Alphonso Lingis

With Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, I show that a home does not have the ontological structure of objects; it is a fixed point that makes possible the perceived and employed map of the paths, objectives, implements and obstacles of the environment. It is also a space closed to the trafficking of the outside environment. It is also a place of welcome, where we, Heidegger says, welcome earth and skies, fellow mortals and harbingers of the sacred, where we, Levinas says, welcome kin and strangers. Humans share the establishing of a home base with many other species of mammals, birds, fish, and insects. And humans share their home with other species. Incarceration is the extreme case of a home base without an outlying environment. Humans also live in spaces without home base. The bent to live on the open road without a home base is something humans share with giraffes, opossums, quail, and albatross. Some people by choice or by necessity are homeless. Most people live months or years of homelessness.

People in isolation or quarantine, and people confined in nursing homes, insane asylums, prisons, and refugee camps are cut off from the outside world, where the coronavirus invisibly drifts. It besieges our homes. And the virus invades, through heating ducts and on packages delivered. Our home is no longer a refuge of rest, tranquility, substance, and sustenance, no longer the place of hospitality. And the coronavirus pursues the homeless, sleeping in municipal shelters or under bridges and overpasses.

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.