Alphonso Lingis

Lingis attended Loyola University in Chicago, then pursued graduate studies at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. His doctoral dissertation, written under Alphonse de Waelhens, was a discussion of the French phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. Returning to the United States, Lingis joined the faculty at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. In the mid-1960s he moved to Penn State University, where he published numerous scholarly articles on the history of philosophy, developing a passionate engagement with Continental philosophy that would prove vital to his later book career.[2] Lingis also began working at his translation projects, and over the years, translated authors included Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Klossowski.[3]

His first book was Excesses (1983). Lingis followed up on this project in 1994 by publishing three books: The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Abuses, and Foreign Bodies. In 2000, in his mid-60’s, Lingis released Dangerous Emotions, which involved a series of limit-experience “dares” along with references to a broad range of philosophical topics. Later books include Trust (2004), The First Person Singular (2007), Violence and Splendor (2011) and Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality (2018). In the books listed above, Lingis’s philosophical style is visceral and occasionally obscene. These books involve a jet-set Continental philosophy-referencing anthropology. Lingis’s motto from Abuses (1994) that “The unlived life is not worth examining” is categorically emphasized in these books.[4] Lingis’s “phenomenology” monographs, on the other hand, (e.g. The Imperative (1998)) emphasize the Socratic point that “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

• Excesses: Eros and Culture (1983)
• Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985)
• Phenomenological Explanations (1986)
• Deathbound Subjectivity (1989)
• The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994)
• Abuses (1994)
• Foreign Bodies (1994)
• Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (1995)
• The Imperative (1998)
• Dangerous Emotions (2000)
• Trust (2004)
• Body Transformations (2005)
• The First Person Singular (2007)
• Wonders Seen in Forsaken Places: An Essay on the Photographs and the Process of Photography of Mark Cohen (2010)
• Contact [photographs] (2010)
• Violence and Splendor (2011)
• The Alphonso Lingis Reader, edited by Tom Sparrow (2018)
• Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality (2018)

• Emmanuel Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant (1947). Translated by Lingis as Existence and Existents (2001).
• Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (1961). Translated by Lingis as Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969).
• Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974). Translated by Lingis as Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (Springer, 1991). ISBN 978-90-247-2374-4
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’Invisible (1964). Translated by Lingis as The Visible and the Invisible (1968).
• Pierre Klossowski, Sade, mon prochain (1947). Translated by Lingis as Sade My Neighbor (1991).

• Thomas J. Altizer, Edward Casey, Thomas L. Dumm, et al., Encounters with Alphonso Lingis (2003)
• Bobby George and Tom Sparrow, Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis (2014)
• Randolph Wheeler, Anne Ashbaugh, Wolfgang W. Fuchs, Graham Harman, Alexander E. Hooke, Alphonso Lingis, et al., Passion in Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Alphonso Lingis (2016)
• Alexander E. Hooke, Alphonso Lingis and Existential Genealogy: The First Full Length Study Of The Work Of Alphonso Lingis (2019)

• Ecstasy (philosophy)
• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers
• Continental Philosophy
• Existentialism
• Postmodernism

• Pennsylvania State University Department of Philosophy
• Official Website
• Alphonso Lingis: The most critical things occur by chance, Interviews with exceptional minds, Eximia