TRAVELLING WITH LINGIS: AN INTERVIEW WITH ALPHONSO LINGIS.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Huppatz, D.J.
• Date: 01 January 1997

Introduction

Alphonso Lingis is currently professor of philosophy at Penn State University. Lingis was born of Lithuanian emigrant parents, he studied in Belgium and continues to travel extensively throughout the world. His early publications included English translations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Visible and Invisible and Emmanuel Levinas' books, Totality and Infinity and Existents and Existence. His own publications include Excesses: Eros and Culture, Libido: The French Existentialist Theories, Phenomenological Explanations, Deathbound Subjectivity, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common and Abusues and Foreign Bodies. We interviewed Professor Lingis on the 7th August 1995 between sessions at the "Sexuality and Medicine" Conference at Melbourne University.

While Lingis is obviously well versed in the language of Continental Philosophy, he was not interested in expounding his or others' theories in academic language. The interview developed into a conversation rather than a formal interview about philosophy, politics or anthropology. For this reason, we have chosen to dispense with the questions that prompted these anecdotes and travel stories and let them stand as monologues. Professor Lingis' stories were captivating and often illustrative of the limits of academic language. We have attempted to retain the voice of the speaker as closely as possible for we feel it conveys the sincerity and honesty of his thought.

Lingis works from the idea that the world is not a spectacle that is to be absorbed and known, but that the speaker (or author) is in the world and a living part of it. This is an ethical stance that Lingis develops from his reading of Levinas: prior to existential anxiety is our sensuous contact with the material world. This sensual perception of the world prevents the existential ideal of an isolated consciousness without responsibility for any exterior being. Lingis recognizes our responsibilities as a living being within the world, rather than merely an observer of the world: "Responsibility is coextensive with our sensibility; in our sensibility we are exposed to the outside, to the world's being, in such a way that we are bound to answer for it." (The Sensuality and the Sensitivity)

Following Emmanuel Levinas, Lingis adopts the position that the other faces me in a relation of absolute heterogeneity. Within his work is the implicit critique of the particularly Western philosophical position that perceives the individual as a functional unit, interchangeable with any other. Such thinking often translates politically as the fear of foreign bodies, fear of an alterity of which we know nothing and against which we have no power.

For Lingis, communication serves no useful function. Communication is an excess that escapes rational discourse, vibrations of intensity that issue forth from the singuarity of the other who speaks, an exclamation, a cry, an ejectulation, a burst of laughter. These are discharges without return, forces that squander energy. There is no exchange of information from point A to point B. Against our rational economy of equalibrium, Lingis proposes Bataille's solar economy of expenditure without return.

With such a revised notion of communication, community must also be considered in a different way. Lingis proposes a community of exposure to the unknown other: "One enters into community not by affirming oneself and one's forces but by exposing oneself to expenditure at a loss, to sacrifice. Community forms a movement by which one exposes oneself to the other, to forces and powers outside oneself, to death and to the others who die." (Community of those ... p. 12) In this interview, Lingis assumes a contentious position in the contemporary theoretical climate. He exposes his notion of responsibility to speak for those who cannot speak, those who are spoken for as interchangable economic units, "Third World" statistics consumed by our colonizing cultures and languages.

Community is inevitably tied up with the sacred, and Lingis uses a particular notion of the sacred, derived again from Bataille: "The sacred is what repels our advance. The taboos and proscriptions that demarcate it do not consitute its force of withdrawal. It is not the salvific but the inapprehendable, the unconceptualizable, the inassimilable, the irrecuperable." ("Chichicastenango") Rather than a force for constructing monuments, the sacred is a force of disintegration, of loss and expenditure.

Academia and Travel

"I always went away. As soon as I got a job any week I wasn't required to be in the United States I left the country, I've done that every year since I started teaching. I don't know if I had any special project in mind, I just wanted to see the world. I wanted to live in the world. It wasn't exactly a kind of planned philosophical project. I wanted to do a lot of different things and see a lot of different places. I don't exactly travel, I've never thought of myself as a traveller. What I used to do for many years was just go to one place, very often by accident. I had a French friend who had been to a lot of places, a guy I admired a lot. He wasn't an academic but he went everywhere. I used to go to Paris first when my term was over and visit him. And I had for a number of years this private rule that the first place he would mention, I would go there for the rest of the summer. And this went on for a number of years, and in this way, unbeknownst to himself, he sent me to Istanbul, to Prague, to all sorts of spectacular places, until one year the first place he mentioned was Berlin and I changed the rule.

As far as my writing and academia, I had a kind of charmed life in academia, I didn't have the kind of hassle about it that people have now. The first job I got which was in Pittsburg, I got by mail. I was actually hired while I was still in Belgium, without a personal interview. And I stayed there half a dozen years then I got invited to Penn State. At that time I hadn't published anything and I was very surprised that they even invited me ... and then I think I can honestly say that I never did any ass-kissing. I don't think I ever wrote anything to please anyone or to promote my career. As I started teaching, it wasn't all that urgent. When I was a student in Belgium, nobody thought about getting jobs. There were very few jobs there for the Belgian students, they had to wait around until somebody died. But they had these research positions, that they have in France and so on, where you could more or less get a fairly decent salary and just go on some research project. So the Belgian students were not very career-oriented. Anyhow, when I was in Graduate School I didn't even think about...