning how to die the subject matter of philosophy and makes philosophy the daily practice of dying. He speaks of the relief he will feel when the opacity of his body will be broken. His last words—Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius—say that life is the sickness for which death is the cure. Did not Socrates here in fact claim to know two things that he did not know—what death is, that is, that death is a relief; and what life is, that is, that life is sickness?Socrates had seen men die; he had committed himself to defend Athens in war, he had killed men in battle. He does not speak of how they died, nor of the relief he felt when they died.Socrates died the way he did in order to demonstrate his belief that the soul is of its own nature immortal. Heidegger, proclaiming the end of the metaphysics launched by the Platonic Socrates, makes one's own death again the central topic it had been for Socrates. Heidegger is convinced that death is not an accident that befalls a life that of its own nature would endure like inanimate things endure. He sets out to show that we die of our own nature, that our life casts itself with all its forces unto its end.Death and Nothingness Heidegger also claims to know what death is: that death is nothingness. He identifies it—it is this one thing, nothingness. Yet he also insists that my death is utterly my own. From the opening pages of Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych, Heidegger draws the affirmation that witnessing the death of others is not the source of my sense of my own mortality. At the wake, I have only seen the body of another immobilized, tranquilized, but still fully, completely, there. I have not seen annihilation. But annihilation is what my death will be for me. This I sense in anxiety, that sense of being cast adrift, the environment no longer supporting me, sustaining me—and which is a premonition of being cast into nothingness.Death is ungraspable, unconfrontable; it has no front lines. Is it not too much to say that I know it is nothingness? Must we not rather say that death is the unknown? [End Page 106]I cannot say, strictly speaking, that I die, since—dying a violent death or not—I am conscious of only part of the event. And a great share of the terror I experience at the idea of death derives perhaps from this: bewilderment at remaining suspended in the middle of a seizure whose outcome I can never know because of my unconsciousness. This kind of unreality, this absurdity of death, is (without taking into account the physical suffering by which it might be accompanied) its radically terrible element, and not, as some may think ("Après moi le déluge!" "Since there's nothing after death, why are you afraid?" "What's the difference to you, since you won't be here any more?" etc....), what might make it acceptable. [Leiris 50] We do not know that death is nothingness—nothingness is not some thing one knows. But nothingness is...

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."

The doctrine of eternal recurrence in Nietzsche is an essentially ecstatic doctrine. It is also strangely incommunicable. Here the ecstasy that reveals singularizes. The essential revelation closes the one to whom it is given in his own singularity ; only a singularity opens to the abysses and the Dionysian truth. Heidegger could then see in it an ontological doctrine. And an authentifying-singularizing-doctrine. Not, though, the same as his own. For Heidegger could suggest that the time horizon in which this doctrine conceives Being in its Becoming-the "deep eternity"-is in fact not a deep structure of time, but the linear time of an eternity of instants. Eternity is not deep. In addition the subject of the Nietzschean ecstasy-which longs for eternity- cannot appropriate itself, cannot become a whole, cannot really achieve singular existence. Are these Heideggerian thoughts criticisms of the Nietzschean experience? Is the deep ontological truth to be then sought elsewhere? Is the wholeness of one's own life- the essence of this existence- to be then sought in another experience of the time-horizon of Being? Or else do these Heideggerian observations not rather point to another structure of the thought involved-something like a surface thought? And to another structure of the one smitten by this thought-a singularity that exists only in a circle of continuous metamorphoses? Some deconstructive work by Derrida encourages us to look in this direction

For Emmanuel Levinas objectivity is intersubjectively constituted. But this intersubjectivity is not, as in Merleau-Ponty, the intercorporeality of perceivers nor, as in Heidegger, the active correlation of practical agents. It has an ethical structure; it is the presence, to each cognitive subject, of others who contest and judge him. But does not the exposure of each cognitive subject to the wants and needs of others result in the constitution of a common practical field, which is not yet the objective world of scientific cognition? For Levinas, the constitution of a world common to all is governed by the practice of justice. Justice begins when above the elf and the other there intervenes a third party, who contests and judges both. But whether this third party is a representative of humanity, or a figure of God, would not his justice be but the name of a higher egoism?