The First Person SingularAlphonso 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. |
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action Alphonso Lingis anger anthropologist arises become believe body Chapter child Claude Lévi-Strauss commit courage culture dance dancer Daniel Paul Schreber Deleuze desire disconnect Dishonor drive energies environment established discourse eyes fantasy space feel Félix Guattari find ourselves forces forest formulate Friedrich Nietzsche function give Guattari healers Heidegger human hummingbirds Ibid identified Immanuel Kant impassioned experience importance individual inner insights intensify introjected jouissance kinetic melodies knowledge language laughter and tears lives lover Martin Heidegger meaning mother movements nature needs and wants Nietzsche NOTES TO PAGES Numbers object observations Oliver Sacks organism Passions PERSON SINGULAR practical private myth psychoanalysis rational recognize respect rhythms seek sense sexual shamans simply situation Slavoj Žižek social society speak story suffering symbolic system takes talk tell things and events thought Thousand Plateaus tion tone trans understand utter visions voice Walter Kaufmann word of honor wounded Žižek says